Fragment: 5

In order to understand the nature of Aten, we must return to Classical Greece, but jump ahead to around 350 B.C. The time of Aristotle. There is no doubt that Aristotle's system of philosophy is a monument to the human intellect, and what it can accomplish. The problem with Aristotle's philosophy is that it is mythology. It is one of the purest mythologies of Aten ever achieved. Remember even the Neoplatonists viewed their task as to look at Aristotle's system through Platonic lenses. As I have shown in previous Fragments, Aten is the law of non-contradiction deified, and represented as a One. When I say that Aristotle's system is one of the purest forms of Aten's mythology, I mean less mythological hold overs from the old polytheistic religions than other mythologies of Aten (Christianity, Islam, etc.). Aristotle's system has provided the skeleton, or framework for all subsequent mythologies of Aten. It can be said that Plato invented the objective world, but it is Aristotle that made the objective world real, and showed how to create the objective view. The objective world is created by using the law of non-contradiction (Aten) to deep cancelling out properties, qualities, or entities that cannot be universalized, thus the same for everyone. The two criteria generally used to set the law of non-contradiction to create the objective world are function and origin. We classify entities in reason by function and origin. It must be said that sometimes these criteria do not agree with each other. An example would be in the two different ways to classify primates. One way uses function, the other origin (D.N.A.) giving different results. As I said myth. We must dismiss the modern understanding of myth as ignorance. Myths are useful, and often contain information. One only has to look at psychology to see how much information the Classical Greek myths contained. I shall briefly look at Aristotle's forms in relation to Plato's Forms. To begin there are three places where it has been said that reason resides. The first place is Plato's divinized mental realm, this becomes the mind of God in Christian theology, and is identified with the Son of the Trinity. The material or sensible world is only a reflection of the realm of the Forms. The second place that reason can reside is in the things themselves. This is the view of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hegel. That the objects contain reason, the forms of Aristotle. The formula for this is the more necessary things are the more reason they contain. Aristotle's forms are the reason of things, while matter is what is contingent, or accidental in an object. The more reason something has the more it approaches absolute thinking (Aten). The third place reason can said to exist is in the minds of individual subjects. This is the view of Kant, on which I shall have more to say later. To get back to Aristotle. It is the law of non-contradiction that creates the objective world by cancelling out all that is not necessary in an entity. An example would be dogs. Dogs do not have to have the same color fur to be a dog. The fur color is an accident, only those qualities that are universal to all dogs are part of the form of Dogs. In this way Aristotle creates the Great Chain of Being by going from the most accidental to the most necessary (universal). This is how Aristotle created his cosmology from Earth to God, the Great Chain of Being. Earth and the space below the Moon is the most accidental, and contingent, the further one gets from Earth the more necessary the realm. Aristotle represented his as a system of concentric spheres, with the Earth being the hub, and the sphere of the fixed stars the outermost sphere. It is in the sphere of the fixed stars that motion originates, passing its motion on to the sphere below all the way down to Earth. Lastly, I must say something about Aristotle's God. In the "Physics" Aristotle places God beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, but this was to suggestive of subjectivity: a point of view, a reference frame. So in the "Metaphysics" Aristotle makes God transcendent, literally God has a point of view from everywhere and nowhere. God has the only completely objective point of view. Aristotle describes God as thought thinking itself. To understand what Aristotle means by this we shall examine the Terrifying vision of J. Bohme and the final formulation of Aten in Hegel next Fragment. a Necromancer.