ДЕЙСТВИЕ И СУБСТАНЦИЯ: БАНИ, ВИНО И ПАЛЬМЫ В КЛАССИЧЕСКОЙ АРАБСКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ

Abstract

The world around us is a collection of things in constant motion and influencing one another. In other words, the world changes every instant. Each moment it differs from itself a moment ago, never staying the same. The difficulty discovered by the Greeks is that what is constantly changing cannot be cognized for if the world is always in motion, always new, knowledge becomes obsolete and useless the very instant after we acquired it, as the world will never be the same as we knew it. So we need to stop that movement, to see the unchanging in change, to understand the change as the renewal of the permanent. The Greeks learned doing it relying on the notion of substance, i. e., the immutable essence of a thing that constitutes its self and survives any of its changes. Such a way of conceptualizing the world was inherited by the big European culture. The big Arab-Muslim culture learned to conceptualize change as a renewal of an action, considering the action itself unchangeable as long as it flows from the actor to the recipient. Those two logics of sense positing gave birth to the metaphysics of substance and metaphysics of action. They the two ways of sense positing, manifest themselves in any activity of consciousness. They are not hard to find in the functioning of language either – both theoretical and ordinary. The classical Arabic texts provide possibility of reading them in perspectives of both substance and process logics, where the two contrasting meanings are suggested by the same verbal design.