Before Essence and Existence

  1. Simple Being With these terminological considerations in mind, we may now turn to a philosophical analysis of the texts. Let us begin with theLiber de Causis :

(A)Liber de Causis , Proposition 1: And we give as an example of this being (anniyya ), living, and man, because it must be that the thing is first being, then living, then man. Living is the proximate cause of the man, and being is its remote cause. Thus being is more a cause for the man than living, because it [sc. being] is the cause of living, which is the cause of the man. Likewise, when you posit rationality as cause of the man, being is more a cause for the man than rationality, because it is the cause of its cause. The proof of this is that, when you remove the rational power from the man, he does not remain man, but he remains living, ensouled, [and] sensitive. And when you remove living from him, he does not remain living, but he remains a being (anniyya ), because being was not removed from him, but rather living, for the cause is not removed through the removal of its effect. Thus, the man remains a being. So when the individual is not a man, it is a living thing, and [when] not a living thing, it is only a being (anniyya faqat ).17

The passage suggests a thought experiment, in which we strip away the features or attributes from man. Of particular interest to us is that when all the attributes have been removed, what remains isanniyya faqat , "only a being" or "being alone."

Compare this with the following passage, from the Arabic Plotinus:

(B)Sayings of the Greek Sage I.10-11: The intellect became all things because its Originator is not like anything. The First Originator does not resemble anything, because all things are from Him, and because He has no shape and no proper form attached to Him. For the**[End Page 300]** First Originator is one by Himself, I mean that He is only being (anniyya faqat ), having no attribute (sifa) suitable to Him, because all the attributes are scattered forth from Him.

Just as in passage (A), the phraseanniyya faqat is used here to refer to the pure being that remains when all determinate features, or "attributes" (sifat ), are removed. This is what I mean by saying that for both authors, being alone is "simple": it is free of attributes or predicates. The difference is that in the Arabic Plotinus, pure being is not the outcome of a thought experiment, but is God Himself, the First Originator who is equated with Plotinus's One and hence is also said to be the cause of Intellect. That the author of the Plotinian paraphrase should call God "being alone" has occasioned comment elsewhere.18 The historical and philosophical importance of the claim is heightened by the fact that it is contrary to Plotinus's statements that the One is, in the words of Plato'sRepublic ,epekeina tês ousias , "beyond being."19

Now, it is tempting to take the claim that God is being alone or "being itself" as tantamount to the claim that God is pure actuality, as Aristotle holds in theMetaphysics . Such later medieval writers as Ibn Sina and Thomas Aquinas explicitly take this over from Aristotle. Nor is such an understanding of God as actuality foreign to the Arabic Plotinus, since we find there a remarkable passage where the author writes that God "is the

thing existing truly in act. Nay rather, He is pure act" (huwa al-shay' al-ka'in bi-'l-fi'l haqqan, bal huwa al-fi'l al-mahd ).20 While this passage does most likely represent an Aristotelian influence on the Plotinus paraphrase, it is an isolated example of that influence. (The thought that God is actuality may also account for al-Kindi's frequent descriptions of God as an "Agent" or the "First Agent."21 ) It is much more frequent to find the paraphrase calling God "being alone" because of His lack of attributes.22 Thus when the author says in passage (B) and elsewhere that God isanniyya faqat , he seems above all to have in mind God's absolute simplicity, and His resulting lack of attributes. It is likely that this concern with simplicity and the exclusion of attributes is related to contemporaneous debates over divine attributes (sifat ), which already raged in the ninth century, when the Arabic Plotinus was composed.23

It is significant for our understanding of passage (A) that we find the same conception of God in theLiber de Causis . In Proposition 4, the author of that paraphrase writes that God is "the pure being, the One, the True, in whom there is no multiplicity in any way" ( al-anniyya mahda, al-wahid, al-haqq, alladhilaysa fihi [End Page 301] kathra min al-jihat al-ashkhas ). As in the Arabic Plotinus, God is nothing but being, because He is simple. Being is contrasted to attributes, because the being of a thing is distinct from the multiple features that are predicated of that thing. Of course it is essential to created things like humans that they have their predicated features, because something cannot be a human without being alive, rational, and so on. But being is not just another of these predicates, essential or accidental. Rather, it is prior to the predicates.

What sort of priority is this? An answer is suggested by a remark of al-Kindi's:

(C) FP 113.11-13 [RJ 27.17-19]: Corruption is only the changing of the predicate, not of the first bearer of predication. As for the first bearer of predication, which is being (ays ), it does not change, because for something corrupted, its corruption has nothing to do with the "making be" (ta'yis ) of its being (aysiyyatihi ).

