The etymology of the Greek word meon is uncertain but it is usually taken to mean “lesser” or small. It has come to have a negative implication in Western philosophy. However there is a way to see the meonic in a positive sense which may have a use in metaxological philosophy; I am focussing here mainly on its use for commentary on literary texts, but its use could be more general. In fact it has been used in a more positive sense; Paul Tillich make various references to the meonic which see it in a positive way, and Nicholas Berdyaev (in Freedom and the Spirit) will refer to ‘meonic freedom’ which, for him, is a kind of nothingness and a creative source. This is somewhat equivocal perhaps, but it does give us a hint of something potentially more interesting if we ask: how can a kind of nothingness be any kind of source let alone a creative one? After all hasn’t King Lear already observed that ‘nothing will come of nothing’?

William Desmond suggests that, ‘One might think of the absurd as a surd: an excess that is elementally at work; that enables something other to itself’ that ‘is at the boundary, or beyond’ (Desmond, 2018, 312 – emphasis Desmond’s). This can also be the ultimate “crossing” point where our having come to be (as originally sourced, not self-originating beings), comes again to nothing as it must do for all mortal creatures. For Desmond, however, a sense of coming to nothing is something we may experience in perhaps more extreme living situations or encounters as ‘like a return to zero in which we can refresh our interface with creation…a breakdown, but in the breakdown something more original breaks through (ibid., 313 – emphasis Desmond’s);¹ yet if these ‘zero’ experiences are “extended” to the ultimate moment, the “actual” zero point of being/nothing, life/death, the moment of maximum meonic contraction, ‘lessness’ or smallness, nevertheless ‘something more original breaks through’ and the ‘problem’ of how nothing can come of nothing, the problem incidentally of all infinite regressions, is “solved”: there is no nothing; there is an ‘interface’ with creation itself. If so the concept of meonic expansion is the necessary corollary to the meonic contraction with meonic denoting something like an energia or “active principle” which can perhaps help to aid our understanding, especially at these boundary points where our language itself begins to break down as it grasps towards that which, as we speak about it temporally, must still transcend us, into that beyond-the-temporal which is both before and after us.² Yet, we can and do make the attempt to describe it. As Hamlet says, it is part of our ‘large discourse/ Looking before and after’ (see below) and perhaps, in this admixture of contraction/expansion, which I am calling a fuller sense of the meonic, in boundary experiences of the type referred to, something, or “something” beyond something, so to say, and contra Lear, may come from “nothing”.³

So, I am using meonic here in a positive sense, perhaps more like a verb than an adjective, linguistically speaking. I will explain further. Parmenides ‘Is!’ can serve to remind us that absolute non-being is for us an “impossible” notion or condition. Certainly we can phrase it and find different ways to say it, but absolute non-being is always envisioned, experienced and communicated from within the ‘Is!’ of actual being, by language speaking beings like ourselves and also by all beings in their “isness”;thus for all being(s) absolute non-being cannot actually “be”. However, if the meonic, in its contractive sense, can as such be seen as a kind of indigence-beyond-indigence, or a “final moment” before a hypothetical nothingness or non-being, yet it may also afford a positive, potentially non-final “moment” where being qua heteroarchic Being (see below for further comment on the difference between Being and being as existent being(s)) may or even will, as it were, re-assert itself thus “enabling” a re-connection (re-ligare) from a re-cognition (by beings) of the impossibility of its (Being’s) ultimate negation.

Such experiences, essentially religious (from re-ligare) ones, can be seen in, for example, St. John of the Cross’s encounter in his ‘dark night of the soul’ or Desmond’s notion of the ‘return to zero’ where at the point of maximally intense contraction of self and soul “something” mysterious (recall Desmond’s notions, too, of ‘the intimate strangeness of being’ and ‘posthumous mind’ – also see note 1) communicates, often forcefully, and recovery of and a return to life (and living) becomes manifest as a kind of hopefulness. We may ask if this is inevitable, the question is entirely legitimate, even if finally unanswerable; but we may remember the suggestion that even those who commit suicide may be desperately expressing a misguided hope; a hope that is still nonetheless a hope, even if “only” for the cessation of a present suffering (seen thus, and perhaps this is the inevitability) and as an improvement in existent being. In any case, and as I am using it here, the meonic is (always?) finally positive and any contraction “becomes” as it were an expansion. We can see meonic contraction as a kind of limit simpliciter and meonic expansion as more like the meonic limit case: a meonic affordance of the plenitude which is the fullness of the Ground of being: the fullness of Being itself.⁴

I will try and put this into a more Desmondian and theological expression, and also to move us more fully from the language of being(s) into the more overtly metaxological, heterodoxical and metaphorical “language” of Being.

