The Volitional Aspect of the Soul according to al-Ghazzālī

In this article the author investigates al-Ghazali’s views on the volitional aspect of the soul. Al-Ghazzālī divides the volitional aspect of the human into two levels, human and animal. His use of terms such as practical faculty, practical reason, power and will for human volition raises the important question of whether practical reason has cognitive character and whether it is a stimulus. Study of this subject shows that, according to al-Ghazzālī, practical reason belongs to the cognitive realm and at the same time is a stimulus in the performance of action. The importance which al-Ghazzālī attributes to the cognitive element in volitional actions is that the ‘action’ in the true sense of the word depends on the existence of a volition arising from consciousness. This issue is illustrated in discussions with titles such as “The Real Meaning of Action”, “The Role of the Free Will in Moral Evaluation of Actions” and “The Explanation of the Concept of Free Will”. It is also shown that al-Ghazzālī especially emphasizes the element of understanding or intellectual perception in evaluating the goodness of an action, which is one of the important consequences of this view.