Methexiology

Philosophical Theology and Theological Philosophy for the Deification of Humanity

Laos

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498233866
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Methexiology is not a particular theory, but rather a general philosophical orientation. Therefore, in Methexiology: Philosophical Theology and Theological Philosophy for the Deification of Man, Nicolas Laos elucidates the significance of methexiology for the study of ontology, epistemology, ethics, philosophical psychology, theory of justice, philosophy of history, and philosophy of religion. Laos argues that, faced with the modern and the postmodern crises of meaning, we need a new myth, a new spiritual formula, for the resacralization of humanity and the cosmos, without restoring defunct totems, without using tales as "cheap" substitutes for the lack of a life-giving myth, and without negating history. In his Methexiology, Laos studies the "genealogy" of the modern and the postmodern crises of meaning, and, based on his new interpretation of classical Greek philosophy and Hesychasm, proposes methexiology as a way of overcoming the crises of meaning and as a way of resacralizing humanity and the cosmos through a new metaphysically grounded humanism.

1

Being and Its Presence

The concept of being is the most central concept of philosophy. The primary problem of every philosophical enquiry consists in the ascertainment of the reality of its object and, more particularly, of that reality that is presumed to be the reality par excellence, namely, the reality of being. Throughout the history of philosophy, the most general definition of being is the following: being is a structurally united, unique, and autonomous reality that lasts either by being “closed” (i.e., isolated) in itself or by tending to transcend its nature, expanding itself beyond its substantial constraints. In the first case, one conceives of being in a static way, whereas, in the latter, one conceives of being in a dynamic way. The basic perception of being that is formed by philosophizing consciousness originally stems from the real presence of man himself, but, at a later stage, this perception undergoes conscious processing in the context of which it is abstracted from its particularities, and, in this way, it facilitates the conception of the corresponding idea and the identification of its difference from and its functional connection with the world into whose functional presence the corresponding idea is integrated.

Every philosophical enquiry is concerned with the issue of being. Even when philosophical enquiry seems, prima facie, to be astounded at the cosmic order and to aim at investigating and interpreting the miracle of the world itself, it refers to the human being in an indirect way (i.e., from distance), and it aims at explaining the peculiar presence of the human being. On the one hand, humanity is related to the world, everything may seem to be an outgrowth of the world, and man persistently tries to be integrated into the world according to the terms of a new equilibrium established by him. On the other hand, man imposes himself as the most magnificent manifestation of being, irrespective of whether one understands the human being in a static way (i.e., in isolation) or in a dynamic way (i.e., extended in the world). The idea of the human being as an independent and, to a large extent, free “whole” and, furthermore, as an indivisible actualization of a structural program underpins both materialist types of philosophical realism, such as the philosophies of Democritus (460–370 BC) and Epicurus (341–270 BC), and spiritualist types of philosophical realism, such as Plato’s theory of ideas and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s monadology.115

The first cosmologizing Ionian philosophers (sixth and fifth centuries BC) sought the primary, mainly material, essence from which, according to their arguments, both the cosmic reality that surrounds the human presence and man himself as the “crown” of the cosmic reality had originated.116 In particular, according to Thales of Miletus, that primary essence was water; according to Anaximenes, it was air; according to Heraclitus, it was fire and the continuous changing of reality; according to Anaximander, it was infinity (in Greek, āpeiron), an endless, unlimited mass subject to neither old age nor decay, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything we can perceive is derived; according to Empedocles, it was a system of attractive and repulsive functions of the elements of matter. However, it was Parmenides, a Presocratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia, active in the earlier part of the fifth century BC, who first articulated a conception of being according to its wholeness, its uniqueness, and its dynamism, and he founded ontology as the focus of the philosophical investigation of reality.