Being is always a fullness, the overdetermined fullness of God (or, if you prefer, Transcendent First Reality or Subsistent Existence itself – the terms here can be seen as synonymous), and our temporal being (existence) is “underwritten”, or sustained, at all times by (the) eternal Being (which, to stress the point, does not exist in the way that created beings do: it is the heteros, the absolute Other). The concept of meonic contraction plus expansion is a notion of an energia within the metaxy, but this energy is here seen as balancing the poles of being (the limits simpliciter of beings and the absolute limit case of Being itself – see also Note 4) and the tensions of beings that are consequent upon our existence between these poles. Therefore, in the silence or stillness of meonic contraction the communication of the presence “beyond” temporal presences (as that which is eternally present), the creating agapeic source of beings’ existences may, and there is an element of the ancient sense of the festive here, hopefully be heard.⁵ T.S. Eliot hears it in the silence of the church at Little Gidding (in the Four Quartets) in ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’ which ‘Is England and nowhere. Never and always’. It is heard again when – in Desmondian terms – the conatus essendi in extremis makes way for the more primal passio essendi. That “voice” of the agapeic source, the communication from or communion with God (as transcendentally ultimate – Transcendence “itself”, so to speak) is, of course, always there to be heard beyond the clamour of our noisy lives, so often lived in the distracted desires of the ensnaring networks of the ethos of serviceable disposability and their utilitarian, instrumentalist reduction of the aesthetic; yet in moments of quietness, meditation or prayerful reflection to, perhaps, the final moment(s) of a living being – the ultimate point of meonic contraction – is when the meonic (quietness, our indigent “smallness”, silence) is the active principle or energy at the boundary where being-as-existence becomes most permeable to saturation by the agapeic source of being beyond being: the source of the temporal , material world’s coming to be at all. This is the return, the re-connection (re-ligare – the basis of religion – see also Note 1): where the emptiness, the nihil, is revealed as the illusion and the meonic as contraction is finally (become) an “expansion”, into the positive fullness of being that is more primal than any transitorily negative temporal/material being; perhaps, too, a fullness where a “re-balancing” of the passio essendi (as our originally agapeically given participatoriness) with the conatus essendi of our living that both the exigencies of life and the assertiveness of our (agapeically given) free will(s) can cause to severely unbalance.

In conclusion, and to return again, briefly, to how art, as an aspect of the aesthetic showing of the world, can help to express some of these notions. For Desmond the aesthetic is one of the ‘potencies of being’, and one of the ways we communicate our experiences of it is through art.

In Hamlet, when seen from the perspective that I have been outlining, Horatio is generally more receptive to the participatorily experiential than Hamlet himself is.⁶ In Desmondian usage, this is Horatio’s experience idiotically of otherness: the intimate strangeness of the otherness within himself (in its idiocy a kind of experience of otherness that we all have – if we become conscious of it) which, nonetheless, is precisely that which enables him to acknowledge otherness per se. Although Hamlet’s final words in the play, ‘The rest is silence’, resonating as he crosses the boundary between life and death, may be even more significant – what, exactly does ‘silence’ signify here? Certainly, I would suggest, merely “nothing” would seem unlikely, especially when heard with the concept of the meonic contraction/expansion that I have been describing here, which sees it (the meonic) not as the agapeic, otherness qua heteros – the overdetermined origin – or any of the names we have this given, but rather, in my usage here, and to re-iterate the point I made earlier, as a way to describe something like an active principle, an energia, so to say, a conduit for communication, indeed both “betweeness” itself and in the between (the metaxy): of the inter-communication of beings and the heteros at their (permeable) boundary. Thus the concept of meonic expansion is an attempt to think, inevitably, in a metaphorical language, beyond the zero; it is, then, a name itself for another language model of the fullness of being (there can be no limit to the number of models or representations of this fullness – it is inexhaustible) to help facilitate an understanding of a patient form of action, a porosity nonetheless actively receptive and participatory: it is thus very different to most of Hamlet’s activity in the play which, as I have described it in Hamlet in the Metaxy, is compulsive as he conjures “reasons” to act and comes to abandon internal thoughtful activity (itself a positive action) about how to externally in the world.⁷ Of course (and this is, it seems to me, why we need the idea of the meonic expansion to balance the meonic contraction: it can help us to come to terms more fully with the exigencies of life and their living with and through them), as temporal, physical beings we are often (always?) obliged to act, as Hamlet must act in his situation, yet perhaps Hamlet’s personal tragedy, and the sense of the tragic that Shakespeare’s dramatic art presents and confronts us with is precisely this dilemma: that posthumous mind and the agapeic sense of the other – that ‘large discourse/ Looking before and after’ – the very sense of the fullness of being itself, is all too easily overlooked and lost in the fury of circumstance.

