I wrote:
I don't know what "pure, single, positive bases of existence" means.
Sciwriter says:
Such as fundamental substance, 'all is consciousness', a Being, ex nihilo, a matrix projector… any metaphysical basis promoted.
Ok. I still don't totally understand it, but the problem probably isn't you, it might be the idea itself.
I'll define 'metaphysics' to mean inquiries into 'ultimate reality', in the sense of what really and most truly exists.
So are you arguing against the idea that metaphysical inquiries can ever be resolved? And perhaps for the stronger idea as well that any proposed resolution is inevitably going to be 'absurd'?
It's interesting (to me at least) that I was just reading about arguments about precisely these issues arising in Buddhist philosophy some 2000 years ago. What follows is a capsule history of Buddhist thinking on this issue. (Writing it helps me clarify it in my own head.)
***********************
There was a broad tendency, beginning in the last centuries BCE, involving a number of different Buddhist philosphical schools, called 'abhidharma'. This project was inspired by meditation practice, basically trying to break down experience into primary existents that they called 'dharmas'.
What marked something as a primary existent was its resistance to being reduced to more elementary constituents. Dharmas were effectively irreducibles, out of which all the rest of reality was built molecularly. These fundamental atoms are what they are because of their own nature, their basic substance or essence, you might say. The technical term for that was 'svabhava', meaning 'own-being'.
Compounded things are what they are simply because of the transitory and causally-governed structure and arrangement of their more primary constituents. They are like a pile of sand -- there isn't any separate interior 'pile' in there that can be revealed by taking away all the obscuring sand-grains. We just assign the word 'pile' conventionally to the heap of sand, when all that's really there is the sand. Forms of being that are compounded out of more basic elements were said to be 'empty' of their own unique essence or substance (or svabhava).
The Buddhists argued pretty vigorously among themselves about precisely how these atoms should be construed. Some (like the Sarvastivadins) treated them like timeless Aristotelian essences, while most favored the idea that they were instantaneous and causally conditioned, some suggesting that they are material atoms and still others psychological atoms, the instantaneous and constantly changing building blocks of any possible experience (of a reality whose ontological status remained undetermined).
What held all the Buddhists together on the same page was the idea, which everyone agreed on, that Buddhists could deconstruct everyday experience into a constantly changing flow of these dharmas in meditative experience, even without any final conclusion as to what the dharmas are. In particular, they could deconstruct their own sense of self into dharmas and they all agreed that the self was empty.
And inevitably, there were critics of the whole abhidharma project. These people argued that when considered properly, all of the dharmas were themselves empty of svabhava too. The sautrantikas pioneered this tendency and it reached its philosophical maturity in madhyamaka. What these people argued against was the whole idea that there are any ultimate constituents of reality at all. Analysis into dharmas might be a useful tool in meditation, but argued that it could be continued on without end, with nothing able to resist its force. In other words, nothing possesses svabhava or own-being. Everything is just a conventional application of some word like 'pile' to the pile of sand. No noun refers to a substance or an essence, which don't exist. This is the 'emptiness of dharmas', or 'dharma sunyata'.
The madhyamakas in turn split up into two varieties. One were logicians who favored syllogistic reasoning and believed that they were really making a coherent metphysical statement about how reality is when they insisted that dharmas (and everything else) was 'empty'.
The other party favored reductio-ad-absurdems over syllogistic reasoning, insisting that they made no metaphysical assertions themselves at all, but only displayed the absurdity in everyone else's metaphysical reasoning.
