The Metaphysics of Non-Being

The present article, originally published at the Substack The Journal of Absolute Truth, represents a condensation of certain themes that I have been musing on for some years. I am in the midst of gradually pulling together a monograph on the topic. I have explored these themes in a variety of articles, though with particular focus in: https://www.pdcnet.org/acpq/content/acpq_2017_0091_0003_0353_0379; https://www.pdcnet.org/acpq/content/acpq_2019_0093_0003_0411_0444

Questions of being and non-being are, as it were, born together. It is impossible for our mind not to see that being is not non-being. This is the primordial insight that our mind has when faced with reality. We live our entire intellectual life within the boundaries of being and non-being. But living within those boundaries is one thing… knowing exactly where they are is another. We are somewhat like people wandering around on a large piece of property—perhaps owned by a friend—without being aware of the exact location of the property lines that divide up the terrain. It is, therefore, an important skill, in fact one that saturates our experience as humans. And, as we shall see, it has profound implications for how we mere humans think about things divine. But let us start with an experience that is much more quotidian: the use of terms.

Whenever we manage to predicate something univocally, expressing one and the same meaning and indicating nothing other than that meaning, we find a very strong affirmation of being without qualification. A clear case of univocation is found in mathematical subjects. Triangularity, oneness, parallelness, etc.—all of these have but one meaning, found in every triangle, in every unit, in every pair of parallel lines. Such mathematical “realities”—here setting aside their particular metaphysical status—are what they are and are not what they are not. And in the physical sciences, whether mathematical or schematically observational, we seek out definitions that provide as close an account of a proper or specific difference as possible, so as to stabilize our mind on the essential character of this or that reality: what it is to be an oak tree, a termite, a body falling under uniform acceleration, etc. Univocal predication enables us to affirm, with a kind of unbending strength: oaks are hardwood angiosperms; triangles are three-sided figures having an angle measure equal to two right angles; etc.

But triangles are not oak trees, nor are termites weasels. Already, here we see the activity of the mind using non-being in order to articulate what separates various realities. As Plato voiced a realization in the Sophist: the mind is not deceived in realizing that sameness and difference, being and non-being, run throughout all of reality (at least all of reality below the level of the First Principle).

And we would be completely at a loss if our mind could not parse the non-being of pure equivocations: the bat hit the ball and died. The Louisville Slugger was long ago dead and dried out… how has it died anew? Then, after a moment of confusion, we realize that the meaning of “bat” here refers to the nocturnal animal, perhaps running into some sort of large, ball-shaped statue and coming to the bitter end that faces all flesh. In other words, our mind is able to see that a very tenuous bond of being has been created here by our language and thought. Through the equivocation of the term “bat,” we have gathered together a kind of “is-ness”: a bat is a piece of sports equipment, for use in a sport best described by Bob Newhart; a bat is a flying rat, of sorts… But our mind is very aware of the fact that this relationship of equivocation involves a powerful assertion of non-being as well. When used without further definition and exactness, “bat” is not either of these exactly. We must be able to sort out the links of being and the separation of non-being if we are to parse this kind of equivocation.

However, much more important for our day-to-day life is the intermingled shade of metaphor. A certain kind of hard-nosed analytic would scoff at the claim that metaphor is arguably the most human mode of discourse. But, so long as we also note the very human character of dialectical logic—the logic of discovery— I think that it is well justified to say that metaphor and likenesses are the structural matrix of the labor of building the edifice of thought. Even the previous sentence would not be thinkable without the bonds of metaphor, but how many other examples could be gathered: it dawned on me; that’s a weighty claim; he’s a really hard-nosed guy; you’re on thin ice; he is straight as an arrow; oh! it finally clicked; why did you blow up on me about that? Endless examples could be strung together…

The development of conceptual systems in social life is deeply dependent upon the growth, development, and stabilization of significations that are metaphorical. Culture is a matrix of metaphor, which is another way of saying that the greater part of human life is expressed by a kind of picturing in speech.

Yet at the heart of every metaphor is a kind of denial. It is most definitely not the case that knowledge is a kind of transfer process, by which something outside the intellect passes into it on the model of physical transfer. It is most definitely not the case that all people with very physically hard noses are also tough guys. And people can be on thin ice even in the summer, when there is no actual ice. Every metaphor involves a transfer of meaning such that the original meaning is more absent than present in the new use. Yet we should not dismiss this use of terms. It is essential to human discourse and to the stabilization of our intellects, which are embodied and discursive. We weave together being and non-being here too, in metaphor.

