Nothing & Everything

athelstane

This is however a pure statement of that which is called the Way, for truly, 'Nothing is everything and everything is nothing.' Through the ages it has been easy to say, yet it has always been impossible to be fully explained. I have spent a long time meditating on this very point and wish to share some of what I have learned from it. It has to be examined as a whole statement though because it cannot properly be dissected into smaller parts without losing the truth of it.

I was once given this as a phrase in Japanese and unfortunately I have long since lost that sheet of paper that it was written on. I only have the faint memory of an approximation of the pronunciation of it and I fear it is a memory that is in error.

The journey begins with a brief discussion about self-importance, this is something that is fleeting; for if I try to hold on to the self as being something of importance, it is like trying to hold on to a handful of mercury, I lose that very self. It is this self that is of no importance. If I take this forward to that which is the all else and it is this all else that is important, it is the all else that deems self as important. But if I see self as important I cannot see the all else for what it is; I can only see self.

The all else is what the Way teaches me to be aware of, with all of my senses. Only then can I make a deliberate action: only then am I one with the all else. The all else is what I am a part of and I cannot change this nor would I want to. I can however take action to improve the all else. If I take action for any other reason I will have lost sight of the Way and the action I fear would be a loss. Action is to fulfill the needs of the all else

If I take this to the point of nihilism, I lose the self and the all else and this is not the Way. If I take this to being existentialism I lose true action. There is the need to avoid absolutes and extremes. These cause blindness from seeing the Way.

Action, by its nature, changes the world around me. All action does this. For better or for worst the action can only be decided by history after the action has been taken. The Way teaches me how to take action. And as that which has been said many times before, even deliberate non-action is an action. Non- action is not inaction. Non-action is a deliberate choice which when taken with knowledge of the world around me it will bring a fruition: as long as we take these actions aware of all else, it will be an action that is true to the Way. The Way teaches me that the all of an action should be done with complete awareness, is like stepping out of a boat, it achieves all of that which is intended and all that which may not have been intended yet will happen regardless of the intent: the boat will move. This is the first step to the understanding of this age old quandary because to understand the nothing and to understand the everything is to step out of the boat.

hope

If I take this to the point of nihilism, I lose the self and the all else and this is not the Way. If I take this to being existentialism I lose true action. There is the need to avoid absolutes and extremes. — athelstane

Ya because you need to survive and avoid pain. Otherwise there is no need.

thewonder

↪athelstane

It's all a question as to whether Camus was a nihilistic existentialist or an existential nihilist. Cioran talks about how death is nothingness agonizing life. We, even Cioran, revolt against this, despite its truth. Camus was the first person to express this form of revolt. Personally, I prefer the former, but considering the latter, perhaps some form of Buddhism would be more apt?

athelstane

↪thewonder

Some of the clumsiness for that 'speech' was because of my attempt to stay in the first person singular. I am a Daoist personally but I do not want or need everyone else to become one...I would have to push a bunch out of the boat before I reached land...to use my metaphor.

thewonder

↪athelstane

I think that I might've confused my reply to this thread with another one or have mixed the threads in my head up somehow. Your usage of the first-person singular is fine.

athelstane

↪thewonder

I like to share my life story a little bit here and there and I try not to be preachy about it because I don't like that myself ... I don't think anybody really does. I figure anybody who wants to be preached to can go find one on cable TV.
I also firmly believe that all of my fellow men (women) deserve to be heard and believed as what they see to be true. Truth is universal and objective, not subjective applying to only a few the rest be damned.
We can learn from anybody; every single person has something of value to share with the world, it is up to the world to listen.
There needs to be discussion and debate; dissension is part of finding what is right. Without dissension truth would disappear from sight as is said in, "On Liberty," by John Stuart Mill (pardon the paraphrasing.) Socrates knew this and regardless what anybody said, or more accurately with the highest regard of what everybody else said, he would pose his questions and always lead towards the answer.

thewonder

↪athelstane

That's all well and good and all, but all that I was trying to explain was that I had confused this thread with the thread on philosophical pessimism and nihilism, which you took as a confusion because of your usage of the first-person singular, but was merely because of that I was tossing ideas around about nihilism and whathaveyou in my head at the time.

Tom Storm

This is however a pure statement of that which is called the Way, for truly, 'Nothing is everything and everything is nothing.' Through the ages it has been easy to say, yet it has always been impossible to be fully explained. — athelstane

Yes, this kind of Eastern insight means little to me. Sounds more like a language game designed to be a kind of provocation These sorts of statements are of minimal use to the way I relate to the world.

I sometimes thought that Sartre hinted at Daoism in some of his more cryptic utterances - I prefer this one:

"We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

I also firmly believe that all of my fellow men (women) deserve to be heard and believed as what they see to be true — athelstane

I take the opposite view. There are some people who are actively not worth listening to and should be avoided at all costs; they have nothing to teach. Of course, you could get tricky and say that they can teach you tolerance or patience - perhaps, but I prefer banishment.

thewonder

I take the opposite view. There are some people who are actively not worth listening to and should be avoided at all costs; they have nothing to teach. Of course, you could get tricky and say that they can teach you tolerance or patience - perhaps, but I prefer banishment. — Tom Storm

Eh, the entire cultural climate is ruled by this logic and is fairly poor because of that. Not everyone can, perhaps, can relate to this, but take anime gatekeepers for example. Sure, the original FLCL series, Serial Experiments Lain, and xxxHolic are considerably better than kind of a lot of shows and it is kind of vexing for people in their twenties to only really ever want to talk about Naruto, but there's also a certain set of absurdities that come with a pretense of aesthetic superiority. The cultural climate of anime fans is also afflicted by assumptions such as that, in order appreciate, let's say, Ruroni Kenshin, you would have had to have also have read the magna, rather in spite of that it was serialized in Shōnen Jump, which tends to streamline manga for animated production, or that, in order to appreciate Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, a good enough show in its own right, you would have also have to had seen an extraordinarily lengthy set of other Gundam series, potentially even having had to have built a model mech, which do make an appreciation of the art form less enjoyable to participate within. As much patience as it required to withhold judgement for this or that conspiracy theory during the Occupy, a generalized assumption that everyone ought to have a voice really did kind of provide for a better forum than most.

