[MD] Is Morality innate in the cosmos?

[Ham Priday]

SA --


> You said:  "Existence is a reality carved out by
> nothingness; it's the ground of our being.  If we
> could negate nothingness, we'd be right back to the
> "absolutely converged" Essence.  But we don't because
> we can't:  we negate "beingness" instead."
>
> By that last statement, do you mean we negate
> "beingness" because we die?

No.  (As I suspected, I haven't gotten this concept across.)  Negating is
the "carving out" or delineation of being from Essence by nothingness.  I'll
give you an analogy.  Michelangelo was once asked how he went about creating
the statue of David.  He replied, "I just chiseled away the stone until I
came to the figure of David."  He was negating the figure from the marble
block.  Likewise, we negate "things" by using nothingness to isolate them
from the wholeness of Essence.

Remember that in the primary negation Essence creates the not-other -- the
Being/Nothing duality -- by negating an awareness-capable nothingness whose
object is experienced iincrementally (conditionally) as Being.  At least,
this is the paradigm I've hypothesized.  I'm not chained to it: if you can
improve upon it, be my guest.

> Reinier said:
> I think we experience space because we experience
> substance. In an empty universe there would be no
> space to experience. ...
> You need to be able to be aware of 'not the object'
> to be aware of 'the object'.  An experience of 'A'
> will always be accompanied by the experience of a
> possible 'not A'. This implies you need a limitation in
> either time or space of the experience. This implies
> you need a concept called time and space, but this
> makes space IMO not equal to nothingness.
>
> Did Reinier mean by this that to notice space and time
> we need to experience something outside of space and
> time to see space and time?  This would be an
> objective view if that's what he meant.

I think he meant that both conditions of the thing must exist in order to
experience it.  We  experience only the "actualized A", but this presupposes
a "possible A" (not-A) which we don't experience.  Although I can accept
this idea because it's consistent with Cusa's theory of Essence as the
coincidence of opposities, to me it's like the "imaginary number" of
Algebra.  If we use the number "1" in an equation, we must accept the
possibility of a "-1".

> You said later in the posting: "If nothingness
> isn't negated, my question back to you is: What does
> Essence negate to create existence?"
>
> By you saying "...nothingness isn't negated..."
> is that because nothingness and Essence have the same
> definition?  If so, why couldn't nothingness be the
> vast, incomprehensible infinite realm of Essence
> experienced by us tied together with the finite realm.

In the sense that Essence is incomprehensible, it is the same as nothingness
to us.  But if we define Essence as Nothingness (E = 0), we make Nothingness
the source of existence, which is metaphysically impossible.

> Our concepts and even awareness are capable of only
> seeing so far (a limit exists), therefore, the
> nothingness is a response or sense that we have of
> Essence.  I would include other ways of describing the
> experience of Essence (other than as nothingness which
> is a very visual type of experience).  One would be
> 'quietness' or 'silence' (a more auditory way of
> describing Essence). ...

All of what you describe is true, but it doesn't add anything to the
fundamental concept.  Existence begins as the finite separation of Essence
by Nothingness.  We are still at a loss to explain the derivation of
Nothingness.  I say it's a negation of the source.  Can you suggest a better
explanation?

-- Ham