Notes:

1. As in Dostoyevsky’s experience on the morning of his “execution” when he thought he was about to die. In the face of imminent death, however, Dostoyevsky’s world seems to become, perhaps surprisingly, more expansive. Reprieved unexpectedly, and as he struggles to reconcile himself with his changing fate he experiences, as Desmond describes it, ‘a kind of resurrection: he noticed the air, bird’s song, the morning freshness; simple elemental things, tasted as inexpressibly good; simple things some dying people tell us strike them as miraculously there’ (Desmond, 2001, 176 footnote – emphasis mine). This sense of thereness is thus felt as before and after (it is a form of what Desmond calls ‘posthumous mind’ – here as a kind being-beyond-time) as the Ground of Being that will expansively be revealed as always transcendentally present (before and after): contraction, it seems, may also be or become a kind of expansion in experiences of this extreme type.

2. A recent headline, ‘Our language is inadequate to describe quantum reality’, makes clear this struggle to “capture” a (quantum) reality that is always expanding beyond our ability to fully grasp and our ability to express it. See the online article accessed January 23^rd 2023 at bigthink.com/13-18/quantum-uncertainty-language/?utm_source=pocket_discover_science

3. At the beginning of the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow titled Beyond the Zero, Thomas Pynchon quotes Werner von Braun’s observation that ‘Nature knows no extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death’. Indeed the novel’s main protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, does in the end seem to transcend death, at least in a sense. Yet, it seems to me instead that Slothrop, who becomes a kind of “crossroads” rather disperses into a “something” that is indistinguishable from nothingness, especially if we ask what has happened to Slothrop the person as a an individual: the singularity that is (or was) Slothrop. Where is that, if there is only dispersion? And how could we express it in any terms regarding the individual character Tyrone Slothrop? At best, this would seem a merely material transformation and not, pace von Braun, a spiritual one, as Slothrop the person has been lost and in that sense nothing still seems to come of nothing in that there is nothing of his own thingness, spiritual or otherwise, in the end anyway. This would seem to be a general conundrum for post-modernism of this type. Another such is the issue with the 2^nd law of thermodynamics – entropy – which Pynchon also writes extensively about, both in Gravity’s Rainbow and elsewhere. Yet this too would seem to be a material/temporal problem (certainly not a spiritual one as such) in that the “everything that runs down” is the universe of matter, time and space, but the notion of meonic expansion denotes a fullness of being which is not physical in this way but metaxic and also radically metaphysically other/heterodox.

4. Barry Miller, the Australian analytical philosopher, in his seminal work The Fullness of Being makes the following important observation about the concept of limit:

A basic difference between a limit simpliciter and a limit case is that the former differs merely in degree from members of the series of which it is a limit case: the limit simpliciter of a series of Fs is itself an F. The limit case of a series of Fs, however, is decidedly not an F. Consider, for example, the speed of moving bodies. As we are told, the upper speed limit is that of light. This is a limit simpliciter and it is a member of the series, albeit its maximum member. Although it might occur to us in an idle moment that speed has also a lower limit simpliciter (0 km/s), we should be wrong, for zero is not a speed at all. Speed has no lower limit simpliciter, since there is no speed below which there could not be a still lower speed. An obvious difference between the lower limit case and the upper limit simpliciter of the speed of moving bodies, therefore, is that the upper limit simpliciter is indeed a speed (300,000 km/s) and hence a member of the series, whereas the lower limit case is not a speed at all, and hence lies outside the series of which it is the limit case (Miller, 2002, 137).

