Before Essence and Existence

  1. Reconciling the Two Conceptions We have, then, found traces of two conflicting notions of being in al-Kindi's writings. When he speaks of "being alone," he means the mere act of existing that is prior to, and the subject of, the existent's essence and other predicates. But he also speaks of "a being," by which he means a fully constituted being that is already considered to have an essence. On this latter notion, the being of each thing will be distinct from the being of anything else; on the former notion, being is mere existence and belongs to anything that God has seen fit to create. I think we can, however, discern a coherent philosophical position that would bring the two conceptions together.

Consider first what al-Kindi has to say about the Aristotelian notion of substance. In his treatise on definitions, al-Kindi defines substance as follows:

On the Definitions and Descriptions of Things 166.7: "Substance" (jawhar ) is what subsists through itself (bi-nafsihi ). It is the bearer (hamil) for accidents, and its essence (dhat ) does not undergo alteration.

Notice how similar the role of substance here is to that of "being" (ays ) in text (C), which first introduced us to the simple notion of being in al-Kindi. We have the same terminology, hamil, this time used to express the fact that substance underlies accidents in the way thatays was in passage (C) said to underlie any predicate (mahmul ). Notice also the emphasis on the fact that it can be the bearer of predication because it remains unchanged in itself, just as the "being" of passage (C) was said to subsist through a corruption.

But note too the difference between "substance" in this definition andays in passage (C). For one thing, al-Kindi says not that substance underlies all predication, but only accidental predication. In another treatise, al-Kindi makes the same**[End Page 308]** point more emphatically in a very similar definition: "[one must] know the adjuncts of the substance that distinguish it from everything else, namely that it is subsisting through its essence (bi-dhatihi ). ., [that it is] the bearer (al-hamil ) for diversity, and is . unchanging."41 Here the phrase "subsisting through its essence" shows that the being of a substance is complex being, where "to be" is to have an essence of a certain kind. Another difference is that, though both of these definitions make the point that substance cannot change, we know that a substance can in fact corrupt (e.g., when a man dies). So substance will not be unchanging in the strongest sense; rather, the point must be that substance remains unchanged in itself throughaccidental change. The being of passage (C), on the other hand, remains unaltered even through "corruption" (fasad ), which I take to refer even (perhaps especially) to substantial corruption.42

With these contrasts in mind, we can see that the superficial similarity between substance and (simple) being is due to the fact that the two are analogous. The being appropriate to substance is complex; it involves reference to what is essential to the substance. Thus, as we have just seen, substance is even said to "subsist through its essence." This complex, essential, or substantial being is then the subject of accidental predication. Being in the sense employed in passage (C), on the other hand, is simple; it is the subject of all predication, and thus can be called the "first bearer of

predication." Al-Kindi obscures the difference between the two by referring to both simple being and substance asanniyya orays . But the equivocation does not lead to any incoherency in al-Kindi's thought, for the two conceptions operate at different levels. Simple being, or "being alone," underlies all, and perhaps especially essential,43 predicates. Complex being, or substance, results when an essence is predicated of simple being, and it underlies accidents.

The complex notion of being accurately, if roughly, represents the sort of being expounded in Aristotle'sMetaphysics . Aristotle stresses that to be is to be a certain sort or kind of thing, and says that of the many ways "being" is said, the primary sense is that associated with a substance of a specific kind. 44 As we saw, the [End Page 309] simple notion of being also derives partly from Aristotle, whose Posterior Analytics distinguishes between what a thing is and that it is. But the fact that al-Kindi's treatment of simple being is ontological, as well as epistemic, seems more at home in a Neoplatonic framework. For example, as suggested above, the account is Neoplatonic insofar as it portrays createdness as a sort of participation in being, and insofar as it recognizes a principle that is absolute Being.