Have you ever considered that the reason Creation remains a mystery may not be that it is complicated, but that it is simple—too simple, in fact, for the intellect to accept as common sense?   But what is "common sense"?  It is the commonly held view that everything that happens conforms to certain fundamental precepts, and that among these are: 1) it must have a prior cause, 2) it must have a basis in physical reality, and 3) it must be explainable in terms that are consistent with the laws of nature.

 

Now these precepts are quite valid and reliable for explaining phenomena that occur in space/time existence.  Actually, it is the fact that things happen the way they do in nature that has led us to the laws of thermodynamics, evolution of the species, Boyle's law, Einstein's theory of relativity, and all the other principles we rely on to explain and predict the phenomena of our relational world.  But what if the phenomenon we seek to understand and explain does not happen solely in this familiar, conforming, and predictable reality?  That's the problem which confronts the astro-physicist when presented with the question of creation.  And physicists are more acutely aware than their counterparts in other scientific disciplines that they don't have the means to answer this question.

Common-sense answers do not apply to "absolute truth", simply because we have never experienced the Absolute and, therefore, haven't had an opportunity to draw conclusions from it.  Such answers cannot be known as "facts".  Instead they fall into the domain of metaphysics which relies on principles of logic rather than observations of nature in order to make sense of the reality that lies beyond experience.  It is the philosopher, not the scientist, to whom we must turn for theories having to do with primary metaphysical concepts.  Indeed, some of the most profound creation theories have come from the neo-Platonists and theological thinkers of the Middle Ages.

Among the most influential minds of 14^th century Europe was the Dominican prefect Johannes Eckhart, also known as Meister Eckhart, who taught theology at the Universities of Paris and Cologne, and had more success communicating his intuitive concepts to the "common man" than in following official church doctrines.  (He was tried for heresy in 1326.)   Eckhart said that "To create is to give being out of nothing."  Such a statement cannot be allegorical, and it certainly seems to defy common sense.  But does that mean it's nonsensical?

I'll give you another example, from the following century.  Nicholas of Cusa was a neo-Platonist philosopher and theologian whose writings influenced the development of Renaissance mathematics and science.  Cusa's original thesis "De li non-aliud" (On the Not-other), published in 1461, postulated an "ineffable unity" to which neither otherness nor multiplicity is opposed.   He called this unity the "Not other", and he theorized that it was the "coincidence of all contrariety".  Does this make sense?  Perhaps not, if your judgment is limited to relational happenings.   But the essentialist cosmology puts these two concepts together—Eckhart's nothing and  Cusa's theory of non-contradictory identity—in a creation hypothesis that has made sense for philosophers and structural designers from both a relational and an absolute perspective.  Here, for example, is one artist's inspired interpretation of this principle, which may also be more accessible to non-logicians:

The wonder of Creation is perhaps the wonder of the creation of negation.  Everything else is derived from it. The first verses of Genesis describe the first distinctions that God made, which are also the creation of the first complementary pairs: heaven-earth, light-darkness, etc., but no distinction is possible without negation, and negation and double negation therefore preceded all distinctions that followed.  For the same reason complementarity too, which was generated by negation, preceded the complementary pairs that were created.  Actually, the first Asymmetry, which according to the Big Bang theory is the moment of creation, could not be without negation.  In a humorous vein, one might suggest a different opening for the first chapter of the Bible: In the beginning God was very bored amidst Perfect Symmetry, in which absolutely nothing happened.  Then accidentally He sighed, "Oh No!"  This created the first Asymmetry, which brought into being the other 'mindprints'...and the rest is History.  In other words, there is no symmetry without asymmetry, and there is no asymmetry without negation, therefore negation is a precondition for Symmetry: Asymmetry, and the same can be shown with regard to all the other 'mindprints'.  In a final regression, the negation of negation is perhaps what created Being, and this is perhaps the significance of the proposition that Being was created from nothingness.  There is nothing new about this, since the idea already arose in the creation myths and in philosophy, in Western and Eastern cultures, and also in modern physics.

                    —Tsion Avital: "Mindprints: The Structural Shadows of Mind-Reality"*

The essentialist view of Creation is based on a primary source called Essence.  Essence is absolute and immutable, which means it has no boundaries or divisions and is not subject to the conditions of space/time existence.  Absolute also means that Essence is the unity of all that is, or, as Eckhart would say, "the totality of 'is-ness'."  (Please note that he didn't say "totality of being".)  Now, Absolute Essence is not only pure and undifferentiated, it has no "other" within or outside of it.  And that is the problem.  For, obviously, if Essence is responsible for creating something, then the moment the thing is created it becomes an "other".  In other words, we cannot have a created world without difference, and difference is anathema to Essence.

Here's where Cusan logic comes to our rescue.  Cusa argued that, although God is indefinable, it can be stated that the world is not God but is not anything other than God.  As Nicholas himself put it: "The first principle cannot be other either than an other or than nothing and likewise is not opposed to anything."  God is 'not other', he said, because God is not other than any (particular) other, even though 'not-other' and 'other' (once derived) are opposed.  But no other can be opposed to God from whom it is derived.  The legacy of this obscure theoretician is a workable definition for the ineffable Source whose attributive nature is otherwise indefinable.

Cusa's logical mind reasoned that if what we experience as actual  did not exist, then nothing could actually be.  The Creator, Cusa's 'first principle', would then be only absolute potentiality.  But things are; therefore actuality exists—at least in experience, and the " experiencer" is you or me, not God or Essence.  Possibility and actuality, he said, are co-dependent in existence but coincide in the non-contradictory Source—the ultimate reality in which opposites like 'positive and negative', 'subject and object', and 'being and nothing' are not mutually exclusive but equivalent.  In the Oneness of Essence, all differences are eliminated.  There is no "other" for Essence because Essence itself is not  other.