And, of course, no Thomist could write about this work of weaving without noting the fact that the same dynamic is involved in analogy. One of the peculiar things about analogical predication is that the common term—being, goodness, life, etc.—is simultaneously affirmed and denied (still with an emphasis on denial, for reasons that go beyond this article) of the realities to which it is attributed. The very meaning of “being” is itself intrinsically modified whenever we consider the being of substance (which exists “in itself”), the being of an inherent accident (which exists “in another”), or the being of relations (which exist “toward another”). Similarly, the being of substance (as a unified, agentive whole) is quite different from the being of quality, by which a given substantial being has, for example, an intellect, a virtue, or a disposition. To be in a creaturely way—where essence and existence are distinct, and where act and potency are intermingled—is quite different from being in an uncreated way, like God. A good artist is not always a good man, and someone who is in good health because of a very careful diet can also be morally very bad because of this same fussy diet, which breaks the natural bonds of shared society with other, normal humans… To live in a way that physically incorporates the environment into oneself (like a tree) is a very different way of living from the life of the mind. In all these cases (and many others), being and non-being are intermingled. We must be able to articulate the boundaries of being and non-being if we are to use our words aright.

Our languages are tapestries of being and non-being: “The weaving together of forms is what makes speech possible for us” (Plato, Sophist, 259e). And the threads upon the loom are the threads of Sameness and Difference, of Being and Non-Being.

Hovering in the background, however, is another, classical form of relative non-being: privations and negations. Here, our thought and discourse are filled with cases of non-being that we handle quite like being. The classic example is “blindness.” But the “hole” in a wall functions just as well as an example of privation. A wall, by its nature, covers a given space in a room. It is a kind of positive being—of being that is there, present between two rooms. But what is a hole? A hole is nothing more than the absence of the wall in this given spot. Just as blindness indicates a lack of the power to see, a hole indicates the absence of material in a place where there should be material. And yet, we can define it: “a hole is an aperture in an otherwise full bodily space.” But this does not mean that the hole is something positive. It is a lack—though one that can have very important consequences: food can be passed through a well-planned hole; a hole caused by an accident will need to be repaired.

Think of how impossible it would be for us to have discourse about all sorts of situations in which something is missing that should, in fact, be present. If we seek to heal the deafness of a person, we must say that this deficient situation is here in him. Yet, in reality, what we are seeking to alter is a situation in which there is no hearing. The hole, too, must be filled if we do not want bourbon to leak out of the barrel! We could never explain the phenomenon of teaching if we did not have an idea of ignorance precisely as a state of not knowing something that needs to be learned. Our mind is made for being: we want to understand what ignorance is and how to help our students emerge from ignorance into knowledge. Yet, in order to do this, we must treat a kind of non-being as though it were being—always aware of the fact that, technically speaking, this involves attributing a condition of positivity that, in point of fact, does not cohere to mind-independent reality. Darkness is an absence of light; it is not a positive ooze that, to steal the words of Gollum in The Hobbit, fills the space behind stars and under hills.

The problem of evil is impossible to resolve if we do not have a sense for the fact that evil is not some kind of positive thing in the world, but rather a kind of privation. The Platonic tradition aided the classical mind in grasping this fact, but for the Christian it is a dreadfully important point: if evil were some sort of positive being, this would imply that it must be brought about by God, the sole cause of all that is. It is the perennial temptation of dualistic Gnosticism to deal with the problem of evil by erecting a second cause alongside God, at war with Him—a principle of evil understood as a kind of positive and active piece of being-furniture in the universe.

But a sound account of evil will need to articulate clearly the fact that evil is a lack of due moral order. It is, in the words of Jean-Hervé Nicolas, “What God has not brought about in the universe that He made.” The entire mysteries of Predestination and Providence are hidden in this assertion, and for that reason it is impossible for us to assess them in detail. But a sound understanding of the causality of God, the defectibility of creatures, and the very principles of the universe requires a keen grasp of the fact that evil does not represent a positive kind of being in the universe. And yet, like blindness, or deafness, or ignorance, or a hole in a whiskey barrel, this privation is not without meaning in the world. The situation of a world in which there is the non-being of evil is not the same as one that lacks this kind of defect. The privation of right order affects our soul, our relationships, and even the physical world all around us. A world that is intemperate lacks the right order of desire in our passions; yet it also gives rise to selfishness and manipulation among fellow human beings, leads to a culture in which the defect of intemperance is present as a continual provocation to evil, and treats the natural order as though it were only a reservoir to be manipulated and wasted for human desires. We will never face reality head-on if we do not take seriously this particular kind of pernicious non-being, freely caused by our own defective causality—our capacity to fail in the order of freedom.

