Part 3: The Quran's Science of Motifs: Transcendental Categories

Having established how Arabic operates through idealistic language patterns, we can now examine the most revolutionary feature of the Quranic system: thirteen key chapters that function as transcendental categories, operating as a set-theoretic framework that organizes all Quranic concepts.

This serves as background against which the analysis of Quranic terms can be conducted, for Quranic Arabic is simply a more radical, more "conscious" and "technical" operation of the Arabic speech pattern we've established.

The Definite Article as Chapter Opener

There's a subtle difference between the definite article that prefixes a particular term and a definite article that prefixes a verse or chapter. The one we find in the beginnings of thirteen of the 114 chapters applies the same logic to those chapters that we established for individual words.

This definite article expands the import of these chapters to cover the Quran at large, inasmuch as a definite article applied to a word widens its import and gives it the greatest interpretive and metaphorical extensity that a word can logically bear.

The poetic concepts that form the transcendental topic of those thirteen chapters are now to be considered as principles that organize and dictate the logic or structure of the Quran at large.

Transcendental Topics in the Kantian Sense

By transcendental topic, we mean it in the Kantian sense of a doctrine of the location of concepts—a systematic way of determining where (in which cognitive faculty) a concept properly belongs to avoid philosophical confusion. It's a "map" for assigning concepts to their correct domain. (you'll find this in the section 'Note On The Amphiboly of Reflective Concepts)

"I beg to be allowed to call the place which we assign to a concept, either in sensibility or in the pure understanding, its transcendental place"

"If so, then the determination of this position which belongs to every concept, according to the difference of its use, and the directions for determining according to rules that place for all concepts, would be called transcendental topic"

Every concept, or every title to which many kinds of knowledge belong, may be called a logical place. Upon this is based the logical topic of Aristotle, of which orators and schoolmasters avail themselves in order to find under certain titles of thought what would best suit the matter they have in hand, and thus to be able, with a certain al_pearance of thoroughness, to argue and wrangle to any extent

This is precisely the same function which the definite article serves in relation to those thirteen chapters. We have concepts that help organize and structure our approach to the Quran at large. Think of it as a schema of classifying Quranic concepts, of saying that whatever ideas we encounter in the Quran fall definitively under one of those thirteen categories.

Subsequently, the general "structure" or "logic" of one of those categories can to be used to give context to it, to understand it as a part of a specific architectonic plan within the Quran.

Set Theoretic 'motive'

If set theory is the mathematical study of collections of objects (sets) and their relationships, and if their function is to provide a unified framework to define almost all mathematical concepts, and by consequence, if without it, modern math and its applications would lack coherence, then those thirteen chapters are the sets of the Quran, into which any Quranic object, so to speak, can be classified.

We reference set theory because this reasoning, i.e., the organizational schema, is essentially "set-theoretic." The implication of this is vast, because if every Quranic object, i.e., concept, is to fall under one of these thirteen sets, then it implies that its author would have had to factor in not only every word or concept, but every syllable and combination of syllables, all the way up to the fully formulated verse, the chapter and the corpus at large.

This architectonic system would have assigned every unit its precise place in the general corpus such that the chances of finding randomness is equivalent to finding randomness in the general scheme of nature.

The Cow Device: Transcontextual Understanding

The "cow," the title of chapter 2, walks us through the story of the "rise" of a society, the then downtrodden children of Israel, from Egypt, and the vicissitudes which this emergence encounters, and how Moses led this movement. The cow is a symbolic device that refers to this process of self-cultivation.

This "process" pervades not just every chapter in the Quran, but every story of every chapter in the Quran, insofar as those stories presuppose this device, and embody, essentially, the task which God has ordained for man. There's no story in the Quran whose figures aren't engaged in self-cultivation.

Transcontextual Movement

This device also spans the very method of storytelling, in conveying this process from the eyes of different people and from every perspective. This necessitates a "transcontextual" framing of stories, and what the definite article is chiefly trying to do is impose as a rule a transcontextual understanding of them.

The definite article there is yourself, the reader, as the logistēs of the poetic object which the chapter is synthesizing. You are to move, so this method dictates, between those contexts wherein the cow device appears, to go from chapter 2, Moses's request that his people find the yellow cow, to Joseph's interpretation of the king's dream in chapter 12, or to go from Moses's tribulations and eventual exodus from Egypt, to Abraham's renouncing of his people and departure, and see these unfoldings as happening in 'parallel' (perhaps as symbolically 'covariant')

It's in this regression from one case in the Quran to another by the mediation of the poetic device that the definite article encodes. But this must happen as your mainly reading chapter 2. Your transition into chapter 12 or any other chapter wherein this device is used should only be done with the intention of giving more context, more meaning to the cow device in chapter 2, that is, to broaden its symbolic import of the "cow," and therefore your understanding of it.

How The 'Category' Works

The category has a purely interpretative function, it helps us 'detect' some motif in places wherein the motif is not explicit.

