an illusion, since they were aiming not at a Buddhist nirvana, but at anthro-
pomorphic moral salvation.
The next round pushed further into the ontological status of existence and
change. Bishr took the realist side. Everything exists only as a series of atomic
instants in time, which God overseeing the world repeatedly creates and
destroys. But every existent is real during the time when it is there. Further-
more, Bishr—probably goaded by debates, similar to those in which the
Buddhists pressed their Vaisheshika opponents onto increasingly extreme real-
ist territory—held that destruction too is a real action, and even the “nothing”
out of which God creates time-atoms is a real “something” too. Against this
extreme realism, true to the pattern of intellectual polarization, al-Nazzam
developed a Heraclitus-like extreme processualism. Substance does not exist,
since it can be infinitely subdivided. Attributes too dissolve, since all other
attributes reduce to motion, and motion is inherently transitory. Al-Nazzam’s
opponents replied by raising Eleatic-like difficulties: Since any distance is made
up of an infinity of points, how is it possible for infinitely divisible time-atoms
to traverse them?
Dirar and MuÀammar, Abu-l-Hudhayl, Bishr and al-Nazzam are not famous
names; the debates within Islamic rational theology have never had a major
place within the historical consciousness of philosophers, even in the Islamic
world, where either Greek-oriented falasifa (al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al.) or the
more conservative orthodoxy of a later period reaped the long-term attention.
Nevertheless, the early MuÀtazilites show the metaphysical driving power of
monotheism and its capabilities for generating from its own resources (this
was a period before Greek philosophy had penetrated the Islamic world, and
there is no serious reason to slough off these debates as imports of Buddhist
or Christian ideas) some key positions in the medium ranges of the abstrac-
tion-reflexivity sequence, colored by a distinctively monotheist problematic.
The occasionalism first formulated by the MuÀtazilites, and continued by
the theologically more conservative AshÀarites, is a religiously specific version
of the deep trouble in the concept of substance and plurality. For the Muslims,
it was a question of invoking God to ensure the continuity from one instant
to the next among a plurality of time-atoms. Radical plurality calls for an
equally radical higher presence to explain the experience of continuity. The
problem arises more generally in world philosophy, in the issue of relations
among plural substances, or in the related issue of relationships among any
kinds of ontological differences. In the Western tradition, this is the classic
problem of Parmenides: the very concept of being contradicts any sort of
change or plurality. Being, the truly existing substance, is always itself; how
can it become any other thing without contradicting its nature? Simultaneous
with Parmenides, Heraclitus formulated the other side of the issue: change
840 •^ Meta-reflections