It's either Something or Nothing

“We are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” 

 - Nietzsche 

Is all God talk just games ? Are we trapped in language, truth forever inaccessible ? Are there things with essences ? Can I point to and know a Gorilla, a human, a car, as a real thing with a real determined form ? Or is everything flux ? 

Theistic and neoplatonic thought take God as the transcendent ground of which reality is the manifestation, is a working out of the intelligibility of being, its conformity to the structure of thought (“grammar”). 

 Eric Perls continues, 

 "The alternative to the principle that to be is to be intelligible, therefore, is the nihilism which afflicts so much of contemporary thought and culture. 

For if being is not what is apprehended by thought, then thought does not apprehend being. This in effect means that there is no being, since whatever we call “being” is not being but a projection, interpretation, illusion—in short, nothing. 

 If reality is not as thought must apprehend it, then there is no such thing as reality.

 Conversely, if thought is not the apprehension of being, then all thought, in that it never apprehends being, is illusory. 

Nihilism may indeed be said to consist most fundamentally in the denial of the intelligibility of being. 

 Only if being is always already given in thought can we avoid the nihilistic conclusion that “there is no truth.”

 The Neoplatonic vision takes as its starting point the intelligibility, which is to say the reality, of being. From the intelligibility of being follows its necessary multiplicity and determinateness, and consequently its status as dependent or derivative, as differentiated presentation, as manifestation of God. 

                                      Plotinus 


"Heidegger shows how “metaphysics of presence,” which on his view dominates the whole of Western thought, leads to a technological comportment toward being in which being is revealed only as Bestand, resources or stockpile, and how this technological instrumentalization of being makes possible modern science and leads inevitably to nihilism. 

 As the alternative to this ultimately nihilistic, scientific- technological stance toward being, Dionysius offers a contemplative-liturgical stance in which being is not an object for mastery and exploitation but a gift which is received only in being given and a symbol which is known only in being unknown. 

 The Dionysian, Neoplatonic understanding of all things, including animals, plants, and minerals, as theophanies which analogously think, live, and love, may be set against the objectifying and reductionist view of nature which has led to its exploitation and destruction, and which is largely the result of a very different religious philosophy that opposes the natural both to the human and to the divine.

 In opposition to such a view, Dionysius and his Neoplatonic predecessors offer a compelling and philosophically grounded vision of all reality as the presence and manifestation of transcendent divinity."

                                        St Dionysius