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A E R I A L  A N D  R E S P I R A T O R Y 
A T M O S P H E R E S  O F 
A V I C E N N A ’ S  F L Y I N G  P E R S O N
P e t r i  B e r n d t s o n
Introductory Words 
Persian philosopher Avicenna (980‒1037) is famous for his thought 
experiment referred to as the Flying Person Argument (also known as 
the Floating Person, the Suspended Person or the Person Suspended 
in Air Argument). In his studies, Nader El-Bizri has examined this 
thought experiment in connection with phenomenological philosophy. 
According to El-Bizri, this Suspended Person Argument could be un-
derstood as “Avicenna’s reduction” and “epoché.”1 In this presentation I 
will focus on phenomenologically interpreting the aerial-elemental and 
respiratory2 atmospheres of Avicenna’s thought experiment. In trying to 
interpret the almost entirely forgotten aerial, elemental and respiratory 
contexts of the Person Suspended in Air Argument, I will make particu-
lar use of Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenologically oriented imaginary 
aerial thinking. 
1  Nader El-Bizri, “Avicenna’s De Anima: Between Aristotle and Husserl,” in The Passions of 
the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 
2003), 78‒82 and 85.
2  My article concentrates solely on the phenomenological and spiritual dimensions of 
breathing and thus I will not speak of Avicenna’s immensely important studies on respiratory 
medicine. If one is interested in his views on respiratory medicine, see, for example, Seyyed 
Mehdi Hashemi and Mohsin Raza, “The Traditional Diagnosis and Treatment of Respira-
tory Diseases: A Description from Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine,” Therapeutic Advances in 
Respiratory Disease 3 (December 2009): 319‒328; Tina Williams, “Invisible Experiences: A 
Philosophical Exploration of Breathlessness,” (PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2019), 71‒73.
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2021.292 Poligrafi, no. 103/104, vol. 26, 2021, pp. 131–151
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What Could the Flying Person Argument Be About?
What could Avicenna’s story of the person suspended in air tell 
us? Over the centuries many have wondered as to the meaning and 
purpose of this thought experiment. Avicenna scholar Dag Nikolaus 
Hasse writes: “It is part of the attractiveness of the Flying Man that 
its meaning and purpose are rather difficult to understand.”3 Because 
of these difficulties in comprehending the meaning, Tommaso Alpina 
writes: “As for the purpose of the experiment, there is disagreement in 
the scholarship.”4 According to Jari Kaukua, Avicenna uses the Flying 
Man Argument as a pointer or a “reminder to make us pay attention to 
something that is and has always been there [experientially] for us but 
that we seldom take heed of [...]. Although the argument may be per 
impossibile, it is still used to point out something present to the read-
er’s experience”5 that we have a “tendency to neglect [...] in favour”6 of 
other aspects of our experience. As I have previously mentioned, El-
Bizri connects Avicenna’s argument with phenomenological reduction 
and epoché. According to El-Bizri Avicenna’s “epoché, as exemplified 
by the ‘Suspended Person Argument,’”7 “provides access to the Ur-Ich, 
that is not the Ich [self ] of solipsism nor of relativism, but rather that 
of an anonymous universality and a pre-personal originary ground 
that underlies all positing.”8 Avicenna’s Ur-Ich as the “primordial self ” 
(al-awal)9 is compared by El-Bizri to “Merleau-Ponty’s consideration 
of the primordial subject that is beneath the subject, whereby being is 
already being oriented.”10 
3  Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripa-
tetic Philosophy of the Soul (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute, 2000), 81.
4  Tommaso Alpina, Subject, Definition, Activity: Framing Avicenna’s Science of the Soul 
(Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2021), 71.
5  Jari Kaukua, Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 34.
6  Kaukua, Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy, 35.
7  El-Bizri, “Avicenna’s De Anima,” 85.
8  El-Bizri, “Avicenna’s De Anima,” 82.
9  El-Bizri, The Phenomenological Quest: Between Avicenna and Heidegger (Albany: State 
University of New York Press, 2000), 14.
10  El-Bizri, The Phenomenological Quest, 149‒150.
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Having said all this in preparation for an interpretation concerning 
the flying or floating person suspended in air, let us turn to Avicenna’s 
own words about this thought experiment.
