Q&A: The “Substance” of Concepts in ‘Two Wagons’
The “Substance” of Concepts in ‘Two Wagons’
Question
Hello Rabbi Abraham,
You probably remember me (= Rodef Hissig).
Recently I reread ‘Two Wagons’ and enjoyed it very much. The first time I read it was when I was a yeshiva student in second-year shiur, about 17 years ago. In retrospect, I discovered two things: (a) that back then I did not understand the core of the book at all; (b) despite what I just said, the book influenced my way of thinking far more than I had realized — many things I had regarded as my own “innovations” I found written there explicitly by the Rabbi.
To the matter itself—
A central topic in the book that I still did not fully understand this time either, and that I wanted to ask the Rabbi about:
When Locke and the like speak about a “substratum” that bears properties, they usually mean the body/entity to which those properties apply.
The Rabbi, by contrast, speaks about the “substance” of the properties themselves.
A. To what exactly is this comparable: does this mean, for example, that the mass “20 kilos” is something over and above the fact that the body possessing this mass contains such-and-such matter (in the ordinary sense of “matter”)?
B. The Rabbi says that this “substance of a concept” is something simple. For example, can the property “bachelor” not be analyzed as a combination of the property “unmarried (up to this moment)” + the property “male (human)”?
Thank you very much,
Answer
Hello D.,
I certainly remember. How are you? What are you involved in these days?
As for your question, suppose there is a red, square table with four legs and so on in front of me. I divide the abstraction into two different directions:
A. That which has these properties is the substance / entity (the object when abstracted from all its properties). The properties describe it (it bears them). This is the first abstraction. Without this abstraction, any arbitrary collection of properties could be defined as an object (you surely remember Borges’s wonderful example about the bird’s cry in the distance).
B. After that, I can take each property of the object, and since I am a Platonist, I think there is an Idea of redness or squareness and even tableness. This is another direction of abstraction. It is not an abstraction of the object but of its property.
Every concrete object is some substance that carries on its back specific appearances of a collection of Ideas that are its properties. Our world is based on a network of links among different Ideas (of the properties: redness, squareness) that intersect with one another, and thus an Idea is formed (tableness; presumably that is just the collection of the table’s essential properties), and it appears through concrete objects (the concrete table, and here accidental properties are added as well).
The example you gave regarding 20 kilos: there I am not sure whether there is an Idea of “having a weight of 20 kg.” That is a quantitative delimitation of the Idea of weight. Similarly, a particular wavelength in the red or blue range is not an Idea in itself, but rather a specific appearance of the color blue or red.
By the way, regarding colors, I am not at all sure that there are even Ideas for the color blue in general, because the division of the continuous spectrum into colors is the result of a division that exists in our brain into seven sectors (if it were divided differently, we would see more colors). It is not likely that the division in the brain reflects an independent division into seven colors that exists in reality itself.