You have built yourself a rationale. It may have some kind of truth for you. You may just be very unlucky and stuck in a basically depressed state. But philosophically, you need to deal with the fact that your story lacks the kind of naturalism that understands life to be a mixed bag. And that is generally all right. — apokrisis

A mixed bag? Generally all right? Which one is it?

The question the structural pessimist asks if the value of being as such. Not the value of living now that we are here, or what could be done to make such an existence valuable. We want to know whether simply being is good or not. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle raises a similar question when he asks what the very function of being-a-man is and not specific functions a person can later assume (carpenter, philosopher, soldier, etc). This is the structural way of looking at things, an example of the ontological distinction. There is a being, and then there is the being's Being. In this case, we want to know what the value of this Being is, i.e. what the value is of a person's existence qua their very existence, and not in terms of what society they live in and what roles they play in this.

Optimists are selective and strategic in their defense of life. What they cannot defend, they blame pessimists for over-reacting to. Or they attempt to psychoanalyze pessimists as being "depressed" or "schizoid", because the existence of the pessimist is incompatible with the affirmative narrative and must be "explained away" via some evanescent category. If pessimism did not hold at least some element of truth, it would have been demolished from the get-go. Pessimism would be definitively shown to be incorrect, not simply asserted to be incorrect. Yet a look at history shows a pattern of thinking that correlates to the structural pessimist's point - life is, at its core, bad. I'm even willing to say you cannot truly understand the religious mind, or understand the essence of religion unless you at least accept that there is some truth to the proposition that life is suffering. Nor can you understand human relationships, which so often are based on sharing a burden. I do not doubt you understand either, which makes me believe you are not recognizing that you do, i.e. you have a cognitive bias (re: Pollyanna principle of rose-tinted glasses)

Instead of a mixed bag, though, I would say a more accurate picture is that you cannot have any good without the bad. The good is optional, the bad is required. You already recognize this when you say life is "generally" good - i.e. despite the fact of all the evils, life is still "worth it". But, I will maintain, when considering the life of a person, as a person, the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that they will die. There are other things you can be sure about as well (beyond reasonable doubt):

• That the person will die (already mentioned)
• That the person will need before they enjoy
• That the person will have to wait more than anything else
• That the person must learn through mistakes
• That the person will feel pain, and at least sometimes extreme pain (consider a child breaking their arm, pulling their baby teeth, falling off their bike and smacking their head, getting dumped by someone; traumatic and intense for the child, a spectacle for the adults who treat the child as a child and thus ignore them)
• That the person will be raised by people they did not choose to be raised by
• That the person will make others suffer, even if it is unintentional
• That the person will have to defend their existence if they wish to continue to live (related to previous)
• That the person will make serious mistakes that jeopardize their ideal dreams and thus must "settle" with the below-expectation, the sub-par, the mediocre. Nobody excells in everything, nobody achieves their greatest dreams in entirety.
• That the person must have their limits violated in order to know their limits
• That the person will experience the death of their parents and/or loved ones
• That the person will be assimilated into a politicized structure that perversely attempts to "fairly" distribute violence in accordance with strategic goals of particular people
• That the person will feel despair at points in their life, and contemplate suicide/their own mortality, thus every person is a potential suicide (Cioran: life is a state of non-suicide)
• That the person is a "puppet" that lacks free will and a substantial ego that is immortal (an existential horror)

Death is death. I'm going to die just like 90 billion people and trillions of other organisms have before. I don't have any beliefs in an afterlife, so I'm pretty sure I'll just cease to exist, I'm 66 and Clarks don't generally live past 75. So, it's coming pretty soon. I can feel it coming closer. After many years of ignoring it, I can't really do that anymore. So? No big deal. That's how it works. It's not as if it's not fair or something. I don't really want to die. I'm having a pretty good time.

What' your point? Why would that change anything? — T Clark

It's great you are having a good time and continue to find enjoyment in living. You, like most everyone else, do not want to die. That's what so tragic - whatever life gives us that dazzles our minds, it eventually takes away. Everything is impermanent, flux, and thus ultimately nothing. We come from nothing and go back to nothing, and nothing happens and nothing changes. Man cannot live, he cannot think, Sub specie aeternitatis. He must limit his mind - the healthy mind is one that is not aware of its incoming doom, and thus not crippled by despair.