Likewise, the metaphysical notion of creation as complete dependence in being requires us to formulate a notion of non-being in the most radical sense. It is here that we pass from the domain of privation to complete negation: non-being, non-existence. In order for us to think of creatio ex nihilo, we must fashion for ourselves a kind of phantom, “nothing,” from which all things were created. This “nothing” is not a kind of chaotic substratum with which God would need to wrestle in order to bring things into existence—a kind of formless chaos that actually existed as a parallel principle, awaiting God’s activity. (Obviously, I am here simplifying a topic that has marshaled a variety of different patristic and scholastic interpretations.) To say that all things come from “nothing” is to say that they come from no presupposed subject of existence whatsoever. In other words, we have to deny that there is any “from” involved. And yet, the only way that we can think this thought is to first formulate something that seems like a process of change (from nothingness to somethingness), only then to assert with complete firmness: this nothingness is not in any way something. Yet notice that, at least as an object of thought, “nothingness” takes on the character of seeming like a substantive subject that can receive predication. Even here, absolute non-being, when it is completely denied, still holds our fascination as something that must be spoken, even if it indeed is nothing at all.

And I would be remiss, as a Thomist, if I did not point out the fact that the dynamic of being and non-being is present at the very heart of metaphysics, in the metaphysical relationship between act and potency. Indeed, on a certain telling, it was a failure to articulate the relativity of non-being that led someone like Parmenides into the monism for which he was famous: all there is is being, for being is and non-being is not. Yet within our experience it is quite evident that we encounter cases of “non-being that is” quite frequently—indeed, all the time. When I am not typing, I am nonetheless the kind of being who could potentially be typing, though I am not the kind of being that actually is typing. Even more profoundly, as a human being, I am potentially the sort of being who could speak Dutch; yet I can tell you that I most definitely am not a Dutch speaker. That potency is a non-being which, while not being, nonetheless is in some way—at least in a way that completely differs from the case of a slug, which most definitely is not a Dutch speaker, even in the most remote of potencies. Being and relative non-being intertwine throughout the fibers of all created reality: essence and existence; matter and form; first act and second act…

Alas, turning to another kind of (supposed) non-being, I rise up now in indignation against my own forebears. And like Plato of old taking up his weapons against Parmenides—is that not a phrase filled with overinflated self-importance?—I feel that I must risk playing the part of a parricide. I must lay my hands upon the scholastics, who have been my masters, and excise what I take to be an error. It is my hope, however, that the operation in question is scalpel work and not a hatchet job!

Let me explain. Reductionism comes in many forms. We are most familiar with the reductionism known as “materialism”—not in the sense of Madonna’s Material Girl, but rather as the claim that all of reality is nothing other than matter, with everything else reducible to it: all higher forms, all ideas, all feelings, all lofty aspirations, even the most divine of realities—all of this would be nothing more than matter. It is a very difficult position to sustain metaphysically, but it has been powerfully present from the days of the pre-Socratics and the atomists all the way through Marx and the Positivists and to our own time. Yet there are many other ways to be reductionist, whether through idealism, historicism, occasionalism, nominalism, rationalist-naturalism, pan-evolutionism, and so on. What is common to all forms of reductionism is that they not only make claims about what things are but, moreover, they all make claims about non-being as well. For the materialist, all higher aspirations are nothing more than a kind of false claim about reality. There are no ideas, nor societies, nor love, nor Gods. These are all phantoms of the mind—mere idols, idola…

Well, I do not want to claim that my scholastic forebears are completely reductionist in this sense, but there is nonetheless a tendency in scholasticism to underrate the being of knowledge, variously called ens intentionale, ens obiectivum, and so on. The being that would exist only “in the mind” is often treated as a diminished sort of being, an ens diminutum. Of course, scholastics are not the only ones to speak this way. Classic modernity picked up this tendency from late scholasticism and radicalized what was most deceptive in this language, treating the intramental world as though it were a diminished copy of “real” reality. Although not all authors are guilty of this, it is a tendency in scholastic thought that should not be overlooked. And it is a sin of modernity which should be jettisoned.

