In continuing from the previous essay on the metaphilosophy of history, we observe that matters of the past, if interpreted to be “what-might-have-beens” presents us an understanding that what was in the past no longer is, but continues to be a primary possibility. Time allows for the possibility of realisation-experience. By virtue of the interaction between Christianity and antiquity, what philosophy is, is an internalised experience, one inseparable from Divinity. The notion of and the question of existence and it’s relation to being thus provides a possibility in future histories of realisation.
Metaphysics is all of philosophy, it’s skópos is the All. Everything within philosophy is subsumed under metaphysics. I am reminded of Proclus in his commentary on the Timaeus where he establishes Plato’s work to encompass the study of the “All” which contains the entirety of physis, nature. Méta, by virtue of definition has defined an aim to metaphysics towards the beyond. But metaphysics does not have to relate to transcendent meaning outside of things per se. Even things in the physical world are invisible, and meaning of things are not evident. Evidentia, a word invented in the Latin language by Cicero in his study of the Stoics reaches close to the fundamental definition of metaphysics. It is generally read in relation to something’s obviousness. But in tracing it’s etymological roots to video, to see, we attach an idea of vision. A clarity of vision. Evidentia is a quality of things that roots perceptions back to things, not outside of them.
Marius Victorinus was the first to use the term existentia, translated from Plotinus and Poryphry’s term huparxis. For him, existentia was opposed to substantia, properly existence contra substance. Substance had substrate and it’s uniqueness in relation. Existence was pre-existing subsistence. Poryphry recast Being in it’s universality, as pure act that generates Form, equating the One with Being. This is his Victorinus’ first state of being, the ontologically anterior state, existent qua substantia and the subsequent ontologically posterior state where being is henceforth aliquid esse. But God as ante-being in Victorinus is transcendent of matter. This of course is classic Platonic tradition if one recalls the opening of Timaeus of Locri, before his begins his hymn to the Demiurge, the content of the namesake Platonic dialogue. “What is that which is Existent always and has no Becoming? And what is that which is Becoming always and never is existent?” The Latin fathers diverge from the East precisely because they see form as manifested in being and the will of the Father and the Son as being manifest in nature together, as opposed to straightforward monarchia. With regards to substratum though, even the Cappadocian Fathers follow a Stoic schema which Latinists will know from Cicero that qualities(poiotes) identifies a substrate by commonality or individuality.
Christianity precisely imbibes the mythic consciousness because it fulfils the aim of metaphysics in the giving of clarity with regards to what is intelligible, Reality. The Doubting Thomas story, the emptying and becoming-flesh and finally, the choice between two men before Pilate, one named Bar-abbas(son of the Father) and the other the real Bar-abbas gives an insight into the idea that through Christ there is new life, new clarity. The Docetic Christ idea espoused by certain Sethian gnostics portrays the world as flawed from the start rather than the more subtle fallen state. In this sense, Christianity has no equivalent to advidya. Naturally if the world is avidya and detachment from samsara involves seeing the anicca, the world is purely impermanent. The uniquely traditional Christian view is that the world is real, albeit it is unfulfilled or derivatively real. Augustine, perplexed by the idea of operations in the world, asserted that manifestations do not provide any great comprehension of God. He merely differs with the great Eastern father St.Basil on the matter of operations coming to be known by relations rather than qualities. If Hilary and Victorinus were the vessels from whom Augustine received all his influences, we must also not forget that Hilary thought natura itself to be infinite. Forma dei, interestingly, in both Hilary and Augustine would not be known prior to ascetism and purification of soul(purgation), hence the representation of the journey to God in Bonaventure’s work being an ascetic path which readies the soul prior to death to reach God. I assert here that Augustine and the Fathers, both East and West rightly addressed Divinity in the world, powers manifesting in the World, but rightly kept God in the dark(to use a very Pseudo-Dionysian metaphor).
I follow from Victorinus that being is finite, but that is precisely what gives Man one’s “ownness”. We return to substantia to assert that personality is characteristically unique with own’s ownness, thus man is imago dei in being open to reality. Subsistence, in being true to the Greeks was never meant to be separate from substance. God as the pure Real, rather than pure Being(as St.Thomas Aquinas thought). Indeed the turn from agape to ens in the Doctor’s work separated the Church from it’s patristic roots, with implications in later philosophy. I explicate…
Sensibility and affectation have been viewed, in the philosophical realm as being given to us. Intellect mediates the received sensation and conceptually engenders sensation as experience. And indeed the rod and cone cells and their conversion of energy prior to stimulatory transduction lend support to the basic model of sensation. Kant begins his philosophy from this point, the feeling of impression and it’s effect on the subject. Indeed stimulus is a common ability for change in most living beings. But the human alone knows that the stimuli is stimuli-as-stimuli. We can abstract concepts such as heat in a moment of “hesitation” as Bergson put it and further instrumentalize heat, instrumentality which is the ground of technic, while the terrestrial snake only holes or basks by it’s sensory affectation and judgement of “it’s getting warmer”. Humans also know heat precedingly, prior to apprehension by virtue of it’s conceptualisation. And thus, our entire existence is grounded by reality, being is subject to change that reality undergoes.
The experience of depth, or experience of three dimensions which marks our conceptualization of space has perplexed thinkers since the beginning of philosophic inquiry. Recall that the earlier mentioned dialogue, the Timaeus provides an insight into the need for the relation between the knower to the knowledge of the known. Harmonic proportionality paves the way for participation in form as explained by the need for a triadic relationship, hence the proposal of the astronomer from Locri for a third intermediary constructed being.
Kant’s synthesis of the phenomenal and the categorical hammers in the separation of the act of sensation. If we were to follow in the footsteps of the mystic Meister Eckhart and dissolve the wood-eye distinction, we realise that we inhabit the object, we participate the in the forms so to speak and the act of sensation becomes a single unified act. Even Heidegger’s “unconcealing” fails to recognise the formal reality of anything sensed.