So we say: one of us must imagine himself so that he is created all at once 
and perfect but his sight is veiled from seeing external [things], that he is cre-
ated floating/flying in the air or in a void so that the resistance of the air does 
not hit him ‒ a hit he would have to sense ‒ and that his limbs are separated 
from each other so that they do not meet or touch each other. [He must] then 
consider whether he affirms the existence of his essence or his self (dhat). He 
will not hesitate in affirming that his self or essence exists, but he will not 
thereby affirm any of his limbs, any of his intestines, the heart or the brain, 
or any external thing. Rather, we will affirm his essence or his self without af-
firming for it length, breadth or depth. If it were possible for him in that state 
to imagine a hand or some other limb, he would not imagine it as part of his 
essence or his self or as a condition of his essence or his self. You know what 
is affirmed is different from what is not affirmed and what is confirmed is 
different from what is not confirmed. Therefore the essence or the self whose 
existence he has affirmed is specific to him in that it is he himself, different 
from his body and limbs which he has not affirmed. Thus, he who takes heed 
has the means to take heed of the existence of the soul (al-nafs) as something 
different from the body ‒ indeed, as distinct from any body ‒ and to know 
and be aware of it.11
So what could this most famous version of Avicenna’s Flying Man 
Argument as phenomenological epoché reveal to us if we were to read 
and interpret it as carefully as possible in the most preparatory man-
ner inspired by Hasse, Kaukua and El-Bizri? Let us take seriously that 
Hasse says that the “meaning and purpose [of the thought experiment] 
are rather difficult to understand.” Where should one put one’s focus 
on this story which has so many aspects to it? Which aspects of our 
experience do we have a deep tendency to neglect? Could some of these 
aspects of our experience be those that even the scholars who study 
11  Avicenna quoted by Kaukua, Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy, 35. I have also 
used translations of Avicenna’s Flying Person Argument that can be found in El-Bizri, The 
Phenomenological Quest, 151; Hasse, Avicenna’s De Anima, 80; Federico Campagna, Technic 
and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 203, and 
Michael Marmura, “Avicenna’s ‘Flying Man’ in Context,” The Monist 69 (July 1986): 387, 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27902982.
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Avicenna’s thought experiment have a tendency to neglect? According 
to Hasse, scholars have debated if the story of Avicenna is most es-
sentially about 1) “the incorporeality of the soul,” 2) “the independ-
ence of the soul from the body,” 3) “the existence of the soul,” 4) “the 
self-awareness of the soul” or 5) “the substantiality of the soul.”12 For 
certain we can say that Avicenna’s Person Suspended in Air Argument is 
essentially about the phenomenon of al-nafs (which can be translated as 
“soul”) and the relationship between al-nafs and the body, but all these 
scholarly interpretations Hasse mentions neglect several aspects which 
are, in my view, truly important; perhaps even more important than 
those aspects that traditionally and normally have been emphasized and 
discussed by Avicenna scholars.13 
If Hasse listed the typical scholarly theories of what Avicenna pos-
sibly wants to reveal about the soul with his thought experiment, then 
another Avicenna scholar, Peter Adamson, crystallizes the usual per-
spective of how scholarly discussions frame the Flying Person Argu-
ment. Adamson writes: 
[the flying] person is in a state of total sensory deprivation. Furthermore, 
he has just been created, so he has no memories of prior sensory experience. 
Avicenna asked what a person in this situation could know. A strict empiricist 
would say, ‘nothing’, thinking that all our knowledge comes directly or indi-
rectly from sensation. But Avicenna thought that the flying man would be 
aware of his own existence. He took this as a pointer, not only to the inelimi-
nable self-awareness that belongs to each human soul, but also to the soul’s 
immaterial nature. After all, Avicenna reasoned, the flying man’s soul is aware 
of itself, but not of his body.14 
As scholars have emphasized the “total sensory deprivation” as a lack 
of something and debated these above-mentioned questions concern-
ing the soul, they have not at all taken seriously the idea that the person 
or the self in this thought experiment is “floating in the air,” “flying 
12  Hasse, Avicenna’s De Anima, 81.
13  For example, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Tommaso Alpina, Jari Kaukua, Nader El-Bizri, Mi-
chael Marmura, Jon McGinnis, Dimitri Gutas and Peter Adamson are among these Avicenna 
scholars.
14  Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2015), 84.
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in the air” or “floating ... in a void,” nor that this could be something 
essentially important. None of the Avicenna scholars mentioned have 
said anything meaningful about the phenomenon of floating or flying 
as a way of being. What could be the purpose or meaning of floating or 
flying in the air in Avicenna’s thought experiment? 
Another truly important aspect in this story is that the person or 
the self is only in relation to either the element of air or the void which 
makes it possible that the person can float. Thus we must ask: what 
kind of relationship is of a purely aerial relation? Or what kind of re-
lationship is a relation with emptiness or voidness? And what kind of 
purely aerial encounter is it to exist in the element of air when all “the 
resistance of air” and wind have been bracketed out in order that the 
flying person does not feel or experience any kind of resistance or hit 
by the air? Would this not also mean that the elemental atmosphere of 
air where the person floats is immense, at least experientially immense, 
in order that there would not be anything blocking or obstructing the 
float or the flight or anything else affirming to him “any external things” 
or objects? This experience of spatial relationality with the immense air 
would not prove affirmation of “length, breadth or depth” as there is no 
length, breadth or depth in such immensity or vastness. The experience 
and knowledge about such spatial measures become possible only in a 
sensory perceptual dialogue between the perceiving self and the per-
ceived things, between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. 
