The Relation of Philosophical Ultimate to Theological Ultimate
Being, Nothingness, and Becoming are transcendental predicates, i.e. the Universal of Universals which are predicable to everything including God, Human, and Worlds in their inseparable Unity. (One and Many are also such universal of universals which transcends the limit of categorical predicates.)
I have shown the two diagrams of Trinitarian structure, i.e. a philosophical trinity and a theological trinity. Theological trinity is well known, and every Catholic Christian professes his faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three are three persons in one substance or essence in the orthodox Christian theology. And I think with Whitehead that the Trinitarian modes of thinking are necessary when we want to transcend the limit of Greek ontology, and grasp this world, and its essential relatedness to God. But how should we understand three concepts, Being, Nothingness, and Becoming? Everybody already has some pre-understanding of these three, because these constitute the most universal conceptual frameworks. The Medieval western philosophers call “One”, “Being”, and “Goodness” as transcendental concepts, because they signify the universal of universals, transcending Aristotle’s categories. They are applicable everything including God and temporal entities. So the study of transcendentals is the proper task of primary philosophy, i.e. metaphysics, whereas the study of objects under the Aristotelian categories belongs to sciences. The Scholastic philosophers did not count “Becoming” and “Nothingness” as transcendentals, because they are under the strong influence of Greek ontology. They don’t recognize the importance of “Becoming” and “nothingness” because they considered both as essentially negative dependent concepts. Whitehead calls “One” “many” and “Creativity” as the categories of the ultimate, which play the similar role in his metaphysics as “transcendentals” in the medieval philosophy. Hegel was, as far as I know, the first Western philosopher who pointed out the paradoxical identity between Pure Being and Pure Nothingness: This logic has to do with the development of philosophical thinking in the West as well as in the East. Whereas the principle of the Western metaphysics is Being itself, or Pure Being, the principle of the East-Asian metaphysics is Nothingness. What Hegel means by “Pure Being” or “Pure Nothingness” is an abstract universal which would contradicts itself and becomes its opposite if we conceptually grasp it as if it were a “concrete” universal. “Becoming” is a higher concept than Being and Nothingness, and it both abolishes and integrate Being and Nothingness. It is a great insight of Hegel that the paradoxical Identity between Being and Nothingness should be resolved in the higher concept of Becoming. But I think that the whole problem of Becoming is not merely a conceptual one of a Hegelian Logic. It is fundamentally an existential and religious problem of Life/Death which is always transcending the standpoint of Reason itself. It necessitates us to think beyond Reason(noesis), something like Metanoetics which Tanabe Hajime advocated after the World War II. The proper understanding of Becoming in Hayathology needs more than conceptual dialectics in Hegel.
