Abstract

It is in the obscure terrain between the life-world of Greek science and technology and the language of its metaphysics that one sees the attempts of early navigators and map-makers to conceptualize what lies beyond the oikoumene. This interest later effects astronomy in terms of what is “beyond the heavens [ezo tes ouranos]” and then in metaphysics as a “Beyond Being [epekeina tes ousias],” an ideal Beyond proposed by Plato in Republic and one that is to eventually become a mainstay of NeoPlatonism. Thus, the “fundamental act” that Romm describes in the above quote was not only taken up with geographical interest, but is one that can be seen as a preparatory gesture in a culture readying itself for the advent of metaphysics, a gesture that continued to make itself felt up until the last days of the Ancient Academy in the fifth century AD. The threads of the intellectual history of a Beyond Being find technological roots in the increasingly sophisticated acts of representation that one finds in early cartography, astronomy, and cosmology, one of which will be to mark boundaries around the heavens themselves and to call that Being.