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Chapter One
Metaphysical Foundations of Arabic Thought, 1: Hierarchy, Substance and Combination
Arabic thought in the Middle Ages reclaimed a very ancient metaphysical repertoire in its conception of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial beings. This repertoire is rehearsed explicitly in works of metaphysics, in pronouncements of metaphysical whimsy scattered throughout Arabic Schrifttum, in speculative and sagely reflections of a literary and scientific type as well as in political and social writings, concerned as they are with notions of order and rectitude. We also find it implicit in several other textual locations which will become explicit in the course of the following pages. At the heart of the conception of order that derives from this ancient repertoire is the idea of hierarchy, for the world of men, along with that of inanimate substances and that of incorporeal beings, is bound to the location to which it is assigned in an hierarchical order of things within which everything has its station. Just as there seems to be a natural priority of foodstuffs over one another, one reflected in the order in which food is served to guests (fruit first, followed by meat and ending with water),1 there is a sytem of hierarchical precedence by means of which all things are con-joined in a system of order. Things descend along this chain of being2 from God down through the heavenly spheres and other incorporeals to the human soul, where they meet an ascendant hierarchy which takes things from the four elements through inanimate minerals, plants, animals and humankind. And within each of these stations, things are again arranged in an hierarchy of excellence, worth and honour constituting, as it were, the imprint of macrocosmic hierarchy in microcosm. Thus foods are so arranged, as are the elements of language in which nouns precede verbs and particles,3 while the forms of the syllogism are arranged not only in a deductive order, but correlatively in an order of honour4 where simpler forms precede inferior and more mediate ones.
The Great Chain of Being
The chain of being assembles all beings in a comprehensive association which specifies every particular being with the attribution of a relative, at once and indifferently ethical and ontological, position with respect to other beings. This assembly is a scale bounded by its extremities, the topmost of which is endowed with absolute value and the lowest of which is somewhat like the obverse of the first and its mirror image. The topmost point of the scale, which is occupied by God, is the one in possession of normative positivity in its absolute fullness, positively as ethical norm and as ontological value. All that is not God is regarded according to the neo-Platonic scheme of things: as degrees of privation. Full existence, absolute goodness and eternity (as distinct from sempiternity), are attributable solely to God; apart from Him, existence and value are relative matters. This is the meaning of the saying which Abū Hayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. after 400/1009) attributes to Abū Sulaimān al-Sijistānī (d. after 391/1001), that ‘evil is nothingness … while good is being’,5 a saying that seems to duplicate many others of the same import. Evil, according to another, is ‘the privation of essence, or rather, the imperfection of essence’6 — for at issue here is not, as Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) pointed out, a simple opposition between good and evil, but one in which ‘good is the realisation of perfection … while evil is the lack of such perfection’.7 Similarly, things that exist either exist utterly and absolutely (‘al-wujūd al-ḥaqq’), or else exist relatively and merely by virtue of perfect existence.8 The hierarchy binding the eternal God with sempiternal and corruptible, perishable creation is a pyramid constituted by its apex, at once its metaphysical and political generator.