Miller will extend this understanding of limit to ultimacy or Subsistent Existence, understanding this ‘in terms not of limits simpliciter (maxima)but of limit cases’ noting that ‘there is an absolute divide between limit cases and limits simpliciter’ and ‘Morover the limit case that is common to many different series of property instances’ because this is without limitation, would be ‘far richer still. Its riches would exceed absolutely those of any creature…’ hence ‘Thus there can be no question Subsistent Existence being vacuous or impoverished.’ In fact it would also necessarily be the limit case of precisely the meonic expansion that I have outlined here: as the limit case of meonic contraction now seen not as ultimately indigent but, like Dostoyevsky’s world after his reprieve, as aspect of ‘the ultimate ontological density’ – Subsistent Existence itself – that ‘Of all entities, it is the one that thoroughly deserves the title “fullness of being”’ (ibid. 161). Note, too, that Miller is careful to denote this as an ‘entity’ not a “thing” – it is beyond our language of existent being(s)/non-being or “thingness”.

5. As Steven E. Knepper observes, ‘The artwork can also offer the two constitutive elements of festivity: participatory affirmation and a heightened temporality’ (Knepper, 2022, 197). Eliot perhaps transforms his actual experience in the church into a communicative artwork.

6. See my essay Hamlet in the Metaxy.

7. If Adam, at the invitation of God, names things (Genesis 2.19-20), as Bob Dylan reminds us in his song ‘Man Gave Names to All the Animals’ (from the album Slow Train Coming) we are name-giving creatures too, as we must be as language speaking ‘animals’. Yet our words are slippery because “reality” is hard, if not impossible, to “pin down” (and as the writer of Genesis also tells us language allows us to become godlike, ‘knowing good and evil’ – Genesis 3. 22), and the very real risk taken by those who would philosophise at the boundary between the physical and metaphysical and who needs must give names to their ideas, is that those ideas will be misinterpreted. Just as there are two modes of being, absolute being and existent being, nevertheless we self-reflective existent beings, human being certainly, can be, or become, aware of this doubleness inherent in reality. Eric Voegelin expresses this concisely: ‘Reality in the mode of existence is experienced as immersed in reality in the mode of non-existence and, inversely, non-existence reaches into existence. The process has the character of an In-Between reality, governed by the tension of life and death’ (Voegelin, 2000, 233). Thus our being is metaxic, doubled, prone to equivocity and finally, to us, a mystery, and thus all our language and naming resists reduction to univocal certainty in any absolute from. Yet the drive, what Desmond calls our conatus essendi, of our desire for certainty induces a tendency to “reduce” the mystery to deterministic “solutions”, what Voegelin would call doxic thinking, ‘that tends to focus on a doxa and to confuse the model with the reality it symbolically represents’ (Webb, 1981, 280). All our naming of the ultimate, Voegelin’s ‘First Reality’, Miller’s ‘Subsistent Existence’ or Desmond’s ‘heteroarchically overdetermined agapeic origin’ and the ‘meonic expansion’ that I have outlined here, are all models of reality. I would add the caveat, however, that the model of the meonic that I have presented is NOT any kind of determinacy; nor is it even a model of the fullness of being: it is a metaphor for an energy that is an active, dynamic process.

Bibliography

Desmond, William (2001) Ethics and the Between. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Desmond, William (2018) The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being: On the Threshold between the Aesthetic and the Religious. Eugene OR. Cascade Books.

Knepper, Steven E. (2022) Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Miller, Barry (2002) The Fullness of Being: A New Paradigm for Existence. Indiana. University of Notre Dame University Press.

Voegelin, Eric (2000) Order and History, Volume 4, The Ecumenic Age, Edited by Michael Franz. Collected Works of Eric Voegelin Volume 12. Columbia. University of Missouri Press.

Webb, Eugene (1981) Eric Voegelin: Philsopher of History. Seattle and London. University of Washington.

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The featured image is “Philosophy: Allegorical figure” (1800) by Nicolai Abildgaard, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.