The Self in Mu‘tazilah Thought

Abstract

At its formative stage, islamic thought was given its rationalist orientation by the mu'tazilah who laid down the groundwork of the islamic digest of the intellectual and spiritual legacies of hellas, palestine and persia. Basing themselves upon the ethical insights of islam, they elaborated a metaphysic in which the nature and function of the self correspond to these insights. Their definition of the soul includes those of stoicism, atomism, plato, and aristotle synthesized under islam's principle of man's obligation and capacity to know and to realize the good. The soul's function is, in their view, manifold. But primarily, it is to know the moral law–a fact which implied for the soul a status metaphysically separate from the body, moral freedom as well as a system of rewards and punishments, anticipating the conclusions of kant's critical philosophy.