We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing
of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym
of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the
present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is
the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But
this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no
individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the
germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or
foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited
possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no
law. It is boundless freedom.
Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept,
MH: you cannot digest nothing.
highly
esteemed by writers of an existentialist tendency, but by most others
regarded with axiety, nausea, or panic.
MH: only if what they go by is intellect when in truth they know that
something larger is operating in the solar plexus.
Nobody seems to know how to
deal with it (he would, of course), and plain persons generally are
reported to have little difficulty in saying, seeing, hearing, and
doing nothing.
MH: I find this state erroneous. No one, not one human being can do
absolutely nothing. They rub their nose, they blink their eyes, they feel
hunger.
Philosophers, however, have never felt easy on the
matter.
MH: Philosophers can't even prove to themselves that they exist. They
cannot understand the dream state although they can use a lot of words, like
this pedantic whirlpool that that does make one nauseous because they
clearly see the writer trying to prove to the world that he or she is
"special" in their ability to connect meaningless words.
Ever since Parmenides laid it down that it is impossible to
speak of what is not, broke his own rule in the act of stating it, and
deduced himself into a world where all that ever happened was nothing,
the impression has persisted that the narrow path between sense and
nonsense on this subject is a difficult one to tread and that
altogether the less said of it the better.
MH: No offense, why would you even spend a second of your life studying such
lack of clarity?
This escape, however, is not so easy as it looks. Plato, in pursuing
it, reversed the Parmenidean dictum by insisting, in effect, that
anything a philosopher can find to talk about must somehow be there to
be discussed, and so let loose upon the world that unseemly rable of
centaurs and unicorns, carnivorous cows, republican monarchs and wife-
burdened bachelors, which has plagued ontology from that day to this.
MH: pure fantasy like the nuttiest people on this ng. Like st.
Nothing (of which they are all aliases) can apparently get rid of
these absurdities,
MH: because they are absurd.
but for fairly obvious reasons has not been invited
to do so. Logic has attempted the task, but with sadly limited
success.
MH: Because logic cannot even fathom "love, hate, unfounded hatred,
jealousy." Why? Because these are character flaws which must be worked on,
and philosophy can't get over its sense of superiority and greatness to even
proceed to the next step. It reminds me of a vain person, who can't keep
his eyes off himself.
Of some, though not all, nonentities, even a logician knows
that they do not exist, since their properties defy the law of
contradiction;
MH: no comment
the remainder, however, are not so readily dismissed.
Whatever Lord Russell may have said of it, the harmless if unnecessary
unicorn cannot be driven out of logic as it can out of zoology, unless
by desperate measures which exclude all manner of reputable entities
as well. Such remedies have been attempted, and their effects are
worse than the disease.
MH: it is madness, the remedy is Torah.
Russell himself, in eliminating the present
King of France, inadvertently deposed the present Queen of England.
Quine, the sorcerer's apprentice, has contrived to liquidate both
Pegasus and President Truman in the same fell swoop.
MH: this is what I call storybook mentality. So in love with creatures.
The old
logicians, who allowed all entities subsitence while conceding
existence, as wanted, to an accredited selection of them, at least
brought a certain tolerable inefficiency to their task. Of the new it
can only be said that solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant--
MH: Why am I not surprised at the Latin. This is the arrogance of the
"Chesterton." people who chase their tales all their lives and don't bother
to realize why they are truly here.
they
make a desert and call it peace. Whole realms of being have been
abolished without warning, at the mere nonquantifying of a variable.
MH: Everyone who ever tried to erase the Jewish People is now gone. The
Babylonians, the Romans, the Greeks, Media and Persia. What you are using
too many words to say, is that you are wasting your life.
The poetry of Earth has been parsed out of existence--and what has
become of its prose? There is little need for an answer.
MH: Prose is just an arrogant people following like lemmings, the baton of a
tester, assigned to find out what we are all made of, and are willing to
fight to develop.
Writers to
whom nothing is sacred, and who accordingly stop thereat, have no
occasion for surprise on finding, at the end of their operations, that
nothing is all they have left.
MH: No, nothing is what you are going to get out of all this "study" you do.
The logicians, of course, will have nothing of all this. Nothing, they
say, is not a thing, nor is it the name of anything, being merely a
short way of saying of anything that it is not something else.
MH: and you wasted our time, why? Probably because you consider
yourself...smart.
