Friday 25 February 2011

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Friday 18 February 2011

Until

They were passionate about truth, until . . .
- "Until?"
 - They encountered it.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Saturday 12 February 2011

Death's Non-Existence

I've repeated to and beyond the point of tedium how language properly used is meaningful, how this is unarguable as the very arguing itself proceeds from the acceptance of the meaningfulness of the language used in the arguing; I've shown quite a few cases of supposed paradoxes, alleging as consequence language being a flawed tool,  being no such things, simply errors of language; and I've described how science itself is enveloped within the folds of this intrinsic meaningfulness of language. Also how language properly used in intellectual matters always corresponds to a what one might call living reality. Reality isn't being dictated to by language, say in the manner of a magic spell, but the reality and the language correspond, cannot contradict one another.
In relation to all this what I am going to look at here is the thought of death, which earlier thoughts are reproduced below:

Death is non-existence. Non-existence by its very non-nature does not exist. Therefore death does not exist.


This might seem a mere elegant play on words but not actually to be taken seriously. However language meaningfully used is meaningful and there is nothing false about the given logic. But to look at it slightly differently, but heading towards perhaps the same logical destination: putting into perspective, for example, a writer who is 'obsessed with death', or simply anyone's fear of death. This is all a process of thought, and what is the nature of the thought, 'death'?

The language term 'death' is an idea or principle of absolute negation and inertia. One cannot be in a state of inertia while engaged in an activity- tautologically. A concept is an activity of the mind. And so the very idea of death as absolute inertia contradicts its very nature as an idea, or activity in which the mind is engaged. An activity cannot produce inertia. 'Death' is an unintelligible concept; the idea that the mental substance of an idea can be devoid of substance.


Another tangent is to say that the products of the mind are emanations of life. Death is the one thing that does not exist in life, and so for this reason is a meaningless concept.
 
So stressing again that 'death' is a thought, and so what I have done is look closer at the nature of this thought and in the inevitable process upset a very crude but very well-accepted notion of the reality of death. And doubly stressing that while language is autonomous in the sense that correct language is self-sufficient in many matters of self-exploration, ike here, it is not a self-enclosed autonomousness, i.e. that it corresponds to life beyond its verbal confines. Madness by contrast is language where this correspondence to a very large degree has broken down. So I am not merely playing like a musician with language to produce some odd idea. A reality dwells in tandem with this declaration of death's non-existence and which can be experienced, admittedly in a very subtle way by the mind.
 
Another angle of perceptual attack on this issue is this, and also showing how the most apparently simple sentence can be a much more slippery, subtle beast than imagined:
 
John died yesterday.
 
So here is expression of the normal attitude with regard to death. "John died, he is dead." A word refers to something which is, and in this case "John." However to say that John died is to say that the word John corresponds to an external essence -  and yesterday he died. John here is the noun and a noun is something to which one can point as a reality but here there is no such reality, and so it is nonsense to talk about anything happening to something which is not. And so it is an illegitimate intellectual construct to say that John died yesterday.

Similarly, another way this traditional view of death's reality would be expressed is to say that "John is dead." Again however there is no John who can be anything. To say that John is dead is to say that John is, he is in a state of existence, and that this state is non-existence. This is obviously full of self-contradictions, and so when one looks to the intellectual sense of the statement one that someone is dead or died, one sees quite simply that there is no sense. And to stress that the purported thought of someone dying cannot be expressed coherently in this pure intellectual sense.

So, repeating the earlier point, language is a truth tool of absolute intellectual precision if used correctly; it cannot  be so if used loosely. I can easily imagine people thinking my statement of death's non-existence being simply a facile, 'smart' use of language and 'merely a matter of language' but this would be a misapprehension of the unarguable nature of language and its correspondence with 'living truth'. Even someone who wishes to believe in the religious idea of death's non-existence might well be dissatisfied with all the above as almost inhumanly dry. However language in this field of intellectual enquiry must be 'dry', precise; this is the means by which it yields the truths legitimately available to it; and also this language does not stand alone but that there is an inner truth to this language which can, however subtly elusive, be understood, or rather experienced, in a deeper sense.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Seraphim

And there appeared before him three seraphim, terrible and beautiful to behold.
"We is the Beings of Light - "
"Are."
"What, mortal?!"
"We are the Beings of Light, not We is the Beings of Light." . . .

Wednesday 2 February 2011