For example, we might, as we said, move from the story of Moses and the yellow cow to Joseph’s interpretation of dreams (seven fat and slim cows, respectively consuming and being consumed). Our acquaintance with Joseph’s analysis adds import or depth to Moses’ case, it's a different 'contextual' instance of it, and so it naturally shows another aspect of it. Various examples give me a general sense of the associations and nuances that accompany the symbol.

In turn, I might look for another situation that carries the same symbolic 'sense' as the “cow.” The word 'cow' need not be mentioned; yet I can infer its presence from the surrounding context by observing the conditions to which the case generally conforms, and from this 'conformance' I can make out the category, or, if I am already well acquainted with - and highly knowledgeable of - those categories, I would immediately recognize it simply as I'm reading through the verse or the story --> 'Aha!, it's 'the cow'!. Here are some scenarios where this 'Aha' moment may take place:

Abraham meditating

The 'yellow cow'

As I'm reading Chapter 6, I hit upon Abraham's part and begin notice the symbolic function of the “cow” in the meditations that led him to certainty about God (Qur’an 6:76). Although no cow is mentioned in that verse. The meditations is a process that parallels the Isrealite's search of the yellow cow; especially the way each side never settled for those conjectures that arose in the beginning, deferring to a more definite, more inclusive representation of the object of search - this intellectual 'desideratum' is noteworthy, as it seems to be precisely the 'point', to present an cognitive challenge that could only be satisfied by way of a thorough exercise of one's mental powers, showing that the objective was never the cow (in the case of the Israelites) but to plant in them this habit of 'thinking' - of 'intellectual cultivation'.

Similarly, I detect the same function in Noah’s building of the Ark and his preparation of humanity for the postdiluvian world. It has that same 'progressive', 'teleologizing' drive. I see it in Solomon’s exchange with the Queen of Sheba. I see here the same scheme having assumed a 'political' guise, in Solomon' effort at bringing the Queen and her kingdom to his side, to the true path, and how this process unfolds, the work it demanded, the challenges it invoked.

The cow resurfaces once more In the Prophet Muhammad’s organization of the Muslim community for battle, for prayer, for social exchange, for charity, for every other social matter. Ien Jalut’s leading of the Israelites into war, in Luqman’s counsel to his son, and so on. It’s everywhere. Granted, in each of these scenarios the cow changes slightly, but adaptively. In all of them gleams the element of 'persistence', effort, toil, industry, culture, but insofar as their aim is singular -> the hereafter.

I can here say that I was led to these connections through the operation of one of the 13 categories—namely, the “cow.”

From this, I come to recognize that the cow essentially pertains to preparation, cultivation, and development—but always with a teleological aim, oriented toward the Hereafter and paving the way for the true path, the highest aim. I realize that there isn't a story or a dramatic unfolding in the Quran that does not contain this principle!, and what's true of this particular principle is true of the others!.

See how we draw from across the Qur'an? and glean this symbolic device, most interestingly, in places where it is absent by name. That is the core function of the category: it allows me to assign meaning. By gleaning its operation in various scenarios, I am also applying or assigning the category to them. In fact, it is precisely because of the category that I’m able to search for and uncover such patterns.

All other categories function in the same way—only instead of the cow, another symbol or theme takes its place. But the pattern of 'gleaning' remains the same.

Direct Address to the Reader

Thus when we read verses containing the rhetorical question "أَلَمْ تَرَ" ("did you not see"), it's not addressing the prophet per se, the person to whom the Quran was first revealed, but yourself, the logistēs, the "proper" critical reader of the Quran who comes to understand those structural aspects of the book.

The critical reader who comes to understand at a deep enough level, and therefore is able to reconstruct through imagination, those events which the rhetorical question suggests.

The Thirteen Categories as Complete Framework

Those thirteen chapters are the sets of the Quran, into which any Quranic object (story, encounter, motif, concept etc..) can be reduced. The poetic concepts that form the transcendental topic of those thirteen chapters are principles that organize and dictate the logic or structure of the Quran at large.

Think of it as a schema of classifying Quranic concepts, of saying that whatever ideas we encounter in the Quran fall definitively under one of those thirteen categories, and subsequently, the general "structure" or "logic" of one of those categories can be used to give context to them (e.g perceiving that the man of knowledge with whom Moses travels (18:65) was essentially behaving in line with that principle which the cow is emblematic of.. i'm here 'contextualizing' this story 'catagorically', the same can be said in regards to dhul-qarnayn from the same chapter (18:83)- 'The Cave')

The Vastness of This Operation

The vastness and complexity of this operation is evident; inasmuch as in any given case can be gleaned some 'catagory', so can we some other category, and, also, we can find in any given category any of the other categories, that is, they permeate each other. Their generality has a paradoxically 'specifying' power, this is what we meant by 'adaptive-ness'. Whatever the case may be, however complex, the category covers it.

If we generalize the relation we find here to cover every construction in the Quran, it would naturally lead us to the realization that the author of this corpus must be the same as the author of the universe because it would otherwise be humanly impossible to account for every detail of this operation.

Implications: Systematic Completeness

What emerges is a recognition that the Quran built on the same framework we find in higher mathematics. Whether we're speaking of the set theoretic use of the thirteen catagories, or the employment of the definite article as a complex number.