The perceiving self is not only in a perpetual dialogue with things that 
are of different sizes, shapes, boundaries and surfaces and that are to be 
found near and far, left and right, up and down, front and rear, etc., but 
also in a constant dialogue with itself in which its eyes gaze at different 
parts of the body that are at different distances from its eyes and each 
part of its body work in collaboration with other parts. 
Also none of the scholarly studies have pondered how does the fly-
ing person stay alive? I do not mean how he finds something to eat or 
drink. The person can fly or float in the air for quite a long time with-
out need for nutrients. I am referring to the need for breath. Breathing 
is our most essential relation with the air. What would it mean if the 
flying person’s fundamental relationship with the air were breathing? 
Could it perhaps be that Avicenna’s Person Suspended in Air Argument 
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is essentially about respiration? And if this were the case, what would 
this then mean? 
In my opinion, all these questions that Hasse and Adamson raise 
concerning the soul in its incorporeality/immateriality, independence 
from the body, existence, self-awareness and substantiality should be 
examined only after one has truly pondered the questions and problems 
that I have just raised. It is also truly important that these questions and 
concerns mentioned by Hasse and Adamson should be examined not 
only after we have deeply pondered these aerial and respiratory ques-
tions but they actually need to be asked within the atmosphere that we 
have been provided access to by these newly formed aerial and respira-
tory questions. 
The Flying Person within the Atmosphere 
of the Bachelardian Aerial Imagination
Let us begin to explore these aerial and respiratory questions in 
dialogue with Bachelard. As a thought experiment, Avicenna’s Person 
Suspended in Air Argument is essentially connected with imagination. 
This thought experiment begins with the words: “one of us must imag-
ine himself so that he is created all at once and perfect …” The whole 
story about the flying person moves within the reign of imagination. 
According to Bachelard, the most primordial form of imagination is 
what he calls “elemental imagination.”15 Bachelard divides the realm of 
elemental imagination into four essentially different reigns depending 
on four elements: the elements of fire, earth, water and air. He calls 
these four types of elemental imagination: 1) the imagination of fire 
(igneous imagination), 2) the imagination of earth (terrestrial imagi-
nation), 3) the imagination of water (aquatic imagination) and 4) the 
imagination of air (aerial imagination). 
Bachelard’s book Air and Dreams is a study devoted to the aerial im-
agination. In this book Bachelard says: “everything that passes through 
15  Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. 
Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 2002), 26.
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air is dynamically and substantially aerial.”16 So if any phenomenon is 
imagined to pass through air in an essential manner, this phenomenon 
belongs to the reign of aerial imagination. As Avicenna’s flying per-
son is imagined to be “floating/flying in the air” it is “dynamically and 
substantially” an elemental and imaginary “aerial phenomenon,”17 and 
if this Bachelardian aerial perspective is taken truly seriously as I will 
take it, this imaginary aeriality of the flying person is the most essential 
feature of its existence or its way of being. The imaginary flying in air is 
actually, according to Bachelard, the essential feature of aerial imagina-
tion. For aerial imagination, “flight is not a technique to be discovered, 
it is a matter to be transmuted; it is the fundamental basis for a trans-
mutation of all values. Our terrestrial being must become aerial. Then 
it will make the whole earth light. Our own earth, within us, will be 
‘the light one.’”18 This imaginary aeriality and becoming aerial is essen-
tially connected with breathing as Bachelard also says about this aerial 
becoming: “let us become as aerial as our breath.”19 
These ideas of becoming are influenced by Bachelard’s reading of 
Nietzsche’s “revaluation of all values” within the reign of aerial imagina-
tion. In this Bachelardian project of “aerial ethics,”20 the transmutation 
of all values changes them into aerial values. For example, freedom as 
a value transforms into what we can call “aerial freedom.”21 When we 
are able to understand that freedom is essentially a phenomenon of 
air, according to Bachelard, we begin to witness how the atmosphere 
of air itself “frees us from our attachment to matter.”22 One of the ul-
timate questions of aerial ethics and aerial freedom is: “how freely one 
breathes.”23 In the Bachelardian aerial interpretation of Nietzschean 
16  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 30n5.
17  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 9.
18  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 142.
19  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 241.
20  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 146.
21  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 117.
22  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 136.
23  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 140. In relation to Nietzsche’s will to “breathe freely,” see, 
for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. 
R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 118 and 126; Friedrich 
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith 
Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72, 92, 184, 256, and 260.