It's funny. Getting weaker. Healing more slowly. Not being able to do things you used to be able to is really interesting. You learn important things about yourself. If you've spent your life ignoring your body, as I have, you're forced to become more self-aware. It is so satisfying to have been around long enough that when something happens you don't get all excited like other people do because you've seen it twice before. It's like you can see into the future. You know how things play out. It's fun. — T Clark

Yes, I imagine that is one of the pleasures of aging - a better sense of perspective. There is nothing new under the sun. The cycle continues: birth, suffering, death. It's sad, but the fact that it's unnecessary makes it absurd.

The Platonistic idea is that universals, or eidos (ideas) are the "most real" things that are. All material, concrete phenomena are but mere shadows, caricatures of the ideal Forms. This is a thoroughly idealistic metaphysical theory.

A more pragmatic and realist theory comes from Aristotle, and later Aquinas, with the theory of concrete universals and the doctrine of substantial being. Substances now belong to natural kinds. Universals exist, but only insofar as they are instantiated.

I now cannot fathom how something like nominalism makes sense, or why we might be motivated to adopt such a stringent denial of abstracta. I also suspect nominalism played a hand in the development of the mind-body dualism, and later (eliminative) materialism. Under nominalism, abstract entities are but "thoughts" that have no correlate to anything. They exist in the mind, and only in the mind.

Yet patterns, regularity, multiple realizability, repetition ... these are the basis of reality, I think. But difference, change, randomness, these are also the basis of reality, I think. Similarity cannot exist without difference, since similarity still implies a mis-match, or lack of identity. But difference cannot exist without similarity, either: the fact that we can compare two+ things means there is something about the two+ things that make them capable of being analyzed in this way.

So as it stands, I think universals absolutely must exist (although I have not committed to either Platonism or Aristotelianism, or something else). With respect to things like "facts", "states of affairs", "propositions", the nominalist may have something to offer. But in general, it does seem as though abstract entities are the "ideal", while concrete entities are the "real". Form-matter...Aristotle?

Damn, this thread got resurrected. I'll get around to responding.

Evolutionary Biology (Third Edition), by Douglas J. Futuyma. Got it cheap and used, good deal.

Thanks for the recommendation, .

I don't "assume" existing is good, I experience it as good. The fact that you don't says something about you, not about existence. You don't find life enjoyable or satisfying, therefore there must be something wrong with life rather than there being something wrong with you. — T Clark

This is a straw man of philosophical pessimism, I think. (Philosophical) pessimism does not claim someone cannot feel good at such-and-such time and place. Schop1, myself and others have consistently focused on the structural features of life that are negative. Nowhere have we argued that existence is bad because we don't like it at such-and-such time and place. What we have argued for is the idea that the "negative" components of existence are in some way more fundamental than the "positive" components of existence.

To re-orient the discussion, then, in order to illuminate this nuance: how do you feel about death? A philosophical pessimistic understanding of death is that it is immanent to life. You will find this idea widespread, that death is written in the contract of life, that life just simply is death. Often people will say death is an evil, but it's not here yet so it's not worth worrying about; or they will say that death, despite being an evil, somehow gives life "meaning". Generally, death is seen as "outside" of life, a "threat" to life, something that "happens" on a particular date and a particular place. But this is superficial - life entails death, life is the process of dying, life is the perpetual decline of health.

Nobody is going to deny that health is good. Yet life is the decline of health. Sooner or later you lose it, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it. Life kills us all, and oftentimes painfully. This is an example of the structural negativity of life. Other examples include our moral impediment, the onerous burden of need and desire, the transitory nature of pleasure, etc. The philosophical pessimistic perspective is that life, stripped of any contingencies (where and when you were born, what opportunities you have, personal traits, etc) is at-its-core negative. Positive things are wholly intra-worldly and arise as a reaction to the structural negativity of life. An analogy: life is an over-cooked piece of meat, and you only slather on so much sauce because you need to mask the poor quality of your meal. Pleasure, positive experiences, these are all additions to life that are contingent and impermanent.

^ changed my life, Toto is love :heart:

That's a good analogy, haha! :cool:

I see life as a continual shifting of the weight from one "arm" to another. Positive experiences happen when this weight is temporarily lifted - for instance, when Sisyphus reaches the top of the mountain, and the boulder slips and falls back down and he is temporarily relieved of its burden. In these brief moments, we catch a glimpse of something beyond our own existence. We wonder what it's "all about". We feel sad, but also can feel a sense of companionship when we look around and see everyone else pushing their own boulders, straining under the weight. Each time up the mountain, the boulder gets a little bit bigger and a little more difficult to bear. Ethics consists in sharing the weight of someone else's boulder, shifting your own burden around to make room for theirs.

