Before Essence and Existence

  1. Does Al-kindi Anticipate the Distinction Between Essence and Existence? We can now address a final question, namely whether al-Kindi precedes Ibn Sina in formulating the distinction between essence and existence.45 If we focus on al-Kindi's complex conception of being, the answer is no. On this conception, if we ask al-Kindi what the being of a given thing is, he will reply in terms of its essence or substance. Here what it is "to be" for any created thing—a thing of kind X—must involve reference to what is required in order to be an X. So for example, "being a human" requires rationality, animality, and any other features essential to humans. The complex conception of being is, then, alien to the distinction between essence and existence, since complex being already includes essence.

So let us restrict ourselves to the simple conception of being. Here I think we do find significant overlap between the views of al-Kindi and Ibn Sina, on the following points:

(1) The most fundamental agreement is that being or existence is distinct from attributes, even essential attributes. For Ibn Sina, this is shown by the fact that we can think about the existence of a thing independently of its nature. He uses the example of a triangle to illustrate this: we can talk about the essential properties of a triangle without even knowing whether there are in fact any triangles.46

(2) In the case of God, for both al-Kindi and Ibn Sina, this distinction betweenwhether something is andwhat it is disappears. God is nothing but being, because He does not have any features distinct from His being. Ibn Sina says, for instance, that God "is sheer existence (mujarrad al-mawjud )—with the condition of negating anything understood as [adding] properties to it."47

(3) A created thing, on the other hand, has a nature distinct from its being, so it must receive existence from something else, namely God.48 As we saw al-Kindi**[End Page 310]** argues explicitly in FP49 that a thing cannot be the cause of its own being. The contrast between God's intrinsic existence and the extrinsically caused existence of created effects is also emphasized by al-Kindi:

FP 97.12-14 [RJ 9.12-13]: the cause of the existence (wujud ) and fixity of every thing is the True, because everything that has being (anniyya ) has truth. So the True is necessarily existent (mawjud ); therefore the beings (anniyyat ) are existent (mawjuda ).

This is perhaps the most "Avicennan" statement to be found in FP, since it emphasizes the necessary existence of God and even uses the wordwujud to pick out existence. The passage again equivocates on the word anniyya , between complex and simple being. The first sentence equates anniyya with mawjud , and uses both to refer to the sheer fact of something's existence. But the second sentence refers to "beings" ( anniyyat ), which will be beings in the fully constituted sense, as distinct from their (simple) existence, wujud . In general, Ibn Sina will likewise prefer wujud for existence in the latter sense, while often using anniyya with a sense closer to "essence." 50 (In one version of the famous "Flying Man" argument, where Ibn Sina

shows that sensation is not required for awareness of one's own existence, he says the flying man is aware of the wujud of his anniyya . 51 )

Despite these parallels between Kindian "simple" being and Avicennan existence, we should be cautious of ascribing to al-Kindi a full-fledged distinction between existence and essence. One might suppose that there is a difference between the positions of al-Kindi and Ibn Sina, insofar as Ibn Sina usually talks of existence as "coming to" an essence, which suggests that essence is ontologically prior to existence, not (as in al-Kindi) the other way around. This conclusion is encouraged by Ibn Sina's references to existence as "accidental" to a thing. In fact, however, I think that this particular contrast between the two is spurious. Ibn Sina does not in fact think that existence is "posterior" to the essence of the existent thing:

It is not possible that the attribute called "existence" be caused in a thing by its essence, which is quite distinct from its existence or any other attribute. For the cause precedes the effect ontologically, but nothing is prior to existence (la mutaqaddim bi-'l-mawjud qablu 'l-wujud ).52

Avicennan existence should not be thought of as an additional element or property of a particular thing, which is predicated of the thing's essence. As Fazlur Rahman has argued, it may be more fruitful to think of existence as "instantiation," which is prior even to the essence's being universal or particular.53 [End Page 311]

Rather, the contrast between the two is that Ibn Sina, unlike al-Kindi, never talks of being as thesubject of essence or any other predicate. It is here that the analogy between al-Kindi's "simple" being and Avicennan existence breaks down. I would suggest that al-Kindi did want to oppose being to attributes or essence, and even did so for the reason that motivates the distinction in Ibn Sina: to show that created things must receive their existence from without, and (by denying the distinction in God's case) to articulate divine simplicity. But his simple conception of being goes directly from this contrast to the conclusion that being is the subject of the predication, which suggests that the only contrast to "predicate" conceptually available to him was that of "subject." (His insistence that being is indeed contrasted with predicates, rather than identical with predicates, has been explained in section 3 above.) But this is to say that al-Kindi in fact lacked the existence/essence distinction, which is a distinction of a very different kind than that between subject and predicate.

This is a point of great significance for the theology presented in Kindi circle texts. The contrast between being and predicate means that, when these authors talk about God as the "First Being" or "only being," they are denying the possibility of divine predication. For this reason, it is difficult for al-Kindi or his translators to give a coherent philosophical account of the nature of God. If God is paradigmatically identified with simple being, in order to emphasize His simplicity, then it quickly becomes apparent that we will not be able to say anything about God at all.

Of course it would be anachronistic to criticize al-Kindi for not fully anticipating Ibn Sina, and we should be content to point out the historically significant fact that, as the above points of similarity (1)-(3) show, his simple conception of being does foreshadow certain aspects of Avicennan existence. It is however not anachronistic to point out that these early, apophatic identifications of God with being fail on their own terms, insofar as a goal of al-Kindi's circle was to make the First Principle of Greek philosophy into the Creator described in revealed texts. This being their goal, it would perhaps have been more fruitful had they further pursued the tentative forays in the Arabic Plotinus toward an "unlimited" conception of being (i.e., as a simple being that is identical with divine attributes), or indeed the idea that God is pure actuality (also present in the Arabic Plotinus, as mentioned above in section 2). Indeed these hints toward a positive theology in the Arabic Neoplatonic translations may have played a role in the development of Ibn Sina's own metaphysics.54 But it cannot be said that al-Kindi himself, at least in the works that remain available to us, explored these kataphatic ideas even as fully as did the translators of his own circle.55