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thinking, the ethical task of becoming a superhuman (Übermensch) in 
an aerial manner is a project of going beyond (über) and transmut-
ing terrestrial and earthly weight and matter and becoming “an aerial 
being” who is “free,” “aerial” and a “joyous spirit” who breathes “an 
air of the heights, a strong air.”24 He becomes “the master of [winged] 
lightness”25 and is always ready to fly to the summits of “immense” “su-
perhuman joy.”26 Thus we learn to live and “float” “in the air, by the air, 
for the air … [and] free as the air.”27
How would Avicenna’s Person Suspended in the Air Argument re-
veal itself to us if it were interpreted within the Bachelardian reign of 
aerial imagination? The thought experiment begins as follows: 
So we say: one of us must imagine himself so that he is created all at once 
and perfect but his sight is veiled from seeing external [things], that he is cre-
ated flying/floating in the air or in a void so that the resistance of the air does 
not hit him ‒ a hit he would have to sense ‒ and that his limbs are separated 
from each other so that they do not meet or touch each other. 
Avicenna demands that we individually imagine his thought experi-
ment. Within the atmosphere of aerial imagination I will listen careful-
ly to Avicenna’s call and I will personally and intimately imagine it step 
by step. When Avicenna demands that “one of us must imagine himself 
so that he is created” in a new aerial manner, his way of imagining is 
in harmony with Bachelard’s aerial imagination in which the dream of 
“flight is not a technique to be discovered, it is a matter to be transmut-
ed; it is the fundamental basis for a transmutation of all values. Our ter-
restrial being must become aerial.” Bachelard has a similarly demanding 
voice when he says that “our terrestrial being must become aerial.” In 
Bachelardian terms, we must imagine the fundamental transmutation 
from terrestrial being to aerial being. When Avicenna demands that I 
imagine that I am created all at once and perfect but my sight is veiled 
from seeing external things, this means that I am freeing or liberating 
myself from my terrestrial way of being. The external things that I see 
24  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 135 and 140.
25  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 142.
26  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 136.
27  Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 28 and 145.
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are part of the terrestrial. Visual perception connects us ceaselessly with 
terrestrial beings. Avicenna also demands that I imagine that while I 
float in the air that my limbs are separated from each other so that they 
do not meet or touch each other. Within the reign of aerial imagina-
tion, Avicenna’s demand takes me further away from my terrestrial way 
of being, that is, from my bodily existence of touching and sensing. In 
his thought experiment, Avicenna is truly transmutating all values as he 
is shifting from terrestrial values to aerial values. What does it mean to 
become aerial? Bachelard suggested that it means to “become as aerial 
as our breath.” 
The Flying Person within the Judeo-Islamic Atmosphere 
of Nephesh and Nafs 
What could be the meaning of Avicenna’s demand to imagine myself 
“created all at once and perfect”? How can I aerially imagine myself 
in that kind of way? Do these words “created all at once and perfect” 
refer to something? This expression “created [...] perfect” refers to the 
Quran’s creation of human being in which God created him perfect. 
The Quran says: “Recall when your Lord said to the angels, ‘I am go-
ing to create a human being from a ringing clay made of decayed mud. 
When I form him perfect, and blow in him of My spirit (ruh)’” (Quran 
15:28‒29).28 Elsewhere in the Quran the following is said about God’s 
perfect creation: God “gave everything its perfect form. He first cre-
ated man from clay [...] Then He moulded him; He breathed from 
His Spirit (ruh) into him; He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How 
seldom you are grateful!” (Quran 32:7, 9)29 It is important to under-
stand that these Quranic verses follow and are based on the creation 
story from the Old Testament: “And the LORD God formed man of the 
dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and 
man became a living soul (nephesh).” (Gen 2:7) Both of these stories 
28  The Qur’an, trans. Mufti Taqi Usmani. https://quran.com/32.
See also The Qur’an: A New Translation, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 163.
29  The Qur’an: A New Translation, 264.
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describe the beginnings of the relation between “the divine breath and 
the earthly clay”30 in human existence. 
In order to understand this relation as well as the relation between 
these Biblical and Quranic creation stories and their relation to the nafs 
that plays an important role in Avicenna’s thought experiment, let us 
quote the following words from Golam Dastagir: 
Etymologically, the term nafs is derived from the term nafas, meaning 
‘breathing’. In early Arabic literature, by nafs is meant ‘self,’ or ‘person,’ while 
the term ruh denotes ‘breath,’ or ‘wind.’ In Islamic theology, the notion of the 
soul is referred to as nafs, though often confused with ruh, and the concepts 
of nafs and ruh seem, to a greater degree, similar to the Biblical concepts of 
nephesh and ruach.31 
The Hebrew nephesh and ruach, which are cognates of the words nafs 
and ruh, also have deep respiratory meanings. According to linguist and 
rabbi Ernest Klein the most primary etymological meaning of nephesh 
is “breath, breath of life.” The other meanings of this word are “soul,” 
“person, human being” and “self.” Etymologically, the term nephesh is 
derived from the term naphash, meaning “to blow, to breathe.” In rela-
tion to Klein’s etymological study of the term nephesh, Róbert Bohát 
writes: “etymology and lexicography agree that [nephesh] is ‘a living, 
breathing being’, ‘a breather’ in short.”32 Similar to the Arabic term ruh, 
the Hebrew ruach also means “breath” and “wind” as well as “spirit.” 