This passage is not particularly clear, but it does explicitly make the point thatays , "being," is the "first bearer of predication" (al-hamil al-awwal ). The meaning of this assertion becomes clearer against the background of texts (A) and (B). Being is prior to the predicates of a thing, for example "living" and "rational" in the case of a human, because it is thesubject of predication .

If this is right, then "being" is treated as analogous to Aristotelian matter. The analogy is suggested by both passages (A) and (C).24 Passage (A) is reminiscent of Aristotle's discussion in theMetaphysics where, on one traditional interpretation, he describes matter as the ultimate subject of predication that underlies all the features of a thing.25 Also like Aristotelian matter, being subsists through change, as becomes clear in passage (C) when al-Kindi says that being "does not change." The point is an intelligible one: even in the case of substantial corruption (such as death in the case of a human), there is not an absolute destruction of being but merely of the way the thing is. This is why the corpse that remains when the human is no

longer alive is yet something thatexists . Finally, like Aristotelian matter, mere being must be simple, where "simple" again means without predicates. For, as the ultimate subject of predication, being itself cannot be further analyzed into a complex of subject and predicates. The analogy does break down insofar as matter is associated with potentiality, whereas being (according to the Arabic Plotinus, as we saw above) is more aptly associated with actuality.

As in the Neoplatonic translations, for al-Kindi this analysis of being in the case of complex, created things is linked to a conception of God. Al-Kindi follows the authors of the two paraphrases in saying that God is being. For example, he**[End Page 302]** says that God is "the true Being" (al-anniyya al-haqq ),26 and asserts that God creates "through His being" (bi-huwiyyatihi ).27 Moreover, he follows them in emphasizing that God is being because He is simple, or one:

(D) FP 161.10-14 [RJ 95.24-96.3]: The cause of unity in unified things is the True, First One, and everything that receives unity is caused. For every one that is not truly the One is one metaphorically, not in truth. And every one of the effects of unity goes from [God's] unity to what is other than [God's] being (huwiyya ), I mean that [God] is not multiple with respect to existing (min hayth yujadu ). [The effect] is multiple, not absolutely one, and by "absolutely one" I mean not multiple at all, so that His unity is nothing other than His being (wa-laysa wahdatuhu shay'an ghayr huwiyyatihi ).

It is clear from the end of this passage that for al-Kindi, unity is convertible with being in the case of God,28 and that unity is here to be understood as excluding multiplicity. Indeed text (D) is the culmination of al-Kindi's efforts in the final surviving chapter of FP to argue that God has no attributes. This fits well with text (C) and the opposition it makes between being and attributes. So it would seem that the notion of God in FP is the same as the one we discerned in the Neoplatonic paraphrases: God is being, which is to say that He has no multiplicity of attributes distinct from His being.29

We now need to make sense of the notion that this simple being is the subject of predication in complex things. We can do this by bearing in mind that complex things are created things. Hence the contrast in passage (D) is between God, a simple and ineffable First Cause who is identical with His own being, and the complex things that arenot identical with their own being. Yet the being of those created things is in itself simple, as we see in passages (A) and (C), for it is distinct from or prior to the predicates. Furthermore, the simple being of a created thing is the direct effect of God. Indeed this is what creation amounts to: the bestowal of the simple being upon which the created thing's complexity is founded. Thus the Liber de Causis asserts that "the first of originated things is being" and that created being then "receives multiplicity." 30 The Neoplatonic lineaments of the [End Page 303] theory are clear enough: createdness amounts to receiving simple being from a simple One that is the principle of being, or pure being. 31

It is in this sense that God's creating something is God's making that thing exist. Thus al-Kindi uses the same terminology of "being alone" in the following context:

FP 101.5-7: There are four scientific inquiries: [. .] "whether" (hal ), "what," "which" and "why" [. .] and "whether" is an investigation of being alone ('an anniyya faqat ).

Here al-Kindi is drawing on Aristotle, who differentiates questions regarding "whether" (to hoti ) from those regarding what a thing is ( to ti estin ) in Posterior Analytics II.1. Al-Kindi's explicit discussions of creation bear out the equivalence of being created and receiving being. In general, the generation of any given thing is a "coming-to-be of being ( ays ) from non-being ( 'an lays )" (FP 118.18 [RJ 33.25]). And in particular, "origination" ( al-ibda' ) or creation is "the manifestation ( izhar ) of the thing from non-being ( 'an lays )." 32 Such passages are further evidence that al-Kindi could use terms meaning "being" to refer to the sheer existence of something, the fact that it is: to hoti , in Aristotle's terminology. This act of existing will be distinct from the predicates true of the created thing; indeed, it will be ontologically prior to those predicates as their subject.