One of the ways in which this outlook came to codify itself was in a particular way of treating what scholastics called entia rationis, “beings of reason.” We have already encountered two very important instances of such “beings”: privations and negations. Such “beings” as blindness, deafness, and evil are, in reality, not beings at all. They are kinds of non-being. But in order for them to have the positive character we give them in our minds, we must bestow upon them something like a mode of being—one that they possess only as objects of knowledge, as constituted “in objective existence.” They do not exist positively in the world at all. They are “only in reason.”

The other major subspecies of such entia rationis is that of “relations of reason,” that is, relations which are mind-formed, even if they do not have any foundation in mind-independent reality. Thus, for example, two rocks can have a relation of “bigger” and “smaller,” founded upon their relative quantities. This kind of relation is said to be real (at least on the Thomist account). But to say that one rock has a greater monetary value than the other—well, this is not really something founded in the rock. It is only a denomination arising from human reasoning. It is not, we are told, “really real.”

All of these entia rationis, therefore, seem to fall into a domain of being that is particularly “diminished.” At most—to use an expression found in some later scholastics (e.g., Suárez, but also Thomists like Antoine Goudin)—they amount to a kind of “shadow of being,” umbra entis. Perhaps the metaphysician should attend to them for a little while, but in the end one is urged to move on to the more important kinds of being found extra mentaliter, in the natures of things.

Yet this misses something of immense importance. In point of fact, I believe it obscures the entire hierarchy of being and occludes the particular being of human culture itself. The highest sort of being among all creatures is spiritual being, and the highest form of spiritual actuality is the actuality of knowledge and love. In other words, the “mental” is what is most-being. The highest achievement of human activity is not the kind of physical actuality achieved in the nourishment and growth of the body; it is the spiritual actuality found in the nourishment and growth of the intellect and will—a growth that is, for us, in the order of so-called “intentional being,” the “super-being” by which we commune with other beings by becoming one with them through intelligence and volition. This is the deep meaning of the scholastic adage that, at least for us created spirits, knowledge is literally to be the other as other: “the knower and the known are more one than are matter and form” (Averroes).

For humans, this cultural being exists in our practices and our disciplines, together with all the semiotics involved therein. The scholastics were well aware of the structural importance of logical relations (which, broadly following the terminology of Avicenna, they called “second intentions”) such as definition, genus, species, proposition, opposition, syllogism, form, and so on. We might think of such second intentions as being the “scaffolding” of our ideas. We will never see an invalid syllogism scantily clad in a bikini, nor will we ever need to pick the fruit from the branches of an essential definition. But nonetheless, these relations among the objects of our knowledge (precisely as objects) create the matrix of shared disciplines of knowledge that we develop and hand on from generation to generation. By knowing realities, we lift them into the particular mode of being that befits speculative discourse. We make them subject to the possibility of cognitive manifestation, amid the many labors this requires. We truly do fashion and “shepherd” our sciences, and they represent an important and impressive conquest of the human spirit. In short: speculative-cognitional being is not non-being. It is the spiritualization of reality, manifested to and expressed by mind

But, of course, our culture does not live only in speculative practices. We live in the midst of a matrix of moral and artistic practicality. As I look around my dining room, I find that I am surrounded by all sorts of signs of human choice and fabrication. There are shades of moral meaning all around me: signs of the dutiful affection of my children, who show their virtue by keeping the table set with silverware. At times, perhaps my wife sees flowers on the table as the mark of my acts of—so I hope—spousal love. Of course, I can also look out the window and see that the trees on the edge of my property are not merely physical barriers to the wind, but also sit very close to my property line—something that is not at all physically visible, but which nonetheless carries real moral weight, or, as some scholastics themselves admitted, a kind of moral being. And this moral being, present throughout all of these realities and suffusing everything that we affect by our moral choice and self-command, is not non-being. No, it is the elevation of reality around us, stamping upon it the mark of the human conquest of the Good—or, alas, our failures in the domain of evil. This is not a secondary reality. It is, rather, spirit morally effective in the cosmos.

And of course, I could also look around the room to consider so many things of human artcraft. It is impossible not to see this in any human environment. The floor underneath my feet is not mere oak, but carefully planed, grooved, nailed, and staggered flooring. A chair is a marvelous thing, for it does not grow on trees. I hope that the hutch along one of my walls has a real beauty, decorated as it still is for Christmas. The entire aesthetic form of the room, curated for a particular appearance and beauty, is itself the mark of a certain style and also the mark of my own particular tastes. On the wall there hangs a tapestry reproduction of one of the panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, The Mystic Lamb, and below it also sits an icon representing one of the recent feasts of the Byzantine churches. And hidden in the walls there are screws and nails, which for their part will never be dug up out of the ground like ore. It would be insanity to reduce an icon to mere paint, a tapestry to mere wool directly from a sheep, or a room to a mere agglomeration of wood and fixtures.