As etymologically the Arabic nafs and the Hebrew nephesh both derive 
from words that mean “breathing,” it is highly interesting to mention 
that Bachelard calls the word “soul” (âme) “a word of breath.”33 In ref-
30  William C. Chittick, “The In-Between: Reflections on the Soul in the Teachings of Ibn 
‘Arabi,” in The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymie-
niecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 30.
31  Golam Dastagir, “Nafs,” in Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, ed. Zayn R. Kassam et al. 
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 519.
32  Róbert Bohát, “‘My Soul Knoweth Right Well’: the Biblical Definition of Soul (heb. 
‘nefes,’ Gr. ‘psyche’) and the Epistemology of Embodied Cognition – an Ancient Source of a 
Modern Concept?,” in The Soul in the Axiosphere from an Intercultural Perspective, Volume One, 
ed. Joanna Jurewicz, Ewa Maslowska, and Dorota Pazio-Wlazlowska (Newcastle upon Tyne: 
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 167.
33  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 
xx. The translation has been altered. See Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace (Paris: 
Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 4.
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erence to this, he quotes Charles Nodier’s truly insightful words: “The 
different names for the soul, among nearly all peoples, are just so many 
breath variations, and onomatopaoeic expressions of breathing.”34 
With the help of these etymological investigations, we can now 
give one possible interpretation of Gen 2:7 which would say: “And 
the LORD God formed man (adam) of the dust of the ground, and 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a liv-
ing, breathing being (nephesh).” Adam (“man”) originated from adamah 
(“ground” or “earth”). Thus we could also interpret that in the creation 
God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man as an earth-
ling became a living breather (nephesh).” In his book Anthropology of the 
Old Testament, theologian Hans Walter Wolff ponders the meaning of 
the word nephesh in Gen 2:7. In his view, nephesh in this verse of the 
Old Testament should “[c]ertainly not [be translated as] soul.” Instead 
of “soul,” Wolff emphasizes “breath” as he writes: “Nephesh is designed 
to be seen together with the whole form of man, and especially with 
his breath; moreover man does not have nephesh, he is nephesh, he lives 
as nephesh.”35 I still want to bring in Etan Levine who relates Gen 2:7 
explicitly with air as he writes: “human life derived from the air when 
God ‘blew into his nostrils the breath of life.’”36 
After all of these various aspects that complement each other, I 
wish to give an initial interpretation of Gen 2:7 which would say: God 
formed man (adam) of the dust of the ground (adamah), and breathed 
into his nostrils the breath of life that is His breath/air/wind/spirit 
(ruach); and man became a living, breathing being, that is, a breather 
(nephesh). As Wolff said “man does not have nephesh, he is nephesh, he 
lives as nephesh,” this would mean in my interpretation that, according 
to Gen 2:7, human being does not have a breath, but is at the most 
primordial level a breathing being and lives as a breather, as one who 
34  Charles Nodier quoted by Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxn1. In reference No-
dier’s words it is interesting to hear what Hans Walter Wolff says about the etymological and 
onomatopoeic roots of the Hebrew nephesh. According to Wolff, this word’s root psh could be 
understood as “an onomatopoeic representation of the violently hissing breath.” Hans Walter 
Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, trans. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 
1974), 13.
35  Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 10.
36  Etan Levine, Heaven and Earth, Law and Love (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 12.
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breathes. This respiratory way of being, which derived from “the com-
mon air”37 (ruach) when God “blew into his nostrils the breath of life,” 
is the fundamental principle of human existence.
Now if we compare our possible interpretative formulations of Gen 
2:7 with Bachelard’s aerial imaginative formulations “our terrestrial be-
ing must become aerial” and “let us become as aerial as our breath,” we 
will see that they are not very far from each other. Let us combine these 
two formulations of Bachelard into one aerial imaginative formulation 
that says: our terrestrial being must become as aerial as our breath. If one 
were able to transform one’s terrestrial being into a being that is as 
aerial as our breath, such a person could be called, in Bachelard’s words, 
“a great breather.”38 We can also take note that both Gen 2:7 and Ba-
chelard use the verb “to become.” Gen 2:7 uses it in the past tense and 
Bachelard in the present tense with the auxiliary verb “must.” So in a 
sense, according to Gen 2:7, what man has already become Bachelard 
in his aerial imagination says we must become. Human being as an 
earthling or a terrestrial being has already become by the grace of God, 
that is, by the breath of God a breathing being, a living breath-soul, a 
breather. If we truly take seriously within the Bachelardian aerial im-
agination the Biblical creation story as that which we always already are, 
then Bachelard’s Nietzschean inspired ethical project of becoming as 
aerial as our breath can be called with a catch phrase taken from Pindar, 
Nietzsche and Heidegger: become what you already are!39 
37  William Glen Moncrieff, Soul: Or the Hebrew Word Nephesh and the Greek Word Psuche 
(Edinburgh: William Laing, 1864), 3.
