Likewise the verbal noun ta'yis seems to be based on simple being...

Likewise the verbal noun ta'yis seems to be based on simple being, much in the spirit of the definitions of creation cited above at the end of section 2. But the plural aysat seems more likely to mean "beings" in the sense of fully constituted entities.39 These will be beings of a particular sort, complete with the predicated features that are excluded from simple being.

The same is true for a more extended meditation on being and essence at the beginning of the third section of FP, where al-Kindi gives a lengthy argument designed to show that a thing cannot be the cause of its own essence. In typical Kindian style, he proceeds with an exhaustive consideration of four possibilities. First, that neither the thing nor its essence ( dhat ) are "a being" ( ays ), that is, that they do not exist.

Second, that the thing is non-existent and its essence is existent; third, that the thing exists but its essence is non-existent; and fourth and finally, that both the thing and its essence exist. He shows that, on any of these assumptions, the thing could not cause its own essence. The key to the argument is the repeated insistence that the thing and its essence are not distinct.

For example, on the second assumption, the thing's essence would be distinct from it, because distinct things are those for which it is possible that something happen to one without happening to the other. Therefore, if it happens to it that it be a non-being, and it happens to its essence that it be a being, then its essence will not be it. But the essence of every thing is itself [ wa-kull shay' fa-dhatuhu hiya huwa ].

(FP 123.18-124.3 [RJ 41.16-18]) At first glance this argument seems to be using exclusively the simple conception of being, since it considers merely whether a thing or its essence exists. But**[End Page 307]** the overall thrust of the argument is that the being of a thing is the same as the being of its essence. This seems explicitly to reject the simple conception of being.

For the whole point of the simple conception is that we can think about the being of a thing in abstraction from thinking about the thing's attributes, some of which will constitute its essence. Instead, al-Kindi insists here that we cannot consider a thing to exist, to be "a being," without simultaneously considering it to be identical with its essence.