Occasionally, someone is crushed by their boulder; they are thrown off the face of the mountain and vanish, never to be seen again. This happens to everyone, eventually. Sooner or later we slip up and the boulder comes crashing down, and that's the end of that. Recognizing the banality and absurdity of our condition makes positive experiences that much more precious. It's ironic, I think: declaring life to be good makes its pleasures that much more ordinary.

If both of you are reasonable and tolerant, you will go your separate ways and not think too poorly of the other person. Different premises entail different conclusions. I'm free to choose which premises I find most appropriate, and so are you, and there's nothing I can do to change your mind unless you agree to play by the rules of discourse that I agree to play by. All of our beliefs stem from an inner feeling of conviction that some particular thing is the way it seems to be, and the way things seem to be can vary wildly between people.

One thing that might prove helpful to remember is that people generally don't know why they do things. They contrive reasons after the fact, but fundamentally it is the passions that run the show. This explains why Nietzsche saw philosophy as auto-biography, for the passions determine the presuppositions which determine the conclusions. It's perspectivism - philosophy emerges from a person as a flower does from its stem. It's very much so a growth - almost like an organ - and sometimes it grows cancerous and it has to be cut off.

Is one side of the argument right or neither? Can both be equally rational and informed? — Andrew4Handel

I think it has less to do with who is right and who is wrong and more to do with who has the better rhetorical skills, who intimidates more, who has the capacity to change minds with symbols, who can dazzle the mind, etc. Pure, unadulterated truth is nowhere to be found.

More generally, what good can be said about Hegel? — Ansiktsburk

Not much, at least according to Schopenhauer:

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I think the mark of an intellectual is to be well-acquainted with your own ignorance, and to always be striving to deepen one's understanding. A "true" intellectual cares little about their reputation as an intellectual, and views inquiry as open-ended, anarchistic and collaboratory. The solitary thinker is as impotent as they are arrogant.

The Departed: 7/10, going off my memory of when I watched it. An exciting thriller with an interesting twist at the end. The soundtrack is very enjoyable to listen to on its own.

Philosophizing, we can now say, is extra-ordinary questioning about the extra-ordinary.

[...]

In Greek, "away over something", "over beyond," is meta. Philosophical questioning about beings as such is meta-ta-phusika; it questions on beyond beings, it is metaphysics. — Martin Heidegger

-Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

"9-11, I'd like to report an incident."

"What is it?"

"Someone on the internet made a broad, general assertion and failed to justify their metaphysical assumptions!"

:brow:

So, philosophy is "highly individualistic" except in cases when you decide someone is "purify it"? Promoting deep immersion into subjectivity then rejecting forms you disagree with is a contradiction. — Jeremiah

You might as well have said that promoting individualism entails precluding rational argumentation. Trying to "purify" philosophy by filtering out anything that does not pass an idiosyncratic criterion is counter-productive to the individualistic ethic I am advocating.

Just because I advocate individualism doesn't mean I can't criticize individual perspectives that threaten this individualism. My view is that philosophy just is individualistic in virtue of its essence, including philosophies that attempt to impose a systematic order upon it. In fact, I am not "advocating" for individualism in philosophy so much as I believe I am pointing out the reality of philosophical discussion. Theory and abstractions aside, philosophy is an individualistic enterprise, whether we like it or not. One cannot isolate a philosophical question by itself; the particular always brings along the universal. Philosophy is so diverse and so complicated that it is virtually impossible to impose any form of order or system that will not provoke or silence others.

I think, then, that it is true to say that philosophy never was, is or will be one single determinant thing. It means different things to different people with different values who live in different places at different times, speaking different languages and having different experiences. I believe this is true, and that this entails a perspectival interpretation of philosophy. It is a mild form of relativism/agnosticism that some may label as (methodologically) pessimistic: disagreement is inherent, opinions will continue to clash and there is no feasible way of overcoming this epistemological nausea. The Dream of Reason is a sham and got a lot of people killed. Of course, we still argue for things with passion and conviction, but it's naive to think there is any significant efficacy to this. That's how philosophy works - it doesn't.

