The Concept of Ungrund in Jakob Boehme.

INTRODUCTION

This thesis analyses Jakob Boehme's (1575-1624) seminal concept of Ungrund, an idea which has strongly influenced the history of science in many ways. Ungrund (according to its use in Boehme's last major work, the Mysterium Magnum of 1622) can best be defined as an atopical negation which has the status of a paradox or negation in the laws of logic. For example, the Greeks used two terms to describe negation, ouk on and mh on. The first describes a negation which is absolute; an unspeakable, unthinkable negation which is totally devoid of any ontological status altogether. It is in this sense that Boehme used the term in his late writings. The second term, mh on, denominates a relative nothingness. This is the familiar "primordial chaos" or "matrix" posited by many classical writers as that out of which the natural order is created or, more accurately, out of which it emanates. Indeed, Boehme deploys Ungrund in his early works to describe a relative nothingness. However, later in his career he shifts usages; perhaps under the influence of Scultetus and the Goerlitz Paracelsian Circle among whom were his friends Tobias Kober, Abraham Walther (the well-known chemist), and Kurtz (a prominent physician). To indicate a relative nothingness, in the 1622 Mysterium Magnum and all his works thereafter, he uses "matrix" or Salitter. When he does use Ungrund in these later works, he indicates an absolute negation, devoid of ontological status. In his 1624 Mysterium Magnum, a philosophical/ exegetical commentary on the Book of Genesis, Boehme is conjoining two concepts, creatio ex nihilo and creatio ex aliquo. I then examine Boehme's concept of God Himself becoming out of this Ungrund through an iterative process which preserves the traditional dogma of Divine aseity.

Sir Isaac Newton was, in fact, influenced by Jakob Boehme's concept of Ungrund. B. J. Gibbons has notes that "there is in fact a superficial resemblance between Newton's system and Boehme's: both construct the universe as pervaded by mysterious forces of attraction and repulsion." She believes that this is a clear evidence that Boehme influenced Newton but that historians of science have not taken this seriously. I examine Gibbons' further suggestion that Newton's "demonstration that white light can be broken up into a spectrum of colours ... was devised to test a metaphysical and religious hypothesis rather than a purely physical one." Newton sought to demonstrate the presence of the Ungrund with his refracting prism because Ungrund was the central idea around which the impressive company of Cambridge Platonists gathered, of which group Newton was a prominent member.