6 pages and no mention of kierkegaard, heidegger, sartre, st. john of the cross, pseudo-dionysius, parmalee of melniborne, or daisy de bingen? or even zen? not even that loathesome positivistic schmuck, carnap, and his trite accusations of "nonsense" (i think i've encountered a number of his offspring). and only cursory mention of nothingness as it relates to being. this is the comparative religion subforum--do we have to be talking physics?
the bane of the empiricists: the phenomelogical experience of nothing. kind of anti-scientific, that.
got plenty to choose from, but we'll go back nearly 15-odd years to the 14th floor of perhaps that ugliest of monstrosities amongst gems, robarts library in toronto (i'm sure glaucon has seen this one). that crappy television series, paper chase was shot here because it looked "more harvard than harvard." that, and it's cheaper to shoot in canada.
anyhow, i was rambling on about how "the gospel of philip" is actually a comprehensive soteriological text, only it's fragments had been arranged in the wrong sequence. the computer center was a trifle warmer than the rest of the building but not this warm, and seldom nauseau inducing (but not quite yet Nauseau). i looked about me and the studentish-sorts had all but entirely morphed into faceless, featureless entities far more extreme than any leper i had ever encountered. anyone who has spent time amongst a leper colony in south asia should know what i am talking about: the orifices were merely blackened holes and the limbs appeared incongruous appendages. and so, it seemed an appropriate time to get the hell out of there.
control over my own appendages had slipped, and i abandoned the idea of properly saving my file and packing away my belongings. rather i "focused" on simply making my way to the elevator. but there was no "i" to focus, i had slipped away and what remained was raw perception--of my now unrecognizable form from afar. moreover, everything had changed more than ever so slightly and locating this "elevator," which now seemed such an elusive and foreign notion, did take nothing short of an eternity. still, "i" eventually located something, lest i not be here today and some "buttons" were pushed and this form slithered into the smaller box. the ground had quietly slipped away as had everything else, and i'm not entirely certain that my entry into the box was accomplished by "walking"; and likewise, the buttons and all such things had just as quietly slipped away.
and then there were the voices, but was anyone actually saying anything? i've no fucking clue, i just know that the voices were there.
the common refrain that such things are "ineffable" seems contrived, but language does prove inadequate nonetheless: dread (rather, urspruengliche angst), unheimlichkeit (what does "uncanny" really mean? not that "un-home-like-ness" is really all that much better, but at least it does suggest something), alien-ness (again, befremdlichkeit is only somewhat more adequate). not very helpful. but is "slipping away from the totality of being (seiende im ganzen)" and only dasein remains, with emphasis on the da, any more useful? one could cite some relevant bits from heidegger--particularly passages from "what is metaphysics?" (the post-script most especially)--for the "technical" explanation, but perhaps carnap was right (just this one time, of course): such is nonsense. it doesn't really say anything.
das nichts nichtet--the nothing nothings.
or perhaps lewis carroll, being the logical sort, could get this matter straightened out:
"i see nobody on the road," alice cried.
"i only wish i had such eyes," remarked the king. "to be able to see nobody! at that distance too."
still, not very helpful.
i don't think that one can really say much of anything at all about nothing. this annihilation of "self," the experience of depersonalization and derealization, "the dark night of the soul." all useless.
wittgenstein "knew" this as well. and as soon as carnap, russell, ayer, et al (the vienna circle sorts) figured this out, they also realized that they had gotten the tractatus all wrong: it's not simply that it's "nonsense" to talk about that which lies outside of space and time; rather, any effort to speak about such is inevitably doomed for the start--for that which is most important really cannot be spoken "about." well, maybe one can speak about it, but that is all: to speak it is another matter altogether--"nonsense."
and this "nothing" lies at the core of being--our being (or there being, dasein). when you know it for yourselves, you simply know it for yourselves, and trying to talk about it only makes one appear a fool. (not that i care.)
"nothing" is hardly a concept, and one deigns to think of it as such, one misses the mark entirely. this reification of nothing is nothing more than a futile endeavor. sunyata can only be experienced, hence the problem for the empirical sciences. evidence? how is one to demonstrate one's findings? is it repeatable? sure, but a lot of good that does when noone can really articulate what exactly is repeatable.
that's all that nothing is to me, at least.
anyhow, fire away!
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