From Parmenides’s perspective, being is a whole (in Greek, houlon), specifically, a unique set that imposes itself by being, and it opposes everything that is not. In the context of Parmenides’s ontology, being and non-being are not reducible to each other: “For this shall never be proved, that the things that are not are.”117 The previous dualist argument is the starting point of the classical Platonic perception of ideas as “real beings”118 (in Greek, ōntos ōnta). However, in his dialogue Sophist, Plato reconsidered the issue of being, and he argued that being and non-being are the extreme terms of an ontological series whose intermediate terms are the non-being of being and the being of non-being. According to Plato, the previous intermediate ontological terms (i.e., the non-being of being and the being of non-being) explain the presence of the world. In Plato’s Sophist, the Stranger argues that, contrary to Parmenides, non-being is an essential condition of the existence of any object, because every object, except only being itself, participates in otherness in relation to being, and, therefore, in the extent to which they are “other than being,” they must be described as “non-being.” According to the Stranger, movement and rest and all other “forms,” with the sole exception of being itself, are “non-beings,” because, even though they participate in being, they participate also in otherness in relation to being, and, therefore, they are not identical to being.

Moreover, in the third century AD, the aforementioned Platonic argument was endorsed and developed further by Neoplatonism. In his Enneads, Plotinus identified four hypostases (or underlying states or substances). In particular, Plotinus’s ontology is based on an ontological series of four hypostases: the totally transcendent “One” (which is beyond all categories of being and non-being, containing no division, multiplicity or distinction); the first emanation from the “One” is the “Nous” (which can be construed as “the divine mind” or “order”), which Plotinus identified (at least metaphorically) with the Demiurge (who can be construed as the “divine Architect”) of Plato’s Timaeus (unlike the “One,” the “Nous” is not a self-sufficient entity, but it is capable of contemplating both the “One,” as its prior, as well as its own thoughts and the ideas that are in its spiritual nature and they correspond to Plato’s ideas); from the “Nous” emanates the “Soul” (in Greek, Psychē), the dynamic, creative temporal power, which itself is subdivided into the upper aspect, or “World Soul” (precisely, the contemplative part that governs the world and remains in contact with the “Nous,” ensuring that the individual embodied souls eventually return to their true divine state within the “Nous”), and the lower aspect, which, according to Plotinus, is identified with “Nature,” and it allows itself to be multiply divided into individual human souls. Finally, Plotinus, using the terminology of Plato’s Sophist, describes matter as non-being.

In his own ontological works, Dionysius the Areopagite119 proposes a hierarchical ordering of beings according to their natural placements and their freedoms and, also, according to the simultaneous immediacy of the unknown God’s presence. In the context of Dionysius the Areopagite’s ontological hierarchy, matter is not merely described as non-being, since, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, there is an epistemological, yet non-ontological, continuity between the Absolute and matter. During the era of modern philosophy, the perception of continuity between the Absolute and matter was reformulated by Baruch Spinoza’s monistic philosophy, in the context of which there is an ontological continuity between the Absolute and matter (in contrast to Dionysius the Areopagite, Spinoza espoused pantheism).120

Aristotle, mainly in his Metaphysics, articulated an ontology that provides a solid philosophical foundation for the interpretation of reality. In his ontology, Aristotle emphasized the distinction between being potentially (potentiality) and being actually (actuality). The previous distinction depends on a process of change (“becoming”) according to which being is increasingly actualized and imposed, following its “entelechy,” a model that is intrinsic to being and constitutes the program of actualization of being; the previous program (i.e., entelechy) remains unchanged, independently of the particular changes that being may undergo. According to Aristotle, being is the simplest possible presence that can be perceived by the human mind, but it is not totally simple; being can be thought of as a resultant of categories.121 In his Categories, Aristotle argued that the categories of being are ten, namely: substance, quantity, quality, relatives (relation), somewhere (location), sometime (time), being in a position (position), having (possession), acting, and being acted upon (undergoing). In addition, in Aristotle’s philosophy, substances are further divided into first and second: first substances are individual objects; second substances are the species in which first substances (i.e., individuals) inhere.

Aristotle’s successors, including Plotinus, classified the categories of being as follows: substanc...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Being and Its Presence
• Chapter 2: Access to Being
• Chapter 3: The Modes of Being
• Chapter 4: Epistemology and the Noetic Faculty of the Soul
• Chapter 5: Mystery, Grace, and Philosophical Theology: Through Unselfishness to Deification
• Chapter 6: Psychotherapy: The Secret Potential of the Mind
• Chapter 7: Axiology, Ethics, and Justice
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• About the Author