Gluon Theory; A model of the Oneness of Being

Abstract

There are true contradictions in Ibn ‘Arabi’s theory of the Oneness of Being. The most important one occurs in his explanation of the relation between Being and beings. According to Ibn ‘Arabi, Being is identical with beings as well as it is non-identical with beings. Different philosophers, through hundreds of years, tried to dissolve this contradiction by giving consistent readings of Ibn ‘Arabi’s theory of the Oneness of Being. We will not follow this path. Instead, we accept those true contradictions and, thus, take the theory of the Oneness of Being to be a dialetheist theory. Our claim is that one can have a paraconsistent semantics of the theory of the oneness of being. To do so, we appeal to Graham Priest’s Gluon Theory. Gluon Theory concerns the problem of unity, i.e. what makes the plurality of an object’s parts into a whole. Gluon theory is a dialetheist theory and, thus, its semantics is a paraconsistent one. After giving a dialethiest reading of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Theory of the Oneness of Being, and explaining Gluon Theory, we will propose a translation of the former theory into the latter one. We will try to show that how Gluon Theory can explain the Theory of the Oneness of Being. In this essay, our focus is on the relation between Being and beings and, thus, other aspects of the Theory of the Oneness of Being will not be our main concern.

Keywords

• gluon
• being
• the oneness of being