Arius and Athanasius, part 3 — Producing something with ‘pre-existing’ ingredients (JT)

In the last post, I explained that something is ‘created from nothing’ when it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. I also explained that by ‘ingredient’ I mean any sort of constituent which satisfies the following two conditions: first, it exists in the product; and second, it bears its own properties, i.e., it has features that other ingredients in the product do not have, and which the product itself does not have. In this post, I will explain what I mean by ‘pre-existing’.

I want to use this term in the following sense: an ingredient is a ‘pre-existing’ ingredient when it is not produced by the productive act that brings the product into being. So, for example, when a mason builds a brick wall, the mason causes the wall to come to exist, but not the bricks. The mason may have produced the bricks himself at some earlier time, in which case the mason is the producer of both the wall and the bricks, but the mason would have produced the bricks by a different productive act, so the bricks would count as ‘pre-existing’ ingredients in my sense of the word.

Alternatively, someone else might have produced the bricks, but again, in this case they would also be produced by a different productive act. The bricks could even have been special eternal bricks that always existed and were never produced at all. But they’d still be ‘pre-existing’ ingredients because they are not produced by the productive act that brings the wall into being, irrespective of time or producer.

Now, I should emphasize that I only use the term ‘pre-existing’ because I think it readily brings to mind a rough idea of the kind of thing I mean. But the term might suggest that pre-existing ingredients must exist at some earlier point in time. I don’t mean to imply that. I mean to use ‘pre-existing’ in a sense that’s neutral to any temporal reference. For our purposes here, a ‘pre-existing’ ingredient can be an ingredient that does indeed exist before the product, but it can also be an ingredient that exists co-eternally with the product.

Further, the term ‘pre-existing’ might suggest that a ‘pre-existing’ ingredient is a contingent ingredient in the sense that it might not have ended up in the product (if, say, history had taken a different course). But I don’t mean to imply that either. I mean to use ‘pre-existing’ with a sense that’s modally neutral. ‘Pre-existing’ ingredients can be contingent, or they can be necessary, in the product in question.

By the same token, I don’t mean to imply that a ‘pre-existing’ ingredient is capable of independent existence. For our purposes here, ‘pre-existing’ ingredients include both ingredients that are separable, and ingredients that are inseparable, from the product in question.

Of course, every time I want to talk about a ‘pre-existing’ ingredient, I don’t want to say ‘an ingredient that is not produced by the productive act that brings the product into being’. That’s far too cumbersome, so instead I’m just calling it a ‘pre-existing’ ingredient. But again, that’s for convenience, and I don’t mean to imply any restrictons on temporality, modality, or separability.

Now that I’ve explained what I mean by ‘pre-existing ingredients’, next time I will give a more precise definition of ‘creating something from nothing’.