Friday 17 May 2019

Smilen Markov: The historicity of Personal Being – a Dialogue in Absentia between John Damascene and Martin Heidegger

In the tradition of Byzantine philosophy the term ἐνούσιον denotes the manifestation of hypostatic being through a particular essence. In the Christological speculation of St. John Damascene ἐνούσιον has a more specific usage and indicates the hypostatic uniqueness, revealed through the essential properties. The model implies intersubjectivity, since the identity of each hypostasis is genealogically related to the other hypostases of the respective essence. Thus the concept of ἐνούσιον demonstrates that essential being is historical, the paradigm of historicity being the event of the Incarnation of the Son of God. Through his ἐνούσιον in human nature Christ becomes Son of man, thus confirming historically his eternal hypostatic unique property – the sonship. In that sense the Byzantine speculation on the ontology of the hypostasis is an answer in absentia to Martin Heidegger, who, in his Sein und Zeit, laments the vanishing of the aspect of historicity and temporality of being in the metaphysical discourse after Aristotle.

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