OWalker wrote: I cannot help you to imagine nothingness because there is nothing to imagine.
People, dogs, and black holes are not nothingness.
Nothing could be more unlike my point of view ; )
OWalker wrote: I cannot help you to imagine nothingness because there is nothing to imagine.
People, dogs, and black holes are not nothingness.
Walker wrote:I cannot help you to imagine nothingness because there is nothing to imagine.commonsense wrote:Please pardon my ignorance above re word game.commonsense wrote:
I think a word game and a bona fide concept are not mutually exclusive. As one can see, you and I, without acrimony, are taking turns in a word game. And yet there exists a concept of a black hole, a uniquely difficult concept to imagine, but a concept nonetheless.
People, dogs, and black holes are not nothingness.
Walker wrote: People, dogs, and black holes are not nothingness.
Products, indeed, annihilating all possibility of a single meaning. And there must be a single meaning in all cases where the author had a single intent.d63 wrote:Stanley Fish: "...I now believe that interpretation is the source of texts, facts, authors, and intentions. Or to put it another way, the entities that were once seen as competing for the right to constrain interpretation (text, reader, author) are now all seen to be the ‘products’ of interpretation.”
When I am feeling blue I start breathing againd63 wrote:Nothing could make an intellectual more useless (i.e. a dick or asshole (than taking themselves too seriously.....
I see. You interpret the word “nothingness” to mean "an emptiness or the negation of something."commonsense wrote:Walker wrote: People, dogs, and black holes are not nothingness.
Never mind black holes. If something exists, the absence of something exists. Nothingness suggests an emptiness or the negation of something.
I've read that Aristotle may have subscribed to a similar notion of nothingness (however, I am not well-informed about the ancients).
Actually, I have been using the same meaning all along: the absence of everything. My contention is that if the absence of one thing can be imagined, then so can the absence of two, and if two then three and so on until the absence of everything that can be imagined, can be imagined.Walker wrote:I see. You interpret the word “nothingness” to mean "an emptiness or the negation of something."commonsense wrote:
Never mind black holes. If something exists, the absence of something exists. Nothingness suggests an emptiness or the negation of something.
I am using the word to mean the absence of everything, which is not a concept, since nothingness in that sense cannot be imagined.
I haven’t considered the meaning you’re using, because, what is there to consider? Here today, gone tomorrow.
But what if there's nothing there to start with? If there isn't even one thing there how can you imagine it's absence, or, to put it another way, how do you know what to imagine the absence of?commonsense wrote: My contention is that if the absence of one thing can be imagined, then so can the absence of two, and if two then three and so on until the absence of everything that can be imagined, can be imagined.
The process leads up to a moment of discovery. What is discovered is any principle of truth that applies to the present situation, and to all situations. The discovery of such an absolute marks the end of that particular process.d63 wrote:“I challenged the self-sufficiency of the text by pointing out that its apparently spatial form belied the temporal dimension in which its meanings were actualized, and I argued that it was the developing shape of that actualization, rather than the static shape of the printed page, that should be the object of critical description” –as always: from Fish’s intro to Is There a Text in this Class
Here I would like to focus on the extent to which temporality has influenced contemporary thought (both postmodern and post-structuralist (and the way it has abandon static forms for the dynamic: that which is destabilized and de-centered. It comes down to a time honored (for me at least (riff I like to pull out from time to time:
At what point are you in this sentence right now?
One of Fish’s main arguments against the formalist approach is that it tends to seek meaning at the end of things: the end of each word, of each clause, of each paragraph, and on and on. But Fish sees meaning in the process. He takes the democratic approach of letting every process find its meaning (in process (while having it restrained by the reality of the text as well as the symbolic order the individual is working in. And I think my sentence shows how meaning works, not through the meaning of each individual word, but the way the meaning of each individual word bleeds into the word before and after it.
I hadn't considered what if there isn't anything to be imagined. Then I thought if it isn't there to be imagined it is already absent. This could be a circular argument, or it could be a solution to not even knowing what to imagine the absence of. This could mean that nothingness would be the absence of everything that can be imagined and everything that cannot be imagined.Harbal wrote:But what if there's nothing there to start with? If there isn't even one thing there how can you imagine it's absence, or, to put it another way, how do you know what to imagine the absence of?commonsense wrote: My contention is that if the absence of one thing can be imagined, then so can the absence of two, and if two then three and so on until the absence of everything that can be imagined, can be imagined.