Stop the meta-narratives, stop the totalizing schemata, stop the imperialism of rationalism. All you are doing is silencing voices that are trying to be heard.

Actual philosophy? No True Scotsman? A primitive descent into tribalism?

Philosophy is philosophy! Stop trying to purify it!

Well, your reply came across as disagreement, and I felt it characterized my position unfaithfully. I said philosophy is highly individualistic and inherently puts the questioner in question, and because of this individuality, attempts to systematize philosophy will fail. We don't know what good philosophy looks like, other than that is contains elements that are commonly found in other species of things we consider good as well. In fact we don't even have a common consensus as to what philosophy is. How can we agree on what good philosophy is when we can't even agree what philosophy tout court is?

None of this means we should accredit the same respect to charlatans as we do scientists, or forgo the use of precision and coherency. All I am saying is that asking what good philosophy is, is akin to Socrates demanding the essence of justice or virtue. We can obviously point to particular instances of good philosophy. But "good philosophy" in the abstract is an impossible concept to flesh out. It might even be malformed.

Philosophy is philosophy. It's up to the individual to determine whether it's any good. I don't think I am "giving up" so much as I am recognizing the impossibility of systematizing something as diverse as philosophy. I'm being historical. One person's good philosophy is another person's shit philosophy. I am espousing a mild form of relativism, or rather, agnosticism. If we agree on something, great. If we disagree on something and can't resolve our disagreement, then we go our own ways and stick to our perspectives. That is what has happened and what will continue to happen. That's how philosophy works.

Oh, man, you got me cornered. Don't shoot! :yikes:

Like I said, there isn't a single model for this. Bad philosophy is obviously going to include anything that is factually incorrect, clearly logically invalid or poorly presented without the proper theoretical virtues like the principle of charity.

We are never going to arrive at a satisfactory definition of what good philosophy is, because philosophy is highly individualistic. We can't even agree on what "philosophy" is - you might even disagree that it's individualistic, although it would kinda prove my point.

:chin:

There is good philosophy and there is bad philosophy. But I don't think there's one single model for what good philosophy is. I recognize good philosophy when I see it. I'm not sure what essential features there are about good philosophy that aren't also features of good science, good religion, or whatever.

Well, you turned out to be a disappointment. :shade:

Come back when you learn how to read.

In terms of evidence, and thus reason to engage in argument regarding the existence of either, there is none for either entity. Debating the existence of God is not philosophical it is engaging in petito principi and shouting tu quoque at whoever disagrees with you. As long as there are atheists willing to be drawn into this quagmire theists will have their own existence guarenteed.

Only by ignoring it will we be able to free ourselves of theism. — jastopher

Isn't this just a massive petito principi? Aren't you just begging the question against theism? You come here with an already pre-made picture of what God is, what theism is, what religion is, and what philosophy of religion must therefore be. No wonder people don't take your atheism seriously. If you aren't even open to discussion then there's no point in even engaging with you as an atheist.

The fact that you have such a shallow, narrow and overly-hostile attitude to theism shows you are not familiar with the literature surrounding philosophy of religion, and clearly are unaware of sophisticated forms of theism that are compelling and serious. This is not the courtier's reply: this is you just not reading, and going into a gunfight armed with a toothpick.

An atheist is one who attempts to disprove the existence of God/gods, but there is also a group who have no reason whatsoever to believe in supernatural beings or have no interest in what those who do believe in them have to say on the topic, and consequently don't waste their time in trying to disprove that which there is no reason to believe in in the first place. I suspect that most of those categorised as atheists fall into this group, but calling them atheists seems wrong since one need not be opposed to something that one considers does not exist. — jastopher

Then these people are not doing philosophy, and thus are not philosophical atheists. Call them what you want - irreligious, non-believers, whatever. If they consider the existence of God a worthless debate that wastes time, then I have the right to ignore them. They are not participating or contributing.

Atheists play into the theists hands by according them respect and a platform. The category to which I refer accords theists about as much attention as the Easter Rabbit. — jastopher

Yup, as I said before. When you treat a debate about the existence of God as akin to a debate about the Easter Rabbit, you have forfeited your right to be listened to. It's disrespectful, a straw man, and a waste of everyone's time.

Oh, I can't remember. It might not even be in that thread. But I distinctly remember dealing with a few self-proclaimed "agnostic atheists" on this forum and others.