38  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, trans. 
Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 180. In relation to this idea that somebody 
could be “a great breather” in a manner similar to when we say that somebody can be a great 
thinker, a great musician or a great swimmer it is very interesting that around 1959 Marcel 
Duchamp tells an interviewer the following: “Art was a dream that became unnecessary ... 
[Nowadays] I spend my time very easily, but I wouldn’t know how to tell you what I do ... 
I’m a respirateur––a breather.” Duchamp quoted by Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. 
Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 106.
39  Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (London and New York: 
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 155 and Babette Babich, “Nietzsche’s Imperative as a Friend’s 
Encomium: On Becoming the One You Are, Ethics, and Blessing,” Nietzsche-Studien 33 
(December 2003), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110179200.29.
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The Flying Person within the Atmosphere 
of Phenomenological Reduction
Could we interpret that becoming what you already are is perhaps 
also one of the key elements of Avicenna’s Person Suspended in the Air 
Argument? Let us return to Avicenna’s Flying Person Argument. Before 
we dived into the respiratory depths of Judeo-Islamic creation stories, 
our last question concerning Avicenna’s thought experiment was: what 
could be the meaning of Avicenna’s demand to imagine myself “created 
all at once and perfect”? We mentioned earlier in this article that El-
Bizri understood the Flying Person Argument as Avicenna’s phenome-
nological reduction or epoché that “provides access to the Ur-Ich” as the 
primordial self. Merleau-Ponty says: “Phenomenology is only accessible 
to a phenomenological method.”40 This method is the method of reduc-
tion which means a perpetual return to the beginning. In the “Preface” 
of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wonderfully describes 
the role of the philosopher as a phenomenologist whose task is to enter 
into the methodological atmosphere of phenomenological reduction: 
the philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts noth-
ing as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also 
means that philosophy itself must not take itself as established in the truths 
it has managed to utter, that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its 
own beginning, that it consists entirely in describing this beginning, that radi-
cal reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is 
its initial, constant, and final situation.41 
In his thought experiment concerning the flying person, in his own 
unique way Avicenna truly enters into the phenomenological atmos-
phere of the perpetual beginner. Within this atmosphere, his task is to 
return to the beginning of everything. This beginning of everything as 
our “initial, constant and final situation” is the Judeo-Islamic creation 
story that Avicenna says that we must return to as imaginative beings. It 
is not enough that this creation of human being has already taken place 
40  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London 
and New York: Routledge, 2012), lxxi.
41  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxviii.
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and that it has been established, for example, within various religious 
orders as part of their belief system and dogma. That is not enough. 
We must return to this event at the beginning of our life, that is, to 
this starting point of our existence as human beings and reimagine it 
as deeply as possible. Human beings have a strong tendency to become 
forgetful of what takes place in this creation story and of how it is that 
our conscious and normal life is dependent on this beginning that is 
our “initial, constant and final situation” whether we want it or not. 
It is not enough that somebody else returns to this phenomenologi-
cal beginning. We have to do it ourselves. As previously mentioned, the 
meaning of Avicenna’s words “one of us must imagine himself so that 
he is created all at once and perfect” are that one has to do it, that is, 
imagine it himself and not accept anything as established from what 
ordinary people and the so-called experts, for example, theologians or 
philosophers believe they know. We have already read the creation story 
of Gen 2:7 within an etymological context and the Bachelardian at-
mosphere of aerial and respiratory imagination and interpreted it to 
say: God formed man (adam) of the dust of the ground (adamah), and 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life that is His breath/air/wind/
spirit (ruach); and man became a living, breathing being. Alternatively 
we also stated: God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and 
man as an earthling became a living breath-soul, that is, a breather. 
In my interpretation of Gen 2:7, my train of thought goes well to-
gether with these words of Bohát: “I strove to ‘hear’ the meaning of 
the root word ‘breathe’ or ‘breath’ [of nephesh] constantly as would an 
ancient Hebrew speaker, whose mother tongue was used in the [Bibli-
cal] text.”42 The creation story of the Quran (15:28‒29 and 32:7, 9) 
