Cup of Coffee

My coffee was hot or at least something close to hot. It is now, however, lukewarm or even less than lukewarm. What happened in the interim? It was one thing, now another. Was hot, now not hot. Did this hotness dissipate into the surrounding atmosphere? Maybe it did but that's simultaneously too vague and yet too specific. It doesn't satisfy me on any count. Of course science could tell me all about vibrating molecules or some such, but what kind of sense would that have for me? Precious little. And anyway, the human being should be self-sufficient regarding truth, or at least capable of it; not reliant on anything beyond his ordinary sense experiences and the ordinary language tool of this here language; no need for esoteric abstractions regarding invisibilities. To think otherwise would be humiliating. Not that I've anything against science.

So anyway, it was hot and became cool and still more so. Well, before it was hot the water was cold, water's natural state is in natural accord with its environment; it was only artificially, so to speak, made hot. And unless artificially sustained, nature returns to nature, the state of normal equilibrium. For instance, a man cannot stay indefinitely standing on one leg. He'll either fall down- if he only has one leg- or else he'll return to his two legs. And even then eventually he'll still fall down.

Is there a cup of coffee regardless of its being hot or cold? In other words, are these mere properties of the cup of coffee, changeable, transitory, while the liquid itself is solid, as it were. Show me this absolute cup of coffee, or is it merely 'a cup of coffee'; that is simply those four words, a purely linguistic phenomenon. I can see them all right, those words, but the 'thing in itself' or, for example, 'world of ideal forms' have never been seen, apart again from the words themselves, and that is in truth all they are.

"But what if we add sugar to this cup?" Well then, we've added sugar. Do you expect the cup of coffee to try separating itself, mentally if not physically, from the sugar content so as to be this unadulterated coffee? Try it sometime. "Okay, maybe not, but what about milk then or cream?" You're very persistent. But all right, now the liquid is a mix of milk, sugar and coffee. Do you think the whole cup should try, while in this 'impure' state, to imagine itself in some pure altered state of absolute undiluted coffeedom without milk or coffee, and that therein lies its freedom? Freedom from what? I think overall it fair to say you'll find no such angst-ridden stirrings going on within the confines of the humble cup.