On the Dianoetic Neutrality of Being in Jakob Böhme’s Ungrund
In the fevered twilight of metaphysical speculation, amidst the stately cathedrals of dialectical idealism and the crumbling cloisters of scholastic realism, one seldom darkens the threshold of the cobbler-prophet from Görlitz, the theosophist Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Revered by a rare few and dismissed by the academy as the luminous dreamings of a spiritual eccentric, Böhme’s system occupies a territory not so much overlooked as eschewed—deliberately, no doubt, owing to its unsettling conjunction of mystical effusion with metaphysical rigor. Nevertheless, it is precisely in this neglected garden of theological cosmogony that we find a subtle but momentous clue regarding the neutrality of Being in relation to intellect—the state I shall denote as dianoetic neutrality.
To speak of Böhme’s philosophy is already to court paradox. A thinker who claims to “read in the book of Nature and Man” while eschewing university learning, whose concepts arise not through methodic abstraction but via a vision “inwards into the center of life,” may present himself as an unlikely candidate for metaphysical sophistication. Yet this would be a grievous underestimation. Böhme’s notion of the Ungrund—a term seldom found outside his works and entirely absent from the closed lexicon of scholastic metaphysics—desires rigorous scrutiny. Conventionally rendered as the ‘Abyss’ or the ‘dark groundless ground’, the Ungrund denotes the pre-ontological condition, a non-Being from which Being itself erupts, without cause and without necessity.
At first glance, the Ungrund appears indistinct from mystical nihilism, recalling the Buddhist śūnyatā or even the Neoplatonist ineffable One. But on closer inspection, Böhme’s conceptualization diverges profoundly. The Ungrund is not a benign abyss nor a merely negational aphantasma; it is tormentous, a will toward self-actualization that aches to know itself. In his work _De Signatura Rerum_, he writes, “The Eternal Nothing makes an eternal Something. It is not to be said what it is, but it is the will to manifestation.” Rather than a mere absence, Böhme’s Ungrund is a turbulent, striving non-Being.
Now to the subtle point: Böhme insists that the Ungrund precedes all cognition, all knowing—not only temporally but ontologically. It is not that thought cannot comprehend it, but that thought arises from it, and not in a linear sense, but in a chaotic unfolding. This metaphysical shift has considerable implications not merely for mystical theology, but for any conceptual schema that roots Being in thought or vice versa. For if the Ungrund is beyond essence and yet the necessary condition of all appearing, then Being itself must be, in its primal state, dianoetically neutral—that is, neither intrinsically rational nor irrational, neither ordered nor chaotic, but preceding all dichotomies which dianoia (discursive thought) would impose.
It is commonly held in the tradition of Western metaphysics, since Parmenides and decisively in Descartes, that thought and Being are upshot to one another. “Cogito ergo sum” makes no sense without an ontological commitment to the sufficiency of thought’s self-verifiability. Böhme shatters this equation with a single, resplendent blow. The Ungrund is not sum; it is not even eris or esse. It is the possibility that Being could become, but not the necessity that it should. In this lies its neutrality. And herein lies the subtlety often overlooked by interpreters, who seek in vain to grant the Ungrund the status of a pre-existing divine mind or archetypal Logos.
To grasp the full poignancy of this notion, it is instructive to remember that Böhme saw the Trinity not as a fixed ontological structure but as something emergent from the inner tensions of the Ungrund. The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost are not pre-given substances or hypostases, but thematic unfoldings of self-recognizing contradiction. In Böhme’s model, the primary Will (equivalent to the Godhead in potential) turns inward upon itself, seeking to manifest, whereby a “flash” (Blitz) occurs—a disordinate birth of Light from Darkness. The intellect, and with it all rational structure, is a consequence of this event, not its cause or essence.
This is in stark contrast to the Hegelian dialectic, which conceptualizes contradiction within thought as itself the motive for the evolution of Spirit. In Böhme, contradiction resides in Being antecedent to all thought. Contrary to twentieth-century existentialists who posited absurdity as a function of limited human knowledge, Böhme maintains that the ground of Being itself is absurd, and not in a nihilistic sense, but in the archaic Greek sense of _alogon_—that which is unspeakably prior to logos. Hence we discern that dianoesis (rational intelligence) is posterior, not primary.
What then, is dianoetic neutrality? It is not the absence of reason, but the condition under which reason appears contingent—sprung from an abyss without rational cause. Such neutrality implies that Being does not favor thought: it is not predisposed to clarity or lucidity. Any lucidity that arises in Being is the product of its own self-recognition, and not its native form. It also entails that Being might just as well fall back into dark un-knowing as persist in Enlightenment. This renders the very project of ontology precarious and potentially tragic—a speculative ascent toward an order that the Ungrund never promised nor guaranteed.
Yet unlike the skeptical Pyrrhonist who recoils from assertion, Böhme insists on affirmation: that from this primordial indifference, Spirit incarnates, God becomes, and the world is made manifest, not out of necessity but from a love that is, paradoxically, born of wrath. For even love is not the first thing; it is the turning of wrath into harmony. The Ungrund does not begin with benevolence but with contradiction.
Some scholars have tried to flatten this complexity by assimilating Böhme to the lineage of mystical piety or Christian esotericism. Such efforts miss the essentially metaphysical problem at work: namely, that the very structures we use to speak of Being—ratio, logos, order—are themselves the byproducts of a pre-rational Will that bears no cognitive allegiance to them. Thus, Böhme is not simply a mystic but a precursor to an inversion of metaphysics where thought ceases to be the master of Being and becomes its orphan, wandering amidst categories it did not choose.
We must conclude then that Jakob Böhme’s contribution lies not in his idiosyncratic language nor his theosophical imagery, but in his unique positing of dianoetic neutrality at the heart of Being itself. A concept so rarefied that it eluded even the attention of his more systematic successors, it portends a metaphysics in which the ground of things is unguided, yet fertile; untethered, yet creative.
And perhaps it is in this recognition that his true philosophical madness lies: that one must accept the abyss not as error, but as origin.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
being, mysticism, primordiality, Böhmian metaphysics, ungrund, dianoetic neutrality, pre-logos thought