The Philsophy of Nothingness and Hayathology 3

The opening sentence of the Gospel according to John is crucial to Hayathology, especially for the understanding of Temporality as a moving image of Eternity.
The Chinese verb “you”(有) can be translated as “was/is” because its tense is “imperfect”. In this respect Chinese grammar resembles Hebrews grammar which also has the distinction only between perfect and imperfect, but no distinction of past, present, and future.

Do you think the sentence “In the Beginning was the Word” narrates a historically past event, or the state of affairs which “was the case” a long time ago, e.g. 6000 years ago, or 15 billion years ago before Big-Bang? Is “the Word’s being with God” only in the past? Isn’t it more suitable to say “the Word is God” rather than to say “the Word was God”? Greek grammar uses “aorist” when it narrates a historical event as if it were a point lying on the temporal coordinate of the linear
sequences of events. The verb “on” is “imperfect”, and does not represent a point-like past of the chronological table of the world history. It narrates not only the past state of affairs, but also the present/ future states of affairs.

In other words, the so-called　“Pre-existence of the Word” essentially involves the element of “Becoming” at each instant of Time.

I would like to cite another key sentence from the Gospel of John  8-58:

eipen autoiV o ihsouV amhn amhn legw umin prin abraam genesqai egw eimi.
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am.

Here, umin prin abraam genesqai (before Abraham was) is “aorist”, and represents the historical past states of affairs as appoint-like instant on the linear coordinate time, but Jesus’ answer is not “I was” but “I am” i.e. egw eimi.  

As “egw eimi o wn” is God’s name to Hebrews, this reply “I am” is deeply connected with God’s self-revelation of his name to Moses, i.e. “I am who am”.

Under the influences of Greek ontology, theologians in the past usually considered “Before Abraham was, I am” signifies the Eternity of Christ. They do not think that such lofty phrase is absolutely not applicable to ordinal human beings because Eternity and Temporality does not intersect with each other.  But would not such theologians side with those who did not believe in Jesus and stoned him?   I would like to affirm the really real existence of such intersection between Eternity and Temporality, or rather, the dynamical relatedness of Temporality with Eternity at every instant of time.

The Philsophy of Nothingness and Hayathology 4

The Relation of Philosophical Ultimate to Theological Ultimate

Being, Nothingness, and Becoming are transcendental predicates, i.e. the Universal of Universals which are predicable to everything including God, Human, and Worlds in their inseparable Unity. (One and Many are also such universal of universals which transcends the limit of categorical predicates.)

I have shown the two diagrams of Trinitarian structure, i.e. a philosophical trinity and a theological trinity. Theological trinity is well known, and every Catholic Christian professes his faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three are three persons in one substance or essence in the orthodox Christian theology. And I think with Whitehead that the Trinitarian modes of thinking are necessary when we want to transcend the limit of Greek ontology, and grasp this world, and its essential relatedness to God. But how should we understand three concepts, Being, Nothingness, and Becoming? Everybody already has some pre-understanding of these three, because these constitute the most universal conceptual frameworks. The Medieval western philosophers call “One”, “Being”, and “Goodness” as transcendental concepts, because they signify the universal of universals, transcending Aristotle’s categories. They are applicable everything including God and temporal entities. So the study of transcendentals is the proper task of primary philosophy, i.e. metaphysics, whereas the study of objects under the Aristotelian categories belongs to sciences. The Scholastic philosophers did not count “Becoming” and “Nothingness” as transcendentals, because they are under the strong influence of Greek ontology. They don’t recognize the importance of “Becoming” and “nothingness” because they considered both as essentially negative dependent concepts. Whitehead calls “One” “many” and “Creativity” as the categories of the ultimate, which play the similar role in his metaphysics as “transcendentals” in the medieval philosophy. Hegel was, as far as I know, the first Western philosopher who pointed out the paradoxical identity between Pure Being and Pure Nothingness: This logic has to do with the development of philosophical thinking in the West as well as in the East. Whereas the principle of the Western metaphysics is Being itself, or Pure Being, the principle of the East-Asian metaphysics is Nothingness. What Hegel means by “Pure Being” or “Pure Nothingness” is an abstract universal which would contradicts itself and becomes its opposite if we conceptually grasp it as if it were a “concrete” universal. “Becoming” is a higher concept than Being and Nothingness, and it both abolishes and integrate Being and Nothingness. It is a great insight of Hegel that the paradoxical Identity between Being and Nothingness should be resolved in the higher concept of Becoming. But I think that the whole problem of Becoming is not merely a conceptual one of a Hegelian Logic. It is fundamentally an existential and religious problem of Life/Death which is always transcending the standpoint of Reason itself. It necessitates us to think beyond Reason(noesis), something like Metanoetics which Tanabe Hajime advocated after the World War II. The proper understanding of Becoming in Hayathology needs more than conceptual dialectics in Hegel.