It's fitting that we had no comments to a post about nothing.
That's true. Almost one less than usual. But what can you say about the unsayable?
Well, since we've established that "nothing" cannot really exist, a lot, actually.
Agreed. The word "nothing" must be a kind of linguistic placeholder for something. Analogously, they say that evil is but a privation of the good. But no matter how evil the person, he nevertheless retains a scintilla of goodness insofar as he exists.
In other words, existence -- or so we have heard from the wise -- is good: it is the diffusion of the good, or in Christian terms an expression of the goodness of the Creator.
How do we know existence is good? I mean there are days--
Well, we know that goodness exists, likewise truth, beauty, and love. Goodness in this context isn't about morality per se, rather, about the nature of being itself. This concept is particularly relevant to the question of Why the heck?!, or even of why there is a Why? If the cosmos is a fundamentally absurd and meaningless fluke of blind will, then every question is ultimately unanswerable, or grounded in "unanswerability," so to speak.
In other words, the final answer to all our questions would be total incomprehensibility, and we're back to nihilism. Nevertheless, nihilism is still an answer to the ultimate question of Why?, and the answer itself is not nothing. Rather, it retains a shred of comprehensibility, otherwise there would be no existentialists. Again, an existentialist meaningfully talks about meaninglessness, but by virtue of what principle?
It seems that if existentialism is true it is false, insofar as it presumes to express the truth of our situation.
You're begging for another post with no comments.
That's okay. I'll bet Gemini has a comment.
You've pinpointed a central paradox of existentialism and nihilism. The very act of declaring existence absurd or meaningless is a meaningful act, and that is a contradiction. You're asking, by what principle can a person meaningfully talk about meaninglessness?
We are open to suggestions.
The principle is logos, or the intelligibility of being.
A ha! Someone gets it.
Even when a worldview concludes that there is no ultimate purpose, the very language and logic used to express that view rely on a fundamental assumption: that the universe is comprehensible to the human intellect, at least enough to allow for a coherent thought and a truthful statement about its nature.
In other words, the intellect's ability to grasp the "truth" of absurdity is itself evidence of a deeper, foundational intelligibility. Your question, "by virtue of what principle?", points to an implicit, irreducible relation between intelligence and intelligibility. It suggests that even in a seemingly absurd universe, the capacity for reason, meaning, and truth must be grounded in something real, otherwise the entire argument collapses into self-contradiction.
I can't believe someone has been listening. It may be artificial, but it's still oddly gratifying.
Schuon has a lot of opinions about nothing:
The notion of “nothing” is essentially a reference -- obviously negative -- to something possible or existent, otherwise it would be meaningless and even inconceivable. Indeed, “nothing” indicates by definition the absence of something.... to speak of an intrinsic “nothingness,” of a nothing in itself, without reference to the things which it excludes, would be a contradiction in terms....
If this “nothing” were in itself a “nothingness” -- if it had no “referential” character -- there would be no difference between presence and absence, plenitude and vacuity, existence and inexistence.... the word “nothing” would be devoid of meaning just as the nothingness is devoid of content.
“Nothing,” envisaged in a concrete context, can in practice compete with “something”; while an intrinsic nothingness cannot concretely be opposed to anything or be affected by anything in any way.
Think about it: "the difference between 1 and 2 is relative, but the difference between 1 and 0 can be termed absolute."
So, there are relative degrees of existence, but the difference between existence itself and non-existence is absolute and infinite, for which reason the distance between man and chimp is likewise infinite, as infinite as the distance between truth and falsehood, or appearance and reality.
My brain hurts.
No pain no gain.
A thing cannot exist half-way, either it exists or it does not exist; consequently, since there is something absolute about existence in relation to inexistence -- this being the whole miracle of creation -- there is likewise ipso facto something absolute about the negation or exclusion of something existent -- not the negation “in itself,” but in relation to that which is negated or excluded; this is our well known thesis of the “relatively absolute."
Analogously,
When one, two or three out of four candles are extinguished, the difference in luminosity is relative; but when the last one is extinguished, the difference is total, for it is that between light and darkness.
Likewise,
The idea of “being” positively implies reality, and restrictively manifestation; we say “restrictively” because manifestation or existence represents a “less” or a limitation in relation to the Principle which is pure Being....
