Creation

essay

What is creation? What is the activity called “creating”?

From early in history there has been a notion that creation has some important, if not essential, relationship to this world including ourselves. Whether the creating is an action done by a personal deity or group of deities from somewhere outside of the world of experience, or if creation is the intelligible change that moves from within existence, as an externalising into phenomena of a hidden inner Being or impersonal intelligence, or if creativity is the very nature of the world (or cosmos) itself, or any combination/synthesis of the above, creation as in, the will and the idea to bring out something novel, has been a generally important question with regards to existence as a whole.

Egypt and Vedic culture each maintained a variety of approaches to the question of creation. There was the notion of a personal creator, such as Amun and Brahma, there was also the esoteric and monistic reading of an absolute being or essence such as Atma/Brahman or Nun/Atum generating what we encounter as the world and ourselves from out of Themself, or as an expression of themselves. Other cultures such as the Sumerian and the Semitic peoples combined the mythology of a personal creator with a cosmic battle alongside esoteric panenthesism.

Greek philosophy developed a variety of approaches to a very high degree that were subsequently adopted, adapted and used by various religious groups in contact with the Mediterranean world. Neither does any approach necessarily (despite vehement even violent exaggeration of one claim or another to sole truth) negate the possibility of regarding each as a means of understanding or approaching one truth which is beyond easy compressing into any particular paradigm. But creation seems to indicate some activity wherein there is an unrealised (and ideal) existence and a will (that is real) to actualise that ideal.

In the Timaeus of Plato there is the myth of the creator, the Demiurge, for whom the Forms, or Ideas, are the model for his creating of the universe. He creates because he is good, and goodness extends outwards rather than jealously guarding and holding. Later philosophers of his school, influenced by Aristotle’s concept of an unmoved mover, began to equate the Demiurge with a divine intellect (nous), but already in the early Academy, the myth was read allegorically as the projection of the contents of Being, characterized as the Monad, into the flux of matter as the indefinite Dyad, and thus forming the world of Becoming. So there again there is depicted an urge with an idea which becomes actualised.

One of the difficulties of writing philosophy, or about philosophy, is that unless one is some kind of master (which I certainly am not) one is limited to a particular strand, often itself within a particular strand, and in a particular context in place, time and language- quite aside from the basic availability of texts in translation or affordability. Very often, and I’m sure it’s the case with what I write, one ends up at best pushing an open door on some issue. Those in the know can then roll their eyes when they read and say “god, this dude thinks he’s on to something original. Hasn’t he ever heard of.... whoever”.

I think I was unusually given to the naive belief in my college days, in a definite historical progress in philosophy, so that I presumed every sequential philosophical school and luminary to have been a clear improvement on the prior. A belief which of course is silly, not to say dangerous to the very freedom of thought that philosophy is supposed to need as it’s wellspring. I have also tended to grant often unwarranted authority, and ceded in a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, to those with credentials or who seem very sure about what they profess. Although a lot had changed by the time I was growing up, nevertheless I come from a country whose people had long become used to giving up their own authority in philosophical and spiritual matters to a globalist theocratic institution, namely the Roman Catholic church. However courageous my forefathers were in regards to the fight for political sovereignty, when it came to the church few had sufficient inclination; and that’s not their fault either. It took the excommunication of my own grandfather (and many of his peers) by the church for their political activities to really sour them to the latter. And it is no longer any mystery why ordinary people subjected to far worse forms of abuse, not to mention the basic affront to national self-respect which follows ceding authority to a foreign religious authority based on an even more foreign religious sect have turned from that domination, though to what may not be so great either.