has its foundation on Gen 2:7 as it tells: “Recall when your Lord said 
to the angels, ‘I am going to create a human being from a ringing clay 
made of decayed mud. When I form him perfect, and blow in him 
of My spirit/breath/wind (ruh)’” (Quran 15:28‒29). I would like to 
bring up two important aspects of the original story. The first one is the 
invitation or commandment to “recall” again and again the creation 
story. The second aspect is that human beings are formed perfect by 
42  Bohát, “My Soul Knoweth Right Well,” 167.
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God. Both of these points can be found in Avicenna’s thought experi-
ment. To imagine oneself created again is recalling the creation story in 
a true phenomenological sense as in it one is returning to the beginning 
of everything. So Avicenna in the Quranic manner recalls the perfect 
creation of human being in his thought experiment about the flying 
person. In other Quranic verses on the creation of human being are 
said: God “gave everything its perfect form. He first created man from 
clay ... Then He moulded him; He breathed from His Spirit/Breath/
Wind (ruh) into him; He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How 
seldom you are grateful!” (Quran 32: 7, 9) 
Let us first connect these Quranic words together with the words 
from Gen 2:7 and then ponder the possible meanings when Avicenna’s 
Person Suspended in Air Argument is read within the etymologico-res-
piratory atmosphere of al-nafs and the Judeo-Islamic creation story. As 
Gen 2:7 is the foundation of these Quranic ideas about the creation of 
human being from clay and God’s breathing being the true beginning 
of human existence, in my opinion, we can interpret that Avicenna 
reads Gen 2:7 together with the Quran 15:28‒29 and 32:7, 9. This 
verse (Quran 32:9) says: “He breathed from His Spirit/Breath/Wind 
(ruh) into him; He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How seldom 
you are grateful!” Now if this verse would be read together with Gen 
2:7 it would say something like this: In the creation/beginning of man, 
God breathed from His ruh/ruach into man and he received the breath 
of life and he became nafs/nephesh. God gave you hearing, sight, and 
minds. How seldom you are grateful! What Bohát said about ancient 
Hebrew speakers can also be said about Arabic speakers like Avicen-
na.43 So to paraphrase Bohát, Avicenna constantly heard the root word 
“breathe” or “breath” of nafs and nephesh and of ruh and ruach when he 
read the Quran and the Old Testament. If he were to have interpreted 
43  Persian Avicenna spoke Arabic fluently and wrote most of his works in Arabic. Dimitri 
Gutas writes about Avicenna’s use of the Arabic language as follows: his “language is ornate, 
with frequent use of rare words culled from literature, while the syntax at times is complex to 
the point of obscurity, pushing the regular paratactic structure of Arabic to its limits ... The 
whole is breathtaking and quite a tour de force; there is nothing like it in Arabic philosophi-
cal literature.” Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading 
Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 382‒383.
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Gen 2:7 as the foundation of the Quranic creation stories in a manner 
similar to the way in which I have interpreted them in this article, we 
may provide a new interpretation of the meaning of the Flying Person 
Argument. So let us read together the etymologico-respiratory atmos-
phere of al-nafs and the Judeo-Islamic creation story. 
We should recall when God formed man from the dust of the 
ground. He created man perfect and breathed into his nostrils the 
breath of life. He became a breathing being, that is, a breather. God 
gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How seldom you are grateful! Man 
does not have nephesh/nafs. He is nephesh/nafs. He lives as nephesh/nafs. 
According to Wolff the word nephesh should not be translated as “soul” 
because nephesh is not a soul as understood by the Western tradition’s 
notion of “soul” (for example, Platonic or Cartesian). Man is a breath-
ing being, a breather. He lives as a breathing being, as a breather. Levine 
wrote that “human life derived from the air when God ‘blew into his 
nostrils the breath of life’” and this “breath of God” is that “non-earthly 
quality ... what sets human beings apart from the plants and beasts.”44 
I am not sure if this “non-earthly quality” sets us humans apart from 
rest of the creation, but what is at least important in Levine’s words is 
that the common air as the breath of God is a “non-earthly quality” that 
defines essentially who we are as human beings. I would suggest that 
these Judeo-Islamic insights should be the starting point when we begin 
to interpret what Avicenna is trying to tell us. 
Concluding Words: The Flying Person 
Within the Atmosphere of Air and Breath
It is important to remember that in the beginning of this article I 
quoted Hasse who said: “It is part of the attractiveness of the Flying 
Man that its meaning and purpose are rather difficult to understand.” 
Kaukua also said that this thought experiment is “a reminder to make 
us pay attention to something that is and has always been there [ex-
perientially] for us but that we seldom take heed of [...]. Although 
the argument may be per impossibile, it is still used to point out some-
44  Levine, Heaven and Earth, Law and Love, 12.
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thing present to the reader’s experience” that we have a “tendency to 
neglect ... in favour” of other aspects of our experience. Perhaps the 
meaning and purpose of the Flying Man Argument is so difficult, cryp-
tic and mysterious that no Avicenna scholar, at least to my knowledge, 
has even imagined as a thought experiment that which it is reminding 
us of and which has always been experientially there for all of us since 
the creation or beginning of man is that man is a breather within the 
aerial atmosphere of divine breath where we all float. As we can see, 
Kaukua uses the wording that the thought experiment is “a reminder” 
of something that “we seldom take heed of.” The word “seldom” appears 
also in the Quranic verse 32:9 which says: “He breathed from His Spir-
it/Breath/Wind (ruh) into him; He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. 
