I DO NOT EXIST

I DO NOT EXIST

D. R. Khashaba

In Creative Eternity: A Metaphysical Myth I said that the whole of metaphysical philosophy is summed up in ‘I am’. But if ‘am’ is, as the grammarians tell us, part of ‘to be’ and if to be is to exist, then it is more metaphysically significant to say “I am not”: my inner reality, my mind, my soul, my person, does not exist. Let empiricists and positivists not cheer at this for the sequel will not please them. My mind does not exist BECAUSE it is REAL. My body, my flesh and bones, my brain, exist and since they exist they are perpetually vanishing; they have no reality; they are shadows in Plato’s Cave. My inner reality – the only reality of which I am immediately cognizant – does not exist since it is not a thing, not an object, not an entity. My inner reality is sheer act, is will, is creativity. It would be misleading and confusing to see it as a creative agent: the creativity not the creator is the reality. If ultimate Reality is named God, then God does not exist, is not a creator, but eternal creativity.

The above is the gist of my metaphysics. If it looks hard to grasp that is not because of any difficulty in the thought but because it completely overhauls common linguistic usages. That was inevitable. The presentation of original thought necessarily demands a semantic revolution. But the thought itself is not entirely new. Mystics, who have probed deepest into their inner reality, in speaking of God and ultimate Reality, have often spoken of Nothing, Nothingness, Dark Night, Cloud of Unknowing. Plato’s Form of the Good can neither be defined nor described but only spoken of in simile and metaphor. And Socrates’ Diotima can speak of the ultimate vision only in negations (Symposium. 210ef.).

I contend that my metaphysics of ultimate Reality as not an existent object or entity or even a transcendent God but as eternal creativity or Creative Eternity that can be spoken of only in metaphor and parable and myth — this metaphysics resolves the contradictions and quandaries of traditional metaphysics and disentangles the entanglements of science and philosophy which have been harmful to both science and philosophy.

Dear Reader, if you find in what I have written above an inkling of sense, though it be obscure and confusing, I hope you will seek clarification in the numerous books in which I have been expounding a philosophy that I claim to be original.

D. R. Khashaba

March 31, 2017

Posted to https://philosophia937.wordpress.com and Http://khashaba.blogspot.com