Before Essence and Existence

4. Complex Being Others, such as Marie-Thérèse d'Alverny,36 have noted a double meaning ofanniyya in the texts produced by al-Kindi's circle. One the one hand, as we have seen,anniyya can refer to mere existence. On the other hand, it can include the actual nature or essence of a thing: notthat it is, butwhat it is. In the case of a human, for example, being in this complex sense would mean "being a human." This equivocation on the meaning ofanniyya is already prominent in Ustath's translation of Aristotle'sMetaphysics , which usesanniyya to translate botheinai ("to be" or "being" in the broadest sense) andto ti en einai ("essence").37

The complex conception of being is illustrated in passages like the following:

FP 117.3-5 [RJ 31.22-24]: If time is limited, then the being (anniyya ) of the body [of the universe] is limited, since time is not an existent (bi-mawjud ), and there is no body without time, since time is the number of motion.

FP 120.3-4 [RJ 35.21-22]: Body is not prior to time, so it is not possible that the body of the universe have no limit, because of its being (li-anniyyatihi ). So the being (anniyya ) of the body of the universe is necessarily limited.

Such passages actually play on the double meaning ofanniyya . The simple conception is employed here insofar as al-Kindi is indeed talking about the sheer**[End Page 306]** existence of the world, and whether that existence is eternal. But the complex conception is also evident, because he says in the second passage that theanniyya of the body of the universe causes it to have a limited, temporal existence.38 Here it would be more natural to understandanniyya as "nature" or "essence." Indeed, at one point he makes a remark that equateshuwiyya , "being," withma huwa , "what a thing is" (FP 119.15-16 [RJ 35.14-15]).

The complex conception seems to underlie another frequent usage of the wordsanniyya andays , where they mean "a being." Thusanniyyat andaysat can mean "beings,"onta , as mentioned briefly above in our terminological survey. A typical instance in al-Kindi can be found in his treatiseOn the First True Agent , where he writes that God's creative act is a "bringing-to-be (ta'yis ) of beings (aysat ) from non-being (lays )" (FP 182.7 [RJ 169.6]). Herelays seems to be the opposite ofays in the simple sense, so that "non-being" means simple non-existence. Likewise the verbal nounta'yis seems to be based on simple being, much in the spirit of the definitions of creation cited above at the end of section 2. But the pluralaysat seems more likely to mean "beings" in the sense of fully constituted entities.39 These will be beings of a particular sort, complete with the predicated features that are excluded from simple being.

The same is true for a more extended meditation on being and essence at the beginning of the third section of FP, where al-Kindi gives a lengthy argument designed to show that a thing cannot be the cause of its own essence. In typical Kindian style, he proceeds with an exhaustive consideration of four possibilities. First, that neither the thing nor its essence (dhat ) are "a being" (ays ), that is, that they do not exist. Second, that the

thing is non-existent and its essence is existent; third, that the thing exists but its essence is non-existent; and fourth and finally, that both the thing and its essence exist. He shows that, on any of these assumptions, the thing could not cause its own essence. The key to the argument is the repeated insistence that the thing and its essence are not distinct. For example, on the second assumption, the thing's

essence would be distinct from it, because distinct things are those for which it is possible that something happen to one without happening to the other. Therefore, if it happens to it that it be a non-being, and it happens to its essence that it be a being, then its essence will not be it. But the essence of every thing is itself [wa-kull shay' fa-dhatuhu hiya huwa ]. (FP 123.18-124.3 [RJ 41.16-18])

At first glance this argument seems to be using exclusively the simple conception of being, since it considers merely whether a thing or its essence exists. But**[End Page 307]** the overall thrust of the argument is that the being of a thing is the same as the being of its essence. This seems explicitly to reject the simple conception of being. For the whole point of the simple conception is that we can think about the being of a thing in abstraction from thinking about the thing's attributes, some of which will constitute its essence. Instead, al-Kindi insists here that we cannot consider a thing to exist, to be "a being," without simultaneously considering it to be identical with its essence. His argument turns on the double meaning of dhat , which can signify "self" as well as "essence," so that al-shay' ghayr dhatihi means both "the thing is distinct from its essence" and "the thing is distinct from itself." 40 And the latter, of course, would be absurd. By insisting on this point, al-Kindi is insisting on the complex notion of being, on which we cannot distinguish being from having a certain essence.