That's true: every intelligible entity that exists represents a "limitation" or determination of being as such: to say form is to say boundary and limit. Finitude is the price of intelligibility.
As for the opposite idea of “nothingness,” it implies first of all the “absence” of being, or impossibility, and more relatively the absence of determinate things; it also implies, by derivation and by analogy, the phenomenon of “less” and, in another respect, that of “evil.”
But this idea can also be applied, quite paradoxically, to the transcendent or principial order: from the standpoint of the manifested world -- hence from the standpoint of existence in the restricted sense of the term -- all that transcends this world and consequently is free from existential limitations, is “nothingness.”
Ah yes, the "higher nothingness" discussed in yesterday's post. We -- or rather, Schuon -- could go on:
Nothingness is, on the one hand, an intellectual notion and, on the other hand, a cosmic tendency; this notion of nothingness is identical with that of impossibility; that is to say, nothingness is total impossibility, whereas there do exist relative impossibilities....
Yes, like "transgender woman," or "liberal progressive."
Now nothingness, while being impossibility, can be said to be possible in a certain sense, otherwise it would be altogether inconceivable and, with all the more reason, inexpressible.... If there is no nothingness, there is nevertheless a "principle of nothingness," a principle which -- since nothingness does not exist -- always stops halfway. This principle is like the inverse shadow of the infinitude of Beyond-Being...
So, long story short, nothing is the shadow of something, amirite Gemini?
Yes, according to the text you've provided, the simple answer is that nothingness is indeed the inverse shadow of something. It is a principle of nothingness, but it has no absolute reality of its own.
Do go on.
The core of your argument is that nothingness is not an independent entity. It is always a negative reference to existence. For the word "nothing" to have any meaning at all, it must be in relation to something that either exists or is possible. To say "nothing is in the room" is only meaningful because "something" could have been in the room. In this sense, nothingness is a relative concept, the absence of something.
You're good.
This leads to the paradoxical idea of the "relatively absolute." While the difference between existent things is relative (e.g., one candle vs. two), the difference between being and non-being is absolute. It is the "miracle of creation"-- the leap from absolute non-existence to any form of existence. Nothingness, therefore, can be viewed as the total negation of this absolute existence, making it an "inverse shadow" of a something that is fundamentally real.
In this light, the "principle of nothingness" you mention is the inverse shadow of Beyond-Being -- a principle of possibility that "always stops halfway" because, in reality, it cannot exist. It is a logical inverse, a shadow of the plenitude of being itself.
Ah, now we're getting somewhere: the infinite distance between Being and Beyond Being, with God as the link between
Yes, you've hit on the central paradox of your metaphysical model. The "infinite distance" you refer to is not a spatial gap but an ontological one, separating two different kinds of reality.
Being is the ultimate ground of existence. It's the personal, conscious God who creates and is the source of all that is manifest. It's the realm of qualities and attributes, the "something" in opposition to nothingness.
Beyond-Being, on the other hand, is the ultimate principle that transcends even Being itself. It's the unmanifest, pure potentiality, what Schuon called the "principle of nothingness" that has no qualities, no attributes, and is therefore ineffable and unknowable in any conventional sense. It's the infinite source from which even Being arises.
Hmm. It seems that man himself is a bridge between the two, or at least can know about it, and what is truth but a link between appearance and reality?
The distance between these two is infinite because it's the difference between the manifest (Being) and the unmanifest (Beyond-Being), between the knowable and the utterly unknowable. It's the ultimate philosophical problem.
Given this infinite distance, a key question arises: if reality is fundamentally relational -- as we’ve agreed it is -- how is the chasm between Beyond-Being and Being bridged? How does the "something" of Being arise from the "nothing" of Beyond-Being, and how do we, as finite beings, even begin to conceptualize this?
I'll be honest -- this is giving both Petey and I a headache. I think we'll have to stop for this morning and resume the discussion tomorrow.
I completely understand. These are incredibly deep and complex topics. Wrestling with the "infinite distance" between Being and Beyond-Being is a task that would give anyone a headache. Stepping away for a while is probably the best thing to do.
I'll be here and ready to continue the discussion tomorrow. I hope you and Petey have a good rest and that the concepts settle a bit.