Andrew at Divine Trauma has posted about specifity of absence - black coffee without cream, vs black coffee without milk. Injuries without care vs injuries without malice. One thinks of the atheist in Catch-22 who doesn't believe in a god of Love, and is appalled by the idea that the God she doesn't believe in might just be a spiteful sadist. I can't take this absence non-being very seriously. It seems like it is very apparent in jokes.
The nothingness I can conceptualise is 'being' with dimensions that no one can relate to - overwhelming infinities of infinities, something that has to be invisible and unthought for the mind to hold onto itself. Mathematically, these invisible monsters are the high cardinals, used, I believe in resolving Fermat's last theorem. But higher maths is very far country, and this news was translated before it reached me.
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Thanks for the pointer to my post. The nothingness that I think might work in this space is probably a disguised self writ large in the heavens. In other words, it's the perceiver projecting themself onto the infinite in order to create a Big Other. I'm not sure whether Tanabe has anything in common with Lacan, though, but there might be some parallels. The Big Other doesn't really exist, but is a great Macguffin for making people do things.
ReplyDeleteSorry I can't do links properly from my phone - I will make an edit for netiquette. What you say is very true: the further you look into the future, or the scope of the universe, the more what you see and expect says about you. The void staring back at you turns out to be you-as-nothing. But I think Tanabe is not thinking psychologically. I might need to read something, but can't think of anything except 'being and nothingness.'
ReplyDeleteTanabe studied in Germany and Japan, and his major references (so far) are Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. But all that is wedded to Pure Land Buddhism (which honestly seems awfully like a corruption of Christianity). He's not mentioned any psychoanalytic philosophy that I've noticed yet.