Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Such a conception of contradictory evolution is compatible with Judeo-Christian cosmology. That cosmology begins with a creation ex nihilo, posits a perfect being that generates evil, believes in a just being that gives humans independent judgment but punishes them for using it, includes accounts of virgin births and other miracles, says that the infinite becomes finite, the immaterial becomes material, the essentially unitary becomes plural, and so on. Given the primacy of that metaphysics, reason must give way. Reason, for example, must be adapted to the demands of this metaphysics of creation: As yet, there is nothing and there is to become something. The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning. The beginning, therefore, contains both, being and nothing, is the unity of being and nothing; or is non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time non-being.[50]