How seldom you are grateful!” I have mentioned it already few times 
but have not yet examined it. Now is the time! What could the mean-
ing of this verse be? How should it be interpreted? Does it have some 
kind of relation to the flying man? The verse says that we have been 
given amazing perceptual, emotional and intellectual faculties that we 
generally take for granted. We are seldom truly grateful for the wonder-
ful gifts we have been given as human beings. 
But what happens in Avicenna’s thought experiment? Let us again 
begin to imagine and dream within the Avicennian and Bachelard-
ian reign of aerial imagination: We are all created at once and perfect 
which means that in this creation God has given to us “hearing, sight, 
and minds” and other human faculties like touch. But we are deprived 
from all of them as Avicenna says: “sight is veiled from seeing external 
[things]” and “limbs are separated from each other so that they do not 
meet or touch each other.” And at the same time we are “created float-
ing/flying in the air.” With regard to this Adamson says: “The human 
is in mid-air, his sight veiled and his limbs splayed so that he is not 
touching his own body. There is no sound or smell. In other words, 
this person is in a state of total sensory deprivation.”45 After all of this, 
Avicenna says: we “will not hesitate in affirming that [our] self or es-
sence (dhat) exists.” The Arabic word dhat means both “self ” and “es-
45  Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World, 84.
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sence.” El-Bizri translates dhat also as the “essential self.”46 So it could 
also be said that we affirm that our essential self exists. What could our 
essential self be which reveals itself after total sensory deprivation? How 
could we have any sense of it? “A strict empiricist would say,” as Adam-
son said, [“that there is nothing to affirm as] all our knowledge comes 
directly or indirectly from sensation.” But to quote El-Bizri, Avicenna 
could reply: “the primary encounter with being or existence does not 
rest on sensible experience or sensory perception.”47 But what is left of 
the Quranic verse 32:9 after all this deprivation? “He breathed from 
His Spirit/Breath/Wind (ruh) into him; He gave you hearing, sight, 
and minds. How seldom you are grateful!” (Quran 32:9) Avicenna has 
not demanded that we imagine that we would be deprived of God’s ruh 
which He breathed into us. In the words from Gen 2:7 God breathed 
into us “the breath of life; and man became a breather (nephesh).” How 
seldom we are grateful that we have been given “the breath of life” and 
that we are breathers! We are created in the air, into ruh or ruach as that 
is where we breathe. We cannot be breathers if we are not surrounded 
and penetrated by air. Now we are able to affirm that our essential 
self exists, that is, that our essential self is breathing, which makes us 
breathers. 
After we have affirmed and recognized our essential self as breath-
ing, as respiratory self we have, in Avicenna’s words, “the means to take 
heed of the existence of al-nafs as something different from the body.” 
We have already earlier interpreted al-nafs as a cognate with nephesh as 
a breathing being, a breather. We could make a preliminary interpreta-
tion of what it means that our essential self as al-nafs (the respiratory 
self ) is different from the body. The body (which includes, for example, 
the perceptual faculties) in the Flying Person Argument means all our 
relations to the terrestrial and earthly, that is, to that clay, dust of the 
ground from which everything is created. The body connects us to the 
world that we can see, hear and touch. On the contrary, al-nafs (the 
breath, the respiratory self ) connects us directly to the invisible air that 
is the “non-earthly” atmosphere of our experience and from which, ac-
46  El-Bizri, Phenomenological Quest, 14
47  El-Bizri, Phenomenological Quest, 162.
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cording to Levine, our human life derives. Breathing connects us with 
the ruh. We could also say again in a preliminary manner that our es-
sential self as al-nafs cannot be anything other than a flying man or 
a floating person, because it is our first and most primordial relation 
with the air, which in terms of Bachelardian aerial imagination is con-
sidered pure lightness (weightlessness) and freedom from matter. The 
breath (al-nafs) flies or floats in the air. The body as seeing and touching 
connects us with the terrestrial world of weight and gravity. Terrestrial 
matter weighs us down. The lightness of the air ascends and elevates us. 
Within the aerial imagination of Bachelard, “flight is freedom [from 
the terrestrial world.] [...] [B]ird personifie[s] free air [...] [and to be 
truly free is to be] free as a bird in the air.”48 For Avicenna, who is a 
philosopher with immense aerial imagination, “[t]he bird is a symbol 
of [al-nafs] set in its flight of liberation.”49 This aerial flight of al-nafs 
within the depths of the non-earthly atmosphere of ruh (the Breath of 
God) is Avicenna’s reduction to the phenomenological beginning that 
is the Ur-Ich as our essential respiratory self. The greatest task of aerial 
ethics is to be a perpetual beginner whose motto of immense superhu-
man joy is: become what you already are! 
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