Ibn Sina's doctrine of Being, like those of earlier Muslim philosophers, e. g., al-Farabi, is emanationistic. From God, the Necessary Existent, flows the first intelligence alone, since from a single, absolutely simple entity, only one thing can emanate. But the nature of the first intelligence is no longer absolutely simple since, not being necessary-by-itself, it is only possible, and its possibility has been actualized by God. Thanks to this dual nature which henceforth pervades the entire creaturely world, the first intelligence gives rise to two entities: (i) the second intelligence by virtue of the higher aspect of its being, actuality, and (ii) the first and highest sphere by virtue of the lower aspect of its being, its natural possibility.
This dual emanatory process continues until we reach the lower and tenth intelligence which governs the sublunary world and is called by the majority of the Muslim philosophers the Angel Gabriel. This name is applied to it because it bestows forms upon or “informs” the matter of this world, i.e., both physical matter and the human intellect. Hence it is also called the “Giver of Forms” (the dator formarum of the subsequent medieval Western scholastics). We shall return later to these intelligences and these spheres to examine more closely their nature and operations; meanwhile we must turn to the nature of Being.
The procession of the immaterial intelligence from the Supreme Being by way of emanation was intended to supplement, under the inspiration of the Neo-Platonic Theory of Emanation, the meagre and untenable view of God formulated by Aristotle according to whom there was no passage from God, the One, to the world, the many. According to Muslim philosophers, although God remained in Himself and high above the created world, there were, nevertheless, intermediary links between the absolute eternity and necessity of God and the world of downright contingency. And this theory, besides, came very close to satisfying the Muslim belief in angels.
This is the first occasion to remark how Muslim philosophers, by a re-elaboration of the Greek tradition of philosophy, not only sought to build a rational system, but a rational system which sought to integrate the tradition of Islam. But what about the Theory of Emanation itself? Would it not destroy the necessary and all-important gulf between the Creator and the creation and lead to a downright pantheistic world-view - tat tvam Asi - against which Islam, like all higher religions, had warned so sternly?
No doubt, this type of pantheism, being dynamic, is different from the absolutist and static forms of pantheism; yet it could lead to anthropomorphism, or, by a reverse process of ascent, to the re-absorption of the creature's being into the being of God. Now, the guarantee against any such danger shall be Ibn Sina's doctrine of essence and existence. This celebrated theory again is designed to fulfil equally both religious and rational needs and, once again, to supplement Aristotle.
Early in this section we said that God and God alone is absolutely simple in His being; all other things have a dual nature. Being simple, what God is and the fact that He exists are not two elements in a single being but a single atomic element in a single being. What God is, i.e., His essence, is identical with His existence. This is not the case with any other being, for in no other case is the existence identical with the essence, otherwise whenever, for example, an Eskimo who has never seen an elephant, conceives of one, he would ipso facto know that elephants exist.
It follows that God's existence is necessary, the existence of other things is only possible and derived from God's, and that the supposition of God's non-existence involves a contradiction, whereas it is not so with any other existent.4 It will be seen that the germs of the ontological argument exist in a fairly developed form in this argument. A cosmological argument, based on Aristotle's doctrine of the First Cause, would be superfluous in establishing God's existence.
Ibn Sina, however, has not chosen to construct a full-fledged ontological argument. His argument, which, as we shall see later, became the cardinal doctrine of the Roman Catholic dogmatic theology after Aquinas, is more like the Leibnizian proof of God as the ground of the world, i. e., given God, we can understand the existence of the world. Here cause and effect behave like premises and conclusion. Instead of working back from a supposed effect to its cause, we work forward from an indubitable premise to a con¬clusion.
Indeed for Ibn Sina, God creates through a rational necessity. On the basis of this rational necessity, Ibn Sina also explains the divine pre-knowledge of all events, as we shall see in his account of God. The world, as a whole, is then contingent, but, given God, it becomes necessary, this necessity being derived from God. This is Ibn Sina's principle of existence stated in brief; we shall now analyse it according to the complex materials which Ibn Sina has left us. It involves more than one point of view.
From the metaphysical point of view, the theory seeks to supplement the traditional Aristotelian analysis of an existent into two constituent elements, as it were, viz., form and matter. According to Aristotle, the form of a thing is the sum total of its essential and universalizable qualities constituting its definition; the matter in each thing is that which has the potentiality of receiving these qualities - the form - and by which the form becomes an individual existent.