So then you do see them as separate paths? — Jeremiah

Do I see philosophy and science as two separate paths? No, absolutely not. Neither one has full hegemony over the field of inquiry. Additionally, I would include religion in the mix.

There is bad science. There is bad religion. There is bad philosophy. In other news, the sky is blue and I hate cucumbers.

Here.

Actually, this has come up several times here in the past.

If we are doing philosophy of religion in the analytic sense and arguing about the existence of God, then there are precisely and only three basic positions to take: theism, atheism and agnosticism. I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered vitriolic idiots claiming agnostic atheism is not only a coherent position but also the "default" position.

BOTH theists and atheists have a burden of proof. If you are an atheist, then you believe God does not exist. You don't have to be extremely confident about this - it's fallacious to assume beliefs can only be held with absolute certainty.

In my experience, "agnostic atheism" is a veiled attempt at naturalistic question-begging. The reason why "agnostic atheists" claim to be the "default" position is because they take naturalism (and oftentimes scientism) to be true as a given, when the reality is that naturalism just is the argument. Hence why they tend to get so goddamn touchy when this presupposition is questioned - it means they actually have to start doing philosophy and provide arguments! Naturalism just is an argument for atheism - but "agnostic atheists" don't want to have to argue for it. They want naturalism to be a given, and thus force theists to have all the burden of proof. Nonsense question-begging.

Just like anything else, if you believe something then you ought to have reasons for believing what you do. It's very, very simple. Atheists need to provide reasons just as much as theists. The agnostics have the default position, not the atheists. All this talk about "lack of belief" and "default positions" is quite literally nothing but question-begging nonsense on behalf of the atheistic crowd.

If we move away from analytic philosophy of religion and into previous forms of philosophical religious discussion (such as Scholasticism, or post-modern theology), then we arrive at different ways of construing the debate. Scholasticism will still accept atheism as a valid position but will absolutely demand the atheist provide good and compelling reasons for believing atheism to be true. And post-modern theologians might scrap the whole "debate" as misguided and re-construe the positions in terms less "metaphysical" and more social, moral and phenomenological.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Plato: “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”

Very true quote, the ignorant will always get angry attack those who expose their ignorance.
On the contrary you should thank me for trying to step up the philosophical skills amongst these cozy chatters, to evolve humankind from the stone ages to information age. — HexHammer

Something-something persecution complex; disagreement misinterpreted as hostility and transformed into self-righteous ego-inflation.

Boy, aren't you masculine! 8=========D

Intellectuals have an over-inflated sense of the importance of their discipline and make broad, sweeping generalizations of other disciplines they are unfamiliar with? :gasp:

There will never be a cohesive and inclusive model for inquiry. Everyone thinks that their favorite philosopher, or their chosen scientific field, is the be-all-end-all pinnacle of everything, and fuck everything else. Echo-chambers exist throughout the sciences and humanities. One person may doubt another person's self-evident truths. et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. At the end of the day, nothing changes, nobody has learned anything, and we all go home just a little more disappointed in others.

If I had to criticize philosophers and scientists for one thing, it's that they tend to make things into a big narrative, with philosophy or science being the "ultimate" that eclipses any other discipline. Philosophy does, in my opinion, technically hold the cards as the "ultimate", but it's often so impotent and slow-moving that you might as well just give the torch to someone more competent. If science is to be the model for everything and anything (as naturalism wishes it to be), then scientists need to be philosophically literate. Before, we had scientist-philosophers, who really were the model intellectuals, and who held a deep respect for philosophy. Nowadays you just have douchey wannabes spouting racist and sexist hate-speech and pretending it's science, parading around and T-bagging dissenters. Rah-rah, we're the best! Rah-rah!

Well, color me embarrassed.

Sure, yeah. You could try reading Being and Time alongside a companion guide, Richard Polt's Heidegger: An Introduction is quite good in my opinion - you can probably even read that first without Being and Time, even.

Heidegger is obscure and could have written more clearly in some places. It is what it is, but I think the charge of obscurantism is over-inflated. Heidegger is hard to read but he's not that hard.

This describes relative nothing, which is similar to, as you say, the hyper-thingness of God in Aquinas. God is not a thing, and so "nothing," but not non-existent either and so not absolutely nothing. — Thorongil

I have never heard of relative nothing apart from in this discussion. But again, by comparing "relative" nothing to absolutely nothing, you are still making judgments as to what absolutely nothing is.

