have difficulty in distinguishing between the existential and copulative senses
of “to be.” Nevertheless, philosophers have made explicit the distinctions
brought into focus by their debates. Ibn Sina was well aware of the absence
of the copula and the difficulties it caused, and modified the verb “to exist”
(wajada) to call attention to “existential propositions” (wujudiyya) in contrast
to a long list of propositional types (Afnan, 1958: 97; Graham, 1978: 25–26).
Medieval Latin philosophers used this Arabic philosophical capital to sharpen
their sense of the different meanings of “to be,” ringing on these a series of
metaphysical changes based on the distinction between existence and essence,
against the existing grain of the language.^2 Among the early Greeks, the idiom
of adjective and article (“the unlimited,” “the cold”) made it natural to fail to
distinguish between abstract and concrete; nevertheless, Aristotle overcame the
difficulty with his armory of distinctions created upon reaching the vantage
point of higher abstraction.
All philosophical communities start with concrete words in their common-
sense meanings. In archaic China, Tao had only the concrete sense of a road
or pathway; it started to take on the first of its many abstract meanings in the
Analects as an intellectual community formed around Confucius. Like all
languages, later Chinese pressed older concrete words into service as abstrac-
tions. It is the same with the Greeks: aer (fog, mist, darkness) was given the
meaning of “substance” by Anaximenes; logos was a common Greek word
with many meanings until a philosophical meaning was created for it by
Heraclitus (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 1:124–126, 420–434). Chinese philosophers,
when sustained by a dense enough argumentative network, extended and
reinterpreted from the resources of their own language (such as clarifying by
means of particles and explanations) to make the distinctions and reach the
levels of abstraction which constituted the forefront of their debates; by the
mid-200s b.c.e. the Mohists had broken through concrete words to explicit
abstract distinctions, and formulated the rules of logical argumentation.
In short, language is no deus ex machina to account for philosophy. Neither
is eternally fixed; both change, and the changes of the intellectual community
are what move a language into more abstract and refined terms.
The general version of this argument, that every cultural activity is irreduc-
ibly shaped by its distinctive meta-rules, may be criticized in the same way. It
is not historically true that cultural practices are fixed and changeless, although
ethnographic descriptions which sample slices taken out of time may give this
impression. Nor is it necessary in sociological theory to accept the premise that
social activity is game-like, that it is shaped by rules at all. A different way of
conceiving of social action will be presented in Chapter 1.
- Everything is fluid; it is impossible to fix any contours or sharpen any
explanatory concepts. The argument for the autonomy or particularistic flow
10 •^ Introduction