ABSTRACT
For Aristotle and Neoplatonism after him, it was a logical category fulfilling a logical necessity. This logical necessity was that truth lay at the end of a process of reduction to the most simple. This broadly remains the logical template of God in Western culture and in the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths: truth in relation to error, and the simple in relation to the compound. This chapter traces the development of these templates of logic and being together in European thinking as the culture of aporia. This culture presents itself in three phases: first is the triad of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; second distinctive phase of the culture of aporia is Kantian; and third phase is Hegelian. In the ancient templates of the logic and being of truth and untruth immediacy is the One and mediation is self-consciousness. Philosophy, religion, and art are cultures of the irreconcilable relation, or aporetic relation, between the individual and truth, God, and beauty.