What in college did leave a very bad taste in my mouth, apart from the course on critical Marxist theory which made me want to shoot myself, so depressing was it, was the last vestiges of the formerly dominant ‘metaphysical’ orthodoxy, namely, Thomism, the philosophical school of Thomas Aquinas. At the time I wasn’t particularly yay or nay on Christianity in general. I had sensed sparks of genuine spirituality in the philosophies of Augustine, and certainly others like Jakob Boehme, Meister Eckhart, and even Spinoza and Descartes. I never found such in Aristotle. But then, encountering the spiritually empty (for me anyway) theology of Aquinas, I found myself wondering, not so much why it was successfully imposed as orthodoxy in western Europe for so long ( it was obviously a philosophy tailor-made for the affirmation of feudal establishment and imperial religious dominion) but why so relativity few heterodox ‘heretics’ arose against it (not that there weren’t many, many of such; I just couldn’t stomach that Europeans en masse would be so amenable to being constricted by such a soulless ideological bridle).

Briefly, this is how Martin Heidegger describes the reshaping of the original Greek (in this case, Aristotle’s) philosophy through mistranslation into the service of Abrahamic religion as Scholastic theology

“Why does energeia become actualitas? Because ergon and energeia are understood by the Romans on the basis of AGERE, “to make” in the ontic sense. The name for such an ontic making is CREATIO. This is why the Summum Ens becomes CREATOR and all ENS is ENS CREATUM”¹

ENERGEIA was Aristotle’s characterisation of “being”. It gives it’s name to what we call energy, but for Aristotle meant something like the ‘working-ness’ of what is, how being (PHUSIS) is manifested in, and as activity. SUMMUM ENS means ‘highest Being’ in the sense of the Divine, or God, a being that is the pinnacle of all that is (but still itself a being among beings).

While with the original Greek understanding, the characterization or the way of being as ENERGEIA is distinct from any particular being, including the highest being, the Divine, with the Latin translation and subsequent adaption for Abrahamic theology, the distinction collapses and the Divine becomes the Creator and all else, created beings.

I did eventually find all the philosophical sustenance I needed in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer as well as the ancient pre-Socratics, Stoics and Platonists who still strike me as having a far better claim to being the philosophical and spiritual heart of the western tradition than the dreary purveyors of the Abrahmo-Aristotelian scholasticism of the middle ages. But I’ve read far more and with far greater enthusiasm philosophy since leaving college than I ever did when I was there. And I discover in this reading time and again that anything I think I have come up with as an original thought has already been done and far better by others.

Martin Heidegger has been a source for this above-mentioned kind of realisation. But in reading on from my interest in Schopenhauer, through to Eduard Von Hartmann, and also Von Schelling, who I had neglected since leaving college, the intuition I have generally had regarding what ‘creation’ really is I find already in these philosophers. Namely, that what we call creation, both in the sense of the universe or the world and as the activity of creating we engage in ourselves – is the emerging into objective appearance of something from within. In other words creation is a process of making external what is originally internal.

This ‘process’ is intelligible, or at least, belongs with our faculty of understanding, and therefore is linked to consciousness. But it seems to emerge from a state prior to what we normally call consciousness. The idea for what is to be brought into being, and the desire or will to do so, seem to be already there and already loaded as content of something which then realises itself in, and through our consciousness and conscious action. Von Hartmann called this ‘the Unconscious’ by which he meant, not merely that aspect of ourselves which is there in our individual bodies, and into which our consciousness withdraws in sleep , or fainting, or even death, but the one original being of the entirety of the world and of all our individual selves, in which will and idea, that is the pleroma of all actual being and idea, are rooted.

Just as when we create, a desire to do so along with the idea of or for what we want to do emerges from obscurity into our consciousness, so too, the one Unconscious (which he also names as Spirit) brings forth from itself this world and all of us. And at the base of our own individual consciousness, and our own unconsciousness, we are fused to that one great Unconscious, so that our individual subjectivity is transcended into the one absolute Subject, which is this great Unconscious (yet still ultimately aware and active) Spirit.

That seems to me to articulate enough with regards to the question of what ‘creating’ really is, and it’s something that was there with me as an intuition before reading Von Hartmann, which fact in itself seems to reveal something about the genesis of the process.

1. Heidegger, Martin “Four Seminars”