But Peircean semiotics gave a credible model of being as pure naked spontaneity. It supplies a mathematical, hence scientific, image. That gives a better purchase on the issue than a poetic description. The poetic view already presumes an experiencer as part of the equation - the story of this vague nothingness that is beyond any determinate somethingness. — apokrisis

But of course - Dasein is the allegedly-privileged mode of understanding Being. It is where the question of Being arises. At least in some.

"Spontaneity" has a metaphysical ring to it but fails to offer a suitable replacement for Heidegger's Sein. It's still ontic, it's still scientific and thus cannot fulfill the requirement necessary to answer the question of Being. Akin to using metal detectors to find plastics.

Yes, this eloquently describes the trap I spoke of. When we speak of absolute nothing, we're not talking about "something" to which these words refer, because an absolute nothing cannot be referred to by definition. Absolute nothing is not a funny kind of something. It is the complete absence of anything and everything. I wouldn't call this a contradiction so much as a paradox or a quirk or language. — Thorongil

But again: you tell me that "absolutely nothing" cannot be referred to by definition, yet all around do just exactly that. It's not a funny kind of something. It is the complete absence of anything and everything.

It seems clear to me that when you say we cannot refer to absolutely nothing by definition and thus cannot be referred to at all makes the same error the atheist does when insisting the god of Thomas Aquinas adhere to man-made languages. It is inappropriate to see the nothing as something - yet it is still "something", just as God is not a thing but is still "something".

Where does he refute it? This interests me because Schopenhauer is adamant that being is merely a linguistic copula (although I'm not sure he's consistent about this). — Thorongil

Most prominently in his magum opus Being and Time. The ontological difference is crucial to his entire system of thought.

Language is playing tricks on you. Absolute nothing cannot strictly be thought or even spoken of. — Thorongil

Yet here you speak of it. Clearly we can speak of something about absolute nothing, if we are to say it cannot be spoken of. For this to be true would require that there be something about absolute nothing that makes it impossible to think or speak about. If we cannot speak about nothing, then we cannot speak about how we cannot speak about nothing, because the fact that we cannot speak about nothing is, itself, about nothing, so we have fallen into a performative contradiction,

As it stands, Heidegger was acutely aware of the charge that Being, the is, is merely a linguistic copula. He obviously denied and in my opinion thoroughly refuted that view.

To address this bit, what are you actually experiencing but some counter-image, some umwelt, of your own imagining? It doesn’t escape the charge of being idealistic. — apokrisis

Nor was it supposed to. Specifically, the il y a refutes egological idealism, procedural solipsism in which something only is when the ego assimilates it into the totality. That there is Other that resists this assimilation is what is understood via the il y a. It is a "primordial", pre-theoretical encounter with something transcending ourselves. Dusk is a good time for such an encounter since it's often filled with shadows, representing objects that cannot be fully seen. There is mystery, unknowability. There is a world that eludes our total comprehension and which will always be alien in some way. That dusk is a good time to experience the il y a does not mean it is a psychological illusion rooted in some way to contingent states of the world. I only use dusk as a example.

The il y a identifies that which cannot be assimilated to our conceptual system. We can talk about Big Bangs, supermassive black holes, vibrating strings or strange quarks, but we are still talking about something. Something that exists. We "know" what existence is - look outside! See all the things that exist!, you may say. Yes, many things exist, but I want to know what it means to exist. What the Being of a being is.

You are probably aware that Heidegger and his contemporary philosophical phenomenologists were aware of semiotics and worked on sign theory themselves. Semiotics is not a replacement for the question of Being, although it certainly is relevant.

I don't, that's the point. And not only don't I know it, I can't know it. — Thorongil

So because you can't know it means it is...what? Nothing? What do you mean by nothing?

I want to know what you mean when you say something is nothing, i.e. what it means to not-exist. That we can coherently predicate certain things that do not exist is clear enough - for we can already say that such-and-such does not exist, or that it did exist but no longer does, or that it never existed. Many factual claims depend on the reality of nothing.

What I want to know is what this nothing is. Distinguishing between a being and its Being is necessary for this question to make sense. For even if we say something doesn't exist, i.e. it is not, we are still saying something about the being in question.

The point I'm trying to make is that "nothing" is still "something", just not the something we are used to in the everyday world of existing things.

How do you know what a square circle is, then? Fine, let me ask you this: do you recognize the ontological distinction between a being and its Being?