"Nothing" means "not-anything"; appearances to the contrary are due
merely to the error of supposing that a grammatical subject must
necessarily be a name. Asked, however, to prove that nothing is not
the name of anything, they fall back on the claim that nothing is the
name of anything (since according to them there are no names anyway).
Those who can make nothing of such an argument are welcome to the
attempt. When logic falls out with itself, honest men come into their
own, and it will take more than this to persuade them that there are
not better cures for this particular headache than the old and now
discredited method of cutting off the patient's head.
MH: Wait a second, so there are two groups of people, you are of the "honest
people." amd then there are the rest? Pure arrogance. This is a symptom of
a life gone to seed.
MH: This is all I can take of this gas.
The friends of nothing may be divided into two distinct though not
exclusive classes: the know-nothings, who claim a phenomenological
acquaintance with nothing in particular, and the fear-nothings, who,
believing, with Macbeth, that "nothing is but what is not," are
thereby launched into dialectical encounter with nullity in general.
For the first, nothing, so far from being a mere grammatical illusion,
is a genuine, even positive, feature of experience. We are all
familiar with, and have a vocabulary for, holes and gaps, lacks and
losses, absenses, silences, impalpabilities, insipidities, and the
like. Voids and vacancies of one sort or another are sought after,
dealt in and advertised in the newspapers. And what are these, it is
asked, but perceived fragments of nothingness, experiential blanks,
which command, nonetheless, their share of attention and therefore
deserve recognition? Sartre, for one, has given currency to such
arguments, and so, in effect, have the upholders of "negative facts"--
an improvident sect, whose refrigerators are full of nonexistent
butter and cheese, absentee elephants and so on, which they claim to
detect therein. If existence indeed precedes essence, there is
certainly reason of a sort for maintaining that nonexistence is also
anterior to, and not a mere product of, the essentially parasitic
activity of negation; that the nothing precedes the not. But, verbal
refutations apart, the short answer to this view, as given, for
instance, by Bergson, is that these are but petty and partial
nothings, themselves parasitic on what already exists. Absence is a
mere privation, and a privation of something at that. A hole is always
a hole in something: take away the thing, and the hole goes too; more
precisely, it is replaced by a bigger if not better hole, itself
relative to its surroundings, and so tributary to something else.
Nothing, in short, is given only in relation to what is, and even the
idea of nothing requires a thinker to sustain it. If we want to
encounter it an sich, we have to try harder that that.
Better things, or rather nothings, are promised on the alternative
theory, whereby it is argued, so to speak, not that holes are in
things, but that things are in holes or, more generally, that
everything (and everybody) is in a hole. To be anything (or anybody)
is to be bounded, hemmed in, defined, and separated by a circumambient
fram of vacuity, and what is true of the individual is equally true of
the collective. The universe at large is fringed with nothingness,
from which indeed (how else?) it must have been created, if created it
was; and its beginning and end, like that of all change within it,
must similarly be viewed as a passage from one nothing to another,
with an interlude of being in between. Such thoughts, or others like
them, have haunted the speculations of nullophile metaphysicians from
Pythagoras to Pascal and from Hegel and his followers to Heidegger,
Tillich and Sartre. Being and non being, as they see it, are
complementary notions, dialectically entwined, and of equal status and
importance; although Heidegger alone has extended their symmetry to
the point of equipping Das Nichts with a correlative (if nugatory)
activity of noth-ing, or nihilating, whereby it produces Angst in its
votaries and untimely hilarity in those, such as Carnap and Ayer, who
have difficulty in parsing "nothing" as a present participle of the
verb "to noth."
Nothing, whether it noths or not, and whether or not the being of
anything entails it, clearly does not entail that anything should be.
Like Spinoza's substance, it is causa sui; nothing (except more of the
same) can come of it; ex nihilo, nihil fit. That conceded, it remains
a question to some why anything, rather than nothing, should exist.
This is either the deepest conunddrum in metaphysics or the most
childish, and though many must have felt the force of it at one time
or another, it is equally common to conclude, on reflection, that it
is no question at all. The hypothesis of theism may be said to take it
seriously and to offer a provisional answer. The alternative is to
argue that the dilemma is self-resolved in the mere possibility of
stating it. If nothing whatsoever existed, there would be no problem
and no answer, and the anxieties even of existential philosophers
would be permanently laid to rest. Since they are not, there is
evidently nothing to worry about. But that itself should be enough to
keep an existentialist happy. Unless the solution be, as some have
suspected, that it is not nothing that has been worrying them, but
they who have been worrying it.
http://www.nothing.com/