But, you ask, how does that principle apply to existence, since the things and events we experience are all different from each other?  And so they are.  The act of Creation would seem to suggest a transition or change on the part of the primary source.  It's only common sense, you say.  But remember what I said about common sense: it does not apply to absolutes.  Essence is absolute.  It is not affected by time and space and does not change.  So, how can it create?

Implied in Cusa's theory of contrariety is the concept that absolute potentiality embraces the extremes of opposition, particularly as they relate to the 'first principle'.  According to Cusan logic there can be no Essence without its opposite. Now Essence is absolute 'Is-ness'—the Oneness of all that is, while nothingness is what is not—the absence of all that is.  The opposite of Essence is nothingness, which by the mystical logic of metaphysics must be considered a potential reality.  Essence cannot create an other (to itself) because it is undivided Oneness.  But it can deny (negate) its contradictory self—what it is not.  And since its contradictory self is also absolute, "real" and undivided, nothingness defines the "not-Essence".  Thus, the potentiality of Essence is the power to negate its contradictory identity—nothingness, thereby actualizing an alternate identity that differentiates Essence as existence.  And because this identity—the existential self—is a not-other to Essence, it has not-otherness in common with its Absolute Source.

Those of you who have read my thesis know that, in addition to absolute potentiality, I maintain that Essence possesses absolute Sensibility and is "negational".  Bear in mind that, although we would normally view these attributes as "different" in the experienced world, they converge as one in the reality of Essence. The antithetical not-Essence may be likened to "the other side of the coin".  It is my theory that Essence denies or negates its metaphysical opposite to create an other (the negate) which becomes the sentient locus and differentiator of existential reality.  Actualization effects a contingency in which the negate is the subject of its denied essence (essent).  From the existential perspective the negate represents the "not-" of this actualized not-other.  From the perspective of absolute Essence, however, it remains not-other.

The negate is actualized as an infinite number of identities, each of which assumes a biological counterpart of its own.  This affords the negate self-awareness—a reflective microcosm of Absolute Sensibility that might be considered analogous to the unitary cell of a living organism.  But while the negate has "proprietary awareness" of itself, it is only indirectly sensible of its essential source. The philosophical significance of negation is that the created negate loses its essential identity in becoming aware, and can only experience Essence in its actualized or finite form—that is, as being in space/time existence.  The negate in my theory is not without Essence; it is still "essential".  But it is conditionally separated from its essence.  Experience can be described as the existential process by which the negate is incrementally reunited with its own negated essence to become being-aware.

In order to extract value from its estranged essent, the negate as being-aware denies that its "otherness" is anything but being—an intellectual application of nothingness.  The negate creates by negation just as Essence does, but dimensionally and on a relational level.  If you surmise this to be a "secondary" negation, you are correct in your astuteness.  As Eckhart said: "To create is to give being out of nothing."  For Eckhart and the 19th century ontologist Georg Hegel, finite being is negation; and the Deity or Source that Eckhart called "absolute fullness of being" is the negation of finite being, which is the negation of negation.  Therefore creation is really a "double negation".

An analogy that appears in my thesis might be helpful in understanding the dynamics of negation.  When Michelangelo was asked how he was able to sculpt his masterpiece 'The David ', he is said to have replied: "Creating The David  was easy—all I had to do was remove all that was not David from the stone."  Think of nothingness as the chisel we use to carve out all that is not being  from the "stone" of negated Essence.  Or consider the value of nothingness as expressed in the Tao Te Ching:

 

 

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

As for the specificity of beingness—the universal template or particular arrangement of forms in time and space that we all experience, I can only say that its design represents a differentiated reflection of all that Essence is not.  I say this because the being that we experience is "doubly-negated" Essence, whereas uncreated Essence is what we do not see, and only Essence can sense itself.  But we are all drawn to the value of the negated otherness that represents our denied essence (essent).  And when we negate a particular being from this otherness in the process of acquiring it as being-aware, we reverse the effect of the primary negation and add its essent-value to our proprietary awareness.

Just as the sentient creature is born into otherness by the negation of Essence, the value of Essence is born into sensibility by the creature's negation of beingness, the negation in both instances expressing the creative power of an otherness denied.  The dynamics of this ontology can perhaps be best appreciated as a valuistic scenario in which the primary denial of otherness ultimately comes "full circle" with the autonomous affirmation of Value.

As more and more otherness is negated as "being-aware", the negate's denied essence is gradually reclaimed, until on completion of the individual's actualized existence the negate's entire value complement is restored to Oneness.  At this point, there is no further need for an estranged negate, and individuated self-awareness ceases to exist along with its contents.  What is lost in this transcendence of the self to essentiality?  Only nothingness.  What is gained?  The sensibility of an actualized other—the valuistic perspective that is our existential reality "perfected" in the Oneness of Essence.

It should be noted as a postscript to this simplified outline that there are other metaphysical models for Creation which do not assume a negational Essence.  The more conventional theory is that all difference is actualized in existence, and that existence is merely the sum of all experience(s).  I have even been criticized on logical grounds for positing an actualized negate that is "detached" from its absolute source.  Yet, it is my firm conviction that without this estrangement the individual would lose autonomy as a free agent, unable to exercise unbiased choice in identifying the values that make each of us unique in our common passage through this relational world.  But then, this is also what makes Essentialism a unique philosophy.

 --HP   

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*The quoted excerpt from Tsion Avital's essay on Negation-Double Negation is published courtesy of the Mindprints 3 website at  www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/