The apex of the chain of being dictates its very primacy as the condition of all that does not belong to its essence, so that other things are not only derivative in the normative sense, but are so in a demiurgical sense, regardless of whether this involved creation in time. Things are ranged along the chain of being in a manner that is purely linear, the distance from the apex being the determinant factor in allocating the value of the thing in question. Things are thus ranged on a sliding scale of ontological and ethical value along which are placed things of a decreasing value and reality and an increasing degeneration, ending with a moral indifference, absurdity and depravity of existence. Throughout, the arrangement of things in this cosmic assembly is along the lines of primacy, ontological and normative primacy implying potency, just as terrestrial political assembly starts with the head who is also the most perfect, in addition to being the most puissant, and slides down the line of imperfection and dependence until we reach creatures whose entire being and actions are dependent upon, and in the service of, superior beings.9 The political and cosmic orders are recapitulated in, among other locations, the faculties of the human soul and their arrangement whereby the baser ones, the appetitive and reproductive, are in the service of the higher faculties, the intellectual, with their multifarious functions which are themselves hierarchically arranged.10 That which is primary is antecedent and relatively perfect in relation to that which is baser, just as the heart is the primary organ in the body, ruling its functions and coming into existence first in the process of embryo formation, thus effectively causing the body to be.11
Thus things constitute two fundamental classes, that of created and that of uncreated beings, both being relative matters, for angels or celestial spheres can be said to be less created than corruptible things, being closer in essence, in being and in value to the creator. To this distinction corresponds the classification of things between eternal and non-eternal, between that which is sui generis and that which is not so, between the simple and composite.12 In all cases, hierarchy is a system of metonymic correspondences between various articulations of value, ontological, ethical, temporal. But such a system was imperfect. Thus Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198) found it difficult to decide precisely what order governed the arrangement of the heavenly spheres and why the saturnine sphere should, by common belief, come second, as the heavenly spheres can be normatively arranged according to various criteria involving honour, none of which has a conclusive claim to superiority.13 Similarly, a bitter critic of Ibn Sīnā (d. 438/1037) charged that the philosopher was proceeding counter to the exigencies of the nature of incorporeals when he maintained that the lowest of the spheres (the lunar) was solely responsible for the emanation of forms destined for the world. This assertion depended on imputing considerations of spatial distance amongst incorporeals, where there is in fact no space and where there should be nothing to stop direct emanations from the First Intellect reaching the world.14
The differential potency of members of the chain of being is perhaps the most essential constituent of the chain. Apart from the Active Intellect, the philosopher-king of Fārābīs (d. 339/950) virtuous community is beholden to no one, but is the supreme component of the community15 just as God is the supreme component of all being. That which is superior is not only more excellent, but is also more potent, fuller of plenitude, self-sufficiency and completeness. After the Philonic moment of Platonism, it seems that providence became, de rigeur, creation16 and the demiurgical providence required by monotheistic divinity17 recapitulated and absorbed philosophical notions of primacy in its religious purview. For in creation were encapsulated all the senses of anteriority and precedence that were known to Arabic thought: temporal, precedence in rank conceived as relative distance from the apex of the hierarchy, precedence involving honour as the precedence of Abū Bakr over ‘Umar, natural precedence as in the precedence of the number one over two and essential precedence as expressed in causal anteriority and differential plenitude.18 The idea of dramatic creation by a creator-preserver, essential to myths of creation as those philosophically or narratively expressed in Arabic thought, is never, and could not have been, eschewed, as can be seen for instance in Ibn Sīnā’s importation of temporal elements into the philosophy of perpetual creativity.19 The assertions of an Ibn Rushd, for instance, on the eternity of the world, are philosophical assertions concerning the sempeternity of the world, not implying it to be coeval with God, for time does not figure in the realm of the philosophical language of causality and is irrelevant to, and does not necessarily contradict, creation ex nihilo and in time.20 Both the philosophical and the more explicitly mythical tales of creation involve the five types of primacy that we have just seen; and all but time are relevant to the chain of being and its hierarchical order: rank, honour, nature, causality. In addition to time, these matters not only distinguish lower things from higher ones, but also contribute to the sense of absolute priority, of the higher being the absolute ground for the lower, both according to the nature of the mind, which sees essential priority as that which conjoins natural and causal priority.21 Thus the chain of being is an hierarchy of grounds, stretching from the sublimity of the ground of all grounds to the most abject creatures as exist wholly on account of others.
Self-sufficiency in an hierarchy of grounds is the criterion according to which the station of everything is determined, from that of plants to that of nouns in the hierarchy of parts of speech (noun, verb, particle) — this, according to the grammarian Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002), is headed by nouns because of their independence of the other two, for a noun can convey a meaning without recourse to verbs or to particles, which particles and verbs cannot accomplish.22 Anteriority, in an hierarchical world, is the correlative of self-sufficiency,23 and dependence in such a world is who...
