*Being* is *Nothing*
August 31st, 2006, search relatedRelated posts :: No related posts
Dr Michael Eldred:
Yes, “*Being* does not *name* anything - for there is nothing to be named.”
Strangely, we agree that being is nothing, you in the form of denial, I in
the form of affirmation. Children, and most other people, do not need to
know anything about dimension to play out their lives. They take it for
granted — a luxury that those who practise ontological thinking cannot
afford.
Jud:
Sorry Dr. Eldred, Look again. I did NOT say that *Being* is Nothing* - I
said *there is nothing to be named.* So I ‘m afraid that I do not agree with
your employment of the *is of identity* in your tautologous coupling of
*Being* and *Nothing* as - *Being is Nothing.* on this occassion.
(Compare *Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor *is* *Elizabeth II of Great
Britain.*)
Your ontological position appears to be this:
(1) *Being* *is* Nothing. (*Being* = *Nothing*)
[Bernard]
Ergo, nothing is nothin!–thus committing the sin of tautologism but the
Marxist schoolboy employment of the dialectical negation of the negation.
Bernard, perhaps the position is that be-ing (of a being, a thing) [is its
self] not-thing (not a thing, not a being) and that [is] nothing (and
nothin’) to a philosophy whose world is only and completely populated by
things (matter, energy, forces, etc). To speak that be-ing is nothing in
this sense (in the environment, the context, of materialisms, say) is thus
to produce a single negation and one ironically in tune with the negation of
the (materialist, say) interlocutor (the one that negates the “existence” of
anything not a (material) thing). Rather more Socratic dialectic than
Marxist… Having said that, I do think that Jud has a point with the
problem of “is” used as identity (rather than copula, which is why I
occasionally put it in parentheses). Perhaps Heidegger understood this
briliantly when in an article/letter to Juenger he begins to cross out
“Being”, so that in one (self-erasing, defacing) move he points to the
crossroads of the fourfold (be-ing as the invisible, silent hub of the
‘wheel’ of earth/sky/mortal/immortal), the erasure of be-ing even as it is
articulated (enworded, said, ‘named’) and the ontological difference (the
be-ing of a being is not a being –> not a thing –> no-thing –> nothing;
thus the ontological difference [is] the difference between nothing and some
thing, [is] the very existence of some thing, [is] the be-ing of some thing
and not (some) thing else; the difference qua difference that Heraclitus
thinks as both the same and different to its self [I can provide the
fragment].
regards
michaelP
