Logical Forms in the Quran (Pr1)

Of the many aspects for which the Quran is known, none has been neglected as much as its logical structure. A core tenet in logical thinking is the principle that meaning gains from relations, any component, call it a logical entity, can be determined only if and when we determine its precise position and role which it fulfils in a definite system. It’s for this reason that logicians, and philosophers of language of the likes of Aristotle or Frege, who are founders of logical systems, assert the priority of the sentence over the word, like Frege, or that the whole precedes the parts, as in Aristotle. This whole is not necessarily the sentence in which a word is localized, this is a mere case, the true whole that truly precedes, is the specific ‘system’, here language, by which is made possible the act of introducing, locating or localizing words.

In the function of predication, defined as the act of attributing a property to an object, for instance, in the proposition ‘Socrates is Mortal, where mortal is a predicate; we predicate regardless of whatever structure the proposition assumes, any linguistic unit formulated in the activity of speech is predicative; we’re disposed in virtue of the laws, or in Wharf’s phrase, ‘obligatory phenomena’ (B.L Wharf Linguistics As Exact Science 1940), which govern this or that language or any other language-equivalent system, to express different propositional schema depending on the demands, or sign situations’, which experience exercise upon us. 

We find that different languages have different ‘word-forming’ or ‘concept-forming’ patterns. Where in English or Germanic languages a single general word suffices to describe complex and contextually diverse activities, like ‘washing’, or ‘Eating’, we find, in certain native American languages, that the single term ‘washing’ “is designated by thirteen different verbs, according to whether it applies to the washing of hands, face, of bowls, garments, meat etc… As for the verb ‘to eat’, we read that no native american language has an equivalent term, instead, we find a plurality of specifications, different verbs are modified by the nature of the thing consumed, thus ‘eating’ is what we’re eating, i.e animals, vegetables. Also occurs devices that indicate whether the meal is being had by an individual, or if its had in common. 

(E.Cassirer ‘Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms, vol1, p289)

This is merely a case of the wider question surrounding the notion of ‘system’. No activity or phenomenon is simple as our senses often lead us to believe, but rather always the exponent of the relations of a certain complex system. Or, as Cassirer put it

“Only in given, existing substances are the various determinations of being thinkable” (p8),

Substance here being synonymous to system. This is why in Judiachristian tradition, special emphasis is layed upon the ‘word’. This is because, the act of speech, that is, the positing of a word is an operation involving the whole of the language system being used, and its the word’s belongingness to this overarching system that makes it a meaningful word, i.e wider connections give a certain connection meaning. But this system is something we bring with us to a possible sign situation, in fact, we bring the appropriate systems to the sign situations that are appropriate to them; a physicist brings with him certain mathematical or geometrical models, a lawyer brings with him the legal system appropriate to that particular case, a speaker of a language, brings with him the alphabet. The roles which each of these things fulfill in their respective areas, are, by this fact, the same, that is, we can identify in any field of enquiry, the same tendency of ‘predication’. And predication, in the widest possible sense, is this act of positing or introducing a system of functions/relations.

The point of showing these examples, is to prepare the way for the question, if our orientation towards the subject matter is determined by the subject matter itself, what sort of system is the Quran? surely it must itself be one?. There’s mainly one distinct property which charactarize the structure of words in the book, and it’s the Hegelian dictum that things or ideas are constituted by their relations, more specifically relations whose foci are concepts. A Quranic word is often a member of a class of words, this we call a concinnity, and its definition is obtained by finding out the position which it occupies in such a system. A Great example is the word like الضحى Aduha, which we find to belong to a class of words related to one another as various approximations of the concept of Sun 

الضحى, الفجر, اليل, القمر, الشمس, يغشي,  

It’s clear to any one whose observed the phenomenon of sunrise, that it consists in phases, distinct phases, each of which charactarizes a definite transitive stage in a continuum, whereby, the sun is the index, and the surrounding terms are all indicative of a certain state of this object. We begin with absolute negation or opposition, Qamar, which is the antonym of the Sun, and then as though by mimicking the real cosmic relation between them, we begin by observing the different phenomena that capture the transition from the moon all the way to the sun. 

