Atomic Structures In The Quran - Part 2

Section 3: The Grasping Function and Atomic Concepts

Function words in general serve that same function, and we choose to include them in our description of atomic concepts because those concepts operate in that same subtle way, and if we can bring our 'understanding' to grow accustomed to isolating them, we will be able to understand much of the import of Quranic words.

🧠 Psychological Insight:

Atomic concepts, if we can describe them in the simplest terms, strike us as 'reflexive', vital, élan (in Bergson's sense), or an 'expressive movement' in Darwin's sense.

Psychologist Wundt writes that the arms and hands, as the organs through which we grasp and master objects, are only superior in humans compared to the higher animals in degree, not in kind; adding that in humans what results is a gradual transformation which at first appears 'regressive' but which leads to the first primitive form of pantomimic movement, which he describes as a grasping movement attenuated to an indicative gesture.

Conceptual Extension:

A great approximation of this is found in the example which Lotze gives of how what we call 'our bodies' may include things not immediately in contact with us—my home, car, company, possessions, even something as abstract as a persuasion—which become 'extensions' of my own physical body, such that damage to them is, in Samuel Alexander's words, like 'a blow in the face'.

Now this 'grasping' function which Wundt says varies in degrees, and which results, as we see in Lotze's case, in 'possessiveness' of non-physical things, is a great example of the import of atomic concepts; this is the same 'functionality' which the prepositional syllable 'oun' encodes to sound, and spatial objects.

We now see how this grasping function is operative not only in the physical clutching activity, but also in something like the acquisition of assets, likewise one's personality equally with corporate personhood. The scope of the activity does not at all affect the 'import' and 'utility' of the function, and this is to be understood as one of the peculiarities, if not the main peculiarity, of atomic concepts.

🔬 Scientific Application:

This is a central idea in scientific nomenclature, the 'metaphysical' part, if you will. Think about the word 'mass' and how it made its way into modern scientific terminology.

Section 4: Mass as an Atomic Concept

This introduction was officially made by Newton, where the word appears in its Latin form 'massa'. This word seems to have come from the Greek word 'maza', meaning barley cake, lump of dough. Newton defines this term in his physics as a "quantity of matter arising from its density and bulk conjointly".

Is this really just a 'play of words', a 'neologism', or is there a deeper motive or 'logic' that's operative in what seems at first a merely emblematic and convenient choice of words? To answer this most effectively, we'd have to examine the various cases wherein this 'term' indirectly appears as a constituent, as a syllable, or a connective.

🏛️ Greek Etymology:

We find in Greek the following terms (it's what we know as gluten):

Mazeuō | mazeusis | mazōtēr | summazeuō | ekmazeuō

This is important, because in all of these cases something is preserved and reappears albeit in a different sense each time.

In Latin, the term appears across many contexts, namely, a political context; recall the Roman governor Baebius Massa who appears in the writings of Pliny the Younger and Tacitus; the cognomen 'massa' is quite significant here, for it's supposed to describe him.

Baebius Massa is a governor who, instead of governing justly, became infamous for plundering the provinces he administered, enriching himself at the expense of the locals. Pliny and Tacitus paint him as a symbol of official greed.

⚖️ Legal Context:

The expression "mass" was used in legal and political contexts in the same sense, to refer to legal precedents, or to legal cases that form precedents, and to the notion a binding authority, also to mean an accumulation of something. Cicero employs the term in a similar area, something like 'institutional weight' or 'bearing'.

Associated with this expression appear concepts like 'consolidation', 'aggrandizement', and 'assimilation' either of wealth, power, or anything else.

Ovid uses the expression in a cosmological setting in connection with the primordial chaos:

"cum, quae pressa diu massa latuere sub illa, sidera coeperunt toto effervescere caelo"

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1, lines 70-71

(when the stars, which had long lain hidden beneath that compressed mass, began to effervesce throughout the entire heaven)

He uses it somewhere else in its original culinary sense:

"lactis massa coacti"

Metamorphoses, Book 8, line 666

(mass of curdled milk/cheese) - in the humble meal served by Baucis and Philemon

In another setting he uses it in an alchemical context:

"contactu glaeba potenti massa fit"

Metamorphoses, Book 11, line 111:

(by powerful touch the clod becomes a mass) - describing Midas's golden touch transforming matter

In a material or physical sense:

Metamorphoses, Book 11, lines 492-493

"tanta mali moles tantoque potentior arte est"

(so great is the mass of evil, and stronger than any skill)

From these various examples we get the sense that 'mass' largely connotes an activity describable as 'synthesis', or agglomeration, of a heap or collection of things held together into a synthetic unity.