I sometimes thought that Sartre hinted at Daoism in some of his more cryptic utterances - I prefer this one:

"We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness — Tom Storm

I could never tell as to whether Sartre was just talking into air or if I just didn't quite get Being and Nothingness at moments similar, at least, to this. It becomes so much more perplexing when he makes statements like this with his particularly defined philosophical vocabulary. This, I think, is a good cryptic statement to express his philosophy of nothingness at the heart of being, but, there were definite times when it seemed as if he had made a litany of completely irreconcilable contradictions that, for me, at least, didn't really seem to approach some sort of higher truth via his critical approach to the dialectic or whatever. I would find myself occasionally rapt and often losing focus while reading that text, though, and, so, probably only really absorbed what I paid good attention to, which kind of misses the general gist of it, as you kind of have to accept his entire methodology to really appreciate it.

Granted, I just think that negation delimits Ontology, and, so, in the Sartrean sense, is important for reflexive self-consciousness, but would place less emphasis on nothingness were I to write a seminal philosophical tract.

Tom Storm

Eh, the entire cultural climate is ruled by this logic and is fairly poor because of that. Not everyone can, perhaps, can relate to this, but take anime gatekeepers for example. — thewonder

Sure - I was talking about my personal life, not about public discourse, where I do value pluralism and the views of people I disagree with.

It becomes so much more perplexing when he makes statements like this with his particularly defined philosophical vocabulary. — thewonder

Agree with you on Sartre. I must confess it's been decades since I read him and the fact that I have not returned suggests he isn't significant to me (despite leafing through his work occasionally to see if it has traction). A lot of people I knew in the early 1980's called themselves existentialists - I suspect they just liked the sound of the word. There was a lot of talk about existence preceding essence in those days, but if you dug deeper they ran out of Sartre pretty quickly.

Granted, I just think that negation delimits Ontology, and, so, in the Sartrean sense, is important for reflexive self-consciousness, but would place less emphasis on nothingness were I to write a seminal philosophical tract. — thewonder

It's a reflection of my limitations but I have never fully understood what the significance of nothingness is for Sartre. Consciousness is 'no thing' - being is 'thingness' - from choices/action the fully human emerges? His version of phenomenology is described in a laborious way (translation problems?) and it probably requires an enthusiast of Sartre's to make it sing.

thewonder

↪Tom Storm

I don't know. I think that, even in my personal life, I still find something or another to gain from just about everyone. Perhaps I'm just too willing to entertain certain ideas, though? For instance, I recently had a conversation with someone at work who was opposed to getting vaccinated on the grounds that the pandemic was born out of an ecological response to the destruction of the environment on the part of humanity. I can't say that I agreed with this at all, but did feel like they were kind of vindicated by that defense. I even saw a certain degree of heroism in it.

I've never met another person who calls themselves an Existentialist. It's a wildly unpopular philosophy today. Sartre is so particular that I kind of wonder if anyone has really engaged in serious study of his philosophy. There is a certain Parisian chic that comes with the claim to be an Existentialist, and, so, it's probably par for the course for just about all of them to know very little about Sartre, but he is just kind of difficult to understand. Despite his obvious attempts at being more clear, I found Being and Nothingness to be much more perplexing than Being and Time, though I can't really say that I paid active attention throughout either of those two texts.

I think that his conception of nothingness as being at the heart of being is the most evident flaw to his philosophy and, perhaps, why I can't bring myself to engage in serious study of his entire methodology. We always exist within a relationship to an existent world. A total lack of existence seems completely unfathomable to me. It's highly speculative on Sartre's part to have situated nothingness as he did. I was kind of with him when he talked about nothingness and reflexive self-consciousness, but he lost me when he seemed to cast nothingness as consciousness itself. He only sort of does that, but I think that it just throws his entire methodology ever so slightly off.

thewonder

↪Tom Storm

I'm not going to do this because of that I just don't use this website, but, now that I brought up internet gatekeepers, I kind of want to make that claim that it is requisite for a true media "patricianship" to watch the television series, Heimat, in its entirety on /tv/ so as to put some other lonely soul through all fifty-nine and a half hours of that sad and strange West German melodrama.

Tom Storm

I don't know. I think that, even in my personal life, I still find something or another to gain from just about everyone. — thewonder

Admirable. I'm querulous and impatient.

I was kind of with him when he talked about nothingness and reflexive self-consciousness, but he lost me when he seemed to cast nothingness as consciousness itself. — thewonder

I hear you.

Heimat, in its entirety on /tv/ so as to put some other lonely soul through all fifty-nine and a half hours of that sad and strange West German melodrama. — thewonder

My parent's favorite TV show. I don't generally watch long-form TV - to me it's like sitting through a 7 hour speech by Castro. I can't take all that storytelling... But I hear it's great - like The Wire and Breaking Bad - neither of which I could endure.

thewonder

↪Tom Storm

If you watch it all at once, it does seem to last for a near eternity, but is considerably better than most television.

Tom Storm

↪thewonder

I didn't mean all at once. :wink: I just meant knowing there's hours of the stuff ahead.

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