But there are two major difficulties in this conception from the point of view of the actual existence of a thing. The first is that the form is universal and, therefore, does not exist. Matter too, being pure poten-tiality, does not exist, since it is actualized only by the form. How then shall a thing come into existence by a non-existent form and an equally non¬existent matter?
The second difficulty arises from the fact that, although Aristotle generally holds that the definition or essence of a thing is its form, he nevertheless says in certain important passages (e.g., De Anima, Vol. I, Chap. I, 403 a, 27 ff.) that matter is also to be included in the essence of a thing, otherwise we shall have only a partial definition of it. If, then, we regard both form and matter as constitutive of definition, we can never arrive at the actual existence of a thing. This is the rock against which the whole scheme of Aristotle to explain Being threatens to break.
This is why Ibn Sina5 holds that from form and matter alone you would never get a concrete existent, but only the essential and accidental qualities. He has analysed at some length the relation of form and matter in K. al¬-Shifa', (“Met.” II, 4 and “Met.” VI, 1), where he concludes that both form and matter depend on God (or the active intellect) and, further, that the composite existent also cannot be caused by form and matter alone but there must be “something else.”
Finally, in “Met.” VIII, 5, he tells us, “Every¬thing except the One who is by His essence One and Existent acquires existence from something else. . . . In itself it deserves absolute non¬-existence. Now, it is not its matter alone without its form or its form alone without its matter which deserves non-existence but the totality (of matter and form).”
This is why Ibn Sina substitutes a three-term analysis of the existent material objects instead of the traditional Greek dyadic formula. It must be noted that it is Aristotle's doctrine which is being developed here. Many scholars have held that Ibn Sina is here following a Neo-Platonic line instead of the Aristotelian one, but, from this point of view, the Neo-Platonic doctrine is the same as that of Aristotle, viz., the dyadic scheme of form and matter, except that, according to Plotinus, under the influence of Plato, the forms have a higher ontological status and exist in God's mind who then proceeds to make them existent in matter.
It should also be borne in mind that existence is not really a constituent element of things besides matter and form; it is rather a relation to God: if you view a thing in relation to the divine existentializing agency, it exists, and it exists ne¬cessarily and, further, its existence is intelligible, but when out of relation with God, its existence loses its intelligibility and meaning. It is this relational aspect which Ibn Sina designates by the term “accident” and says that existence is an accident.
Ever since the criticism of Ibn Sina's doctrine by Ibn Rushd who, among other things, accused Ibn Sina of having violated the definition of substance as that which exists by itself, and of Aquinas who, although he adopts the distinction between essence and existence under the direct influence of Ibn Sina, nevertheless follows Ibn Rushd in his criticism, the unanimous voice of the Western historians of medieval philosophy has been to the effect that existence, according to Ibn Sina, is just an accident among other accidents, e. g., round, black, etc.
We have said that when Ibn Sina talks of existence as an accident with relation to objects (as distinguished from essence) he just means by it a relation to God; it is, therefore, not an ordinary accident. Further, if existence were an accident, one could think it away and still go on talking of the object just as one can do in the case of other accidents and, indeed, in that case Ibn Sina would have been forced to hold something like the Meinongian view held by many Muslim Mutakallims that non-existents must also “exist” in some peculiar sense of that word. But this is the very doctrine which Ibn Sina ridicules. The whole discussion on this point can be found in the article referred to in note No. 5 of this chapter.
Here we give only one passage where our philosopher criticizes the view of those who hold that a non-existent “thing” must, nevertheless, “exist” in some sense so that we can talk about it. He says (K. al-Shifa', “Met.” I, 5), “Those people who entertain this opinion hold that among those things which we can know (i. e., be acquainted with) and talk about, are things to which, in the realm of non-being, non-existence belongs as an attribute. He who wants to know more about this should further consult the nonsense which they have talked and which does not merit con¬sideration.”
Indeed, according to Ibn Sina, the ideas of existence and unity are the primary ideas with which we must start. These underived concepts are the bases of our application of other categories and attributes to things and, therefore, they defy definition since definition must involve other terms and concepts which are themselves derived (ibid., I, 5).
It will be seen that this problem now is not a metaphysical one but has to do with logic. Ibn Sina has attempted to give his own answer to the question: How is it possible that we can talk of non-existents and what do these latter mean? His answer is that we can do so because we give to these objects “some sort of existence in the mind.” But, surely, our individual images cannot constitute the meanings of these entities for the obvious reason that when we talk, e. g., of a space-ship, it must have an objective meaning.
