Pleasure and Pain from Ibn Sina's View

Pleasure and pain are two factors which are considered as human motive and stimulant for his attainment to physical and spiritual perfection; therefore, they are considered as the highest goal for human’s life. Throughout the history, thinkers have done a great deal in trying to understand these two elements. The most important problems with regard to the subject of pleasure and pain consist in: knowing the truth of pleasure and pain; to be acquainted with kinds of pleasure and pain and the role each of them has in the development of different dimensions of human existence. Among Islamic philosophers, Ibn Sina has dealt with the problem of pleasure and pain in detail. In his explanation and description of the nature of pleasure and pain and to set forth the divisions of them, he intends to go beyond bodily pleasure towards intellectual and spiritual pleasures, and in the end he presents happiness as the highest stage of pleasure that is the specific quality of incorporeal beings and of the Infinite Divine Being. Ibn Sina regards the nature of pleasure and pain as the perception of the object of pleasant and unpleasant in human soul. He reckons this perception as a kind of knowledge by presence and on the grounds that the presence of sensual or imaginative forms or intellectual concepts is produced in mind be takes into consideration different kinds for pleasure and pain. In his view all these kinds have a role to play in the growth and exaltation or decadence in human soul and body.