No. The smallest nail or spoon—let alone works of fine art or religious art—are all new forms, artistic forms. These physical beings cannot be reduced to their pre-intellectual and pre-volitional being. When the sound of a piece of music stops and someone says, “That was nothing more than sound,” we know that we have found ourselves faced with a reductionist of a particularly terrible sort (one who could readily join the ranks of certain nominalists who were equally reductionistic about artistic form). But artistic form is neither the pre-spiritualized form of the material nor mere non-being in comparison with “real,” mind-independent being. No, it is a truly spiritualized form of being, one stamped with the creativity of the human person—something that is also part of culture, which is the highest actualization of the human person in the merely human order. (I say “merely human,” for through grace we are called to be divine… Yet even there we encounter a kind of culture: the culture of the economy of salvation, wherein culture and divine tri-union become, in the end, one. The Trinity is the communion at the heart of the Church, our deepest reality…)

To see these final points is to see something very important. Every account of being and non-being gives a kind of priority to what we take to be the “most beingly being.” And, in comparison with the prime case of being, other modes of being will be, in some way, not that kind of being. The parsing of being and non-being is ubiquitous and crucial. This is, ultimately, another way of saying: The principle of non-contradiction abides.

This is why I insist that the being of human culture, as our most fully actualized way of being spiritual, is the most important reference point for understanding what being is. For at its height, the activity of being is the activity of knowing and loving, both of which establish the possibility of communion—in the shared space in which self-manifestation and other-reception take place, or, to put it another way, where the free gift and reception of self occur by way of union and joyful rest. It is this kind of being that arguably marks out what is most divine. For knowledge and love are not cheap relative-non-being replacements for the “really real.” They are what is most real; they are what most fully express the perfection that God is. So much is at stake.

Without explicitly weighing in on the scholastic question of the “formal constitutive of the divine narure” (is it aseity, or self-subsistent intellection… or self-subsistent love?), I nonetheless think that intellection and love most adequately express—at least to natural reason, which is itself open to untold supernatural vistas through revelation—what the divine being is. For they most fully express the actuality and perfection of being: manifestation in the truthfulness of God and jubilant rest in His infinite goodness.

I will close with the words of one of my masters, Fr. Jean-Hervé Nicolas, who states it all much better than I:

Being (être) is the very foundation of the Divine Nature, the source and reason for all of His perfections. However, in a very true sense, goodness is the ultimate flowering of being, for it is being in its perfection, in its ultimate completeness, to the point that it has nothing left to desire and is marked solely by the tendency to give. Thus, indeed, among the divine attributes, goodness places in relief, more than any of the names do, the fullness of being that, in comparison with the multitude of indigent creatures composing the Universe, is the distinctive mark of God. [Here, he cites the argument for the fittingness of the Incarnation (ST III, q. 1, a. 1), based upon the self-communicability of God’s infinite goodness.]

And for this reason, it is through goodness that we can enter even more deeply into the secret of the Divine Nature. It appears first to us among the traits belonging to this God, whom we know first of all through the benefits He bestows. And when we set aside our consideration of these benefits, we might attempt to know our Benefactor Himself, this goodness once again is what has the last word to say concerning His perfection. Goodness, at its fullest degree of flowering, is love…. Being at its supreme degree of tension becomes love itself. To say that God is Love is to express nothing other than His infinite goodness. But, in fact, it expresses this in a way that is at once more profound and more suggestive: does not every being whatsoever, spiritual beings above all, exist completely in the love that determines the foundational orientation of their entire lives, the love that we might go even further and say is its very life…

God is Love. Reason could have divined this fact, for even the smallest blade of grass sings the song of God’s love. But, in fact, by its own means it never managed to rise to this summit of all knowledge. It was necessary that the son of God become incarnate and that He reveal to us the hidden meaning of the supreme gift wherein all others are absorbed. “God is Love,” wrote St. John the Beloved Apostle. All things are illuminated in the light of these words (Jean-Hervé Nicolas, Connaître dieu [Paris: Cerf, 1947], 38–42).