It is, neverthe¬less, true that Ibn Sina has seen the basic difficulty of the logic of existence. And our modern logic itself, despite its superior techniques and some valuable distinctions, seems nowhere nearer the solution. It has tried hard to contend that whenever I talk of a space-ship, although none exists, I am not talking of a “thing,” of an individual object, but only of a generic object or a conglome¬ration of properties. But is this really so ? Is it absurd to say that the “individual space-ship I am talking of now has this and this property”? Besides, the crux is the phrase “conglomeration or set of properties” - what is it to which they belong and of which I profess to be talking?
Besides this meaning of “accident” as a peculiar and unique relation of an existent to God, the term “accident” in Ibn Sina has another unorthodox philosophic meaning. This concerns the relationship of a concrete existent to its essence or specific form, which Ibn Sina also calls accidental. This use of the term “accident” is quite pervasive in Ibn Sina's philosophy and, without knowing its correct significance, one would be necessarily led to misinterpret some of his basic doctrines.
Now, whenever two concepts are clearly distinguishable from each other, they must refer to two different ontological entities, as we said above, and, further, whenever two such concepts come together in a thing, Ibn Sina describes their mutual relationship as being accidental, i. e., they happen to come together, although each must be found to exist separately. This is the case, for example, between essence and existence, between universality and essence.
According to Ibn Sina, essences exist in God's mind (and in the mind of the active intelligences) prior to the individual existents exemplifying them in the external world and they also exist in our minds posterior to these individual existents. But these two levels of the existence of an essence are very different. And they differ not only in the sense that the one is creative, and the other imitative.
In its true being, the essence is neither universal nor particular, but it is just an essence. Hence he holds (K. al-Shifa', “Isagoge to Logic,” Cairo, 1952, pp. 65-69; also ibid. “Met.” V, 1) that both particularity and univer¬sality are “accidents” which happen or occur to the essence. Universality occurs to it in our minds only, and Ibn Sina takes a strictly functional view of the universals: our mind abstracts universals or general concepts whereby it is enabled to treat the world of infinite diversity in a summary and scientific manner by relating an identical mental construction to a number of objects.
In the external world the essence does not exist except in a kind of metaphorical sense, i, e., in the sense in which a number of objects allow themselves to be treated as being identical. Existents in the external world are the individual concrete objects, no two of which are exactly the same.
He says, “It is impos¬sible that a single essence should exist identically in many” (“Met.” V, 2), and again, “It (i. e. absolute manness) is not the manness of 'Amr; it is different from it, thanks to the particular circumstances. These particular circum¬stances have a role in the individual person of Zaid ... and also a role in the 'man' or 'manness' inasmuch as it is related to him” (“Met.” V, 1). It is clear especially from this last statement that the “essence” virtually undergoes a change in each individual. That is why we must say that if we regard essence as a universal, that concrete determinate existence is something over and above the essence; it is something added to the essence, or it is an “accident” of the essence.
Two things must be specially noted here. First, that existence is some-thing added not to the existent objects - this would be absurd - but to the essence. This is because everything whether it exists or not - indeed whether it is existable or not - in fact every concept is “something” of which assertions can be made, whether positive or negative. Indeed, even non-existence is “something,” since one can talk about it. But a positive individual existent is more than just “something.” (This distinction between “something” and an existent, treated by Ibn Sina [“Met.” 1, 5] which has confusedly returned in present-day logic, was originally made by the Stoics [see, e.g., Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, Vo. II, p. 117].)
Hence Ibn Sina says that when existence is attributed to essences, this existence is equivalent to “is something” and, therefore, such statements are not “profitable.” But statements about existents are informative and profitable, since they add to the essence something that is new.
Secondly, we must note that although Ibn Sina speaks in several places of matter as the principle of multiplicity of forms or essences, he never says that matter is the principle of individual existence. The sole principle of individual existence is God - the Giver of existence; matter is the occasional cause of existence, supplying external attributes of multiplicity.
We have given a considerable number of quotations from Ibn Sina in the treatment of this problem not only because it is of capital importance for Ibn Sina's philosophy, but also because there has been such a great deal of fundamental confusion in the traditional treatment of the subject that a clarification of the terms “existence,” “accident” in this relation, and “essence” is absolutely necessary.
Sabtu, 19 Oktober 2024