Precise Analogy:

Think of gluten's function as a binder; it binds water and creates structural networks in dough. Gluten proteins (gliadin and glutenin) form extensive hydrogen bonds with water, creating a hydrated protein matrix; this is what gives bread its chewy texture, and holds the dough together in the way we're familiar with. The bond is usually stable under variation, meaning the composition is subject to as many 'configurational' and compositional varieties without that essential 'bond' being broken; the expression 'massa' zeros in on that kinetic 'dynamic'.

Political Application:

Similarly. The cognomen 'massa', would have been appropriate for the Roman intellectual, for this function was quite accented as a governing methodology; in modern terms, in contemporary political discourse, the expressions 'agglomerate' or 'corporate' are often spun as shorthand for a predatory upper stratum of society, particularly by working class peoples.

This explains why Newton would borrow the 'expression' 'mass' into his physics; it is a felicitous way of describing that dynamic we mentioned.

Section 5: Context vs Function - Atomic Application

The distinction between content and lexical terms is highly important. We need to be aware of this difference in order to be able to perform the abstraction which a deeper understanding of any concept requires. The transformation of the content word into a function word is necessary for the purpose not only of 'generalization', i.e., inductive inference, but also of 'specification' or 'deductive inference'.

💡 Key Insight:

Recall what we said above: fluency or eloquence in language is less the effect of 'content words' than the free and dexterous handling of function words. Semantic felicity—how do we express an idea in such a way that if it were expressed any differently, it would result in a completely different idea?

The idea here is to extend the range of word-functionality to include the principle of sufficient reason. Think of the concept of least action, but for language.

🧠 Phenomenological Process:

This suggests that a given concept or idea which typically a content-word captures is a sort of 'law' or 'principle' with which we're first acquainted before we even think of naming. I know exactly what I want to say, but I don't have the words to express it; see here that the effort of 'capturing' this word is as agglomerating as the expression 'massa' connotes. Such that, even if we failed to produce an expression that mirrors it, the collection of words which we subordinate to it along the way become 'symbolic', rather, 'symptomatic' of it—we're willing to subordinate the whole of language to the effort of grasping it.

This idea which we vividly understand but find it difficult to express is still in that domain of 'intuition'; we seek to tame and capture it using a word, and subsequently the wording act transforms it into a content word. It's here where the intuitive 'vivid' meaning is lost and buried beneath what would become a mechanical and habitual nomenclature.

🎨 Aesthetic Recovery:

This is what we often try to restore when reading 'contemplatively', when reading poetry or certain novels, or even in painting or music—the 'aesthesis' that colors any artistic production is really the pulsation of that underlying concept which we call 'atomic'; it's also the proper object of Socrates' dialectical method of 'midwifery', the notion 'to be drawn'.

🗺️ Spatial Functionality:

Think about how we use prepositions, the purposiveness, that is, we employ them in sentences—we don't necessarily think of the expression 'above' as a shorthand for some more precise term. We are perfectly aware of its mere functionality, of the spatial intuition which it gives

There's a difference in sense, between the expression 'ground', and ground with the syllable 'oun' distinguished in it (this is what we meant by function words as coefficients). The 'depth' or magnitude gleaned structurally converts a mere 'surface' to a dimension, something 'extant' or 'measurable', in a more immediate sense than would our understanding find in 'ground'.

📐 Mathematical Analogy:

It becomes something like:

surface × depth = dimensional

by contrast to sound, where we get:

noise × depth = acoustic

The multiplication here represents the functional synthesis that transforms simple content into dimensional awareness.

References:

• Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie (1900-1920), on gestural development and pantomimic movement

• Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmus (1856-1864), on bodily extension and possession

• Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (1920), on embodied experience

• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), on élan vital

• Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art (1935-1936), on aesthetics and truth

• Plato, Theaetetus, on Socratic midwifery and dialectical method