The Three Parts of the Human Being: Body, Soul and Reason

A common idea we see in most of the literature on psychology is that the human being consists of two substances of soul and body; and of these, as we can see also in Afzaluddin’s Mosannafat (pp. 468-5), The soul is separate, simple, alive, indestructible, thinker and wise. On the other hand, in some of Afzaluddin’s writings, it is said that the human being consists of three parts: The first is ‘the body which is made masterly of components such as bone, nerve, blood, flesh and so on; The second is the soul by which your body is alive and without which it is dead; The third is the reason which knows both body and soul, and identifies each separately. Neither the body is the soul nor the soul is the reason. The reason is neither the body nor the soul (ibid pp. 604-5).In the history of philosophy, the idea of Human being’s combination of body and soul is seen evidently in Pythagorean teachings. Then, in Plato, beside this dualism, we see the composition of the soul of three parts (reason, will and passion). In Aristotle’s On the Soul, the man is a single substance made of two unified elements of body and soul (as his matter and form); but in a well-known fragment, he also introduces the reason as a separate, divine and indestructible part. In Middle Ages this tripartite view of human being, in virtue of its correspondence with Christian Trinity, has been well-accepted and well-used. In this paper, after a survey of the views on the soul and the body, we report, compare and evaluate Afzal- aldin’s views on this matter. We shall see that there are traces of unity, duality and trinity in his works, but not in a way that we can’t reconcile them.