All word relations in the Quran can be understood the same way, that each concept belongs to a constellation of words. Words which can only be understood in relation their said constellations. This is a very simple approach, as intuitive as the slave kid from Plato’s meno found geometry. What we do is find out what groups of words a given words belong with, and with which in concert, it forms an overall inclusive concept--concinnity. Call this method eidetic reduction or transcendental reduction; which is an actual method developed by Edmund Husserl. What we do is first, consider that any word is simply a combination of words, that, the sun in this particular example is not yet the object that we see rise and set everyday, instead we take the reverse approach, admitting that the sun is an experience, and that an experience is a name we ascribe to a temporal sequence, and that the sun here is the name we ascribe to this sequence. 

Here we treat the sun as the result of the combined act of certain conditions; we ask, what are its prerequisites?, immediately finding that it's concepts or phenomena which precede the sun in the natural sequence of sunrise; night, dawn, daybreak, and finally sunrise. The true symbolic meaning of the sun is found here, in this gradual process of unfolding. Thus in understanding concepts, whether Quranically or otherwise, we are to adopt an approach where instead of taking the words for face value, as how they appear to us, we ask what are the necessary conditions which if invoked, the term in question automatically follows, or is immediately implied, sort of how the food item on your plate is more than a food item on your plate, but something which you purchased from the market, that required transporting from the factory, that would have been made and packaged in a factory, that would have been grown or produced in a farm somewhere. Or, that purchasing the food require currency, that transporting the food from requires a mode of transport, and the mode of transport requires fuel,etc.. 

These are preconditions for the sequence ‘food on my plate’ which we use as the label for the whole experience but which we’re prone to ignore. Now with this example, if having designated each precondition, we assembled and collated them into a class in which the members all sharing the common characteristic of ‘food item on plate’, we will have created a system in which each component is easily explained by relation to the other, and we will find that numerous, equally valid propositions can be constructed from any combination and any ambiguities can be illuminated and defined by contemplating what position a term occupies in this sequence. We will say that:

‘factory’ is the place where food is packaged and delivered to the market, or that the farm is the place wherein Food is grown to be sent to the factory to then be transported to the market.

It clearly appears to us that the components are arranged in terms of ‘prior’ and ‘subsequent’, and that each component has a specific ‘teleological’ function within what appears to be a compact system, a system in which we’re free to choose our premises, i.e we can choose to have the ‘farm’ rather than the food on the plate as the mark of the system, in which case, we rearrange our terms to express what was marginal but now‘ central’ role of the ‘farm’. 

The arrangement into prior and posterior or ‘ground’ and consequent’, simply means that our premise of choice, becomes the simplest in the sequence, and the simple is always the given context in some relation; thus if the color red is chosen as the premise of some proposition, it means that red is able to modify our experience in such away as to be able to see ‘red’ things, and to make red’ things, to speak of the properties of Red, to recognize red things, overall, to expand certain concepts into contexts. In the above example, any proposition in the scheme ‘food on my plate’ when used as a premise becomes a context, all the others are immediately subordinated to it, so that if farm is the premise rather than the market, it means that we understand the closely related concepts of food and market in terms of the ‘organicness’ or non-organicness of the food, the agricultural and food-growing methodologies that were involved in growing the food. If on the other hand we use the market as our premise, we begin to discuss the marketing aspect of food, distribution, purchasing, delivery, transport and the like. Lastly, if we use ‘Food on my plate’, then we discuss more of the cooking aspect. 

Each proposition shuffles the terms around and recombines them according to their degrees of relevance to the given premise. Thus we consider what conditions are ‘closer’ or have a more ‘direct’ bearing on the premise, and placing them in a sequence showing the terms from the most to the least relevant. This is decided by the order of relations, closer connections are given priority over remoter connections. The food on my plate, has, in this case, the least bearing on the ‘farm’, whereas the factory obviously has the most, or in the example of the sun, daybreak has the most bearing on the sun, than say night or dawn. Whatever the chosen point of reference, there immediately follows an arrangement appropriate to it, an arrangement which emphasizes the component, but at the same arrange into a perfectly logical sequence the core conditions which make up the word.