events or substances, God intervenes to connect the succession of subjectively
experienced qualities. This position is equivalent to that of al-Nazzam in the
MuÀtazilite debates. (We might notice that Berkeley and al-Nazzam both failed
to acquire followers for their positions; both were regarded as taking debates
to an absurd extreme—in effect, testing the limits of what can be said about
a deep trouble in this particular direction).
Still further down this road, Hume followed out the implications of Locke
and Berkeley to note that from a purely empirical stance, there is no evidence
of necessary causes or patterns of regularity in the phenomenal stream. Hume
culminated this series of debates much in the same way that al-Ghazali did for
this period of the Islamic sequence.
The problem of substance and plurality resurfaces in later revivals of
metaphysics in European philosophy. One prong was to raise the issue at a
higher level of abstraction, in the very general question of relations. Bradley’s
version of Idealism was based on showing the incoherence of any kind of
relation; using the same kind of argument as Shankara and Nagarjuna, Bradley
pointed to an infinite regress of relations connecting relations with their relata.
This problem stimulated yet a further step in the abstraction-reflexivity se-
quence when Russell distinguished external and internal relations. To hold that
all relations are internal (as did Bradley, Leibniz, and Spinoza) is to hold that a
thing’s properties are so closely connected that to change one would make it
a different thing (we recognize here an explicit point from Nyaya-Vaisheshika,
upholding asatkaryavada). To hold that relations are external is to say that the
essential properties of a thing are intrinsic to it, and would remain the same
no matter how its relations with the rest of the world might change. The latter
position allows for plurality but makes mysterious just what constitutes the
properties of the plural things of the world; the former position reduces the
world into a single substance, something like Indra’s net in Hua-yen Buddhism.
Russell’s distinction aimed to overthrow Bradleyan Idealism by showing that
it rested upon a confusion; but the clarification reopened the problem in new
form, into the depths of which Wittgenstein’s Tractatus soon plunged.
The other prong of this issue in modern philosophy followed the line that
the deep trouble is built into the structure of reality itself. That is to say, reality
is both plural and single, relations are both coherent and incoherent; it is this
contradiction within metaphysical substance that generates time and drives
change. This was the position worked out by Fichte and Hegel. It is the classic
deep trouble treated at a higher level of reflexivity; the sequence of philosophers
comes to recognize explicitly the existence of the deep trouble, and instead of
trying to solve it by taking one side or the other, makes an ontological category
out of it on which further constructions can be built. The period of these
dialectical Idealist systems was succeeded in turn by anti-Idealist philosophies.
844 •^ Meta-reflections