2021

August

When the intellect attempts to grasp the concept of nothing, it does so along these lines: it subtracts things away from their places until all that is left is pure emptiness. But in doing so, the intellect falters in its purpose, because the emptiness thus abstracted is conceived within the intellect and exists for the intellect, as a thing that can be conceived. A true nothing would consist of neither emptiness or the intellect which conceives it. A true nothing is a world without us.

—

Every philosopher who has ever pronounced an a priori principle or constructed a metaphysics to explain the complexities of the world should be hunted for sport, and if they survive and still hold to their previous declarations, then at least we will know they believe what they are saying.

September

If it is the case that our being, in its primary essence, is contained in the laws of physics and mathematics, then there will come a day when a (un)lucky physicist is solving his equations and recognizes in their computation himself and not merely his image, but himself embodied in the equations themselves, as an extension of his own being; for that is the conclusion of rationalism: that we must be reducible to priors. If that is so, then we are already in the representations which represent us, for our being cannot be anything but what it is, by definition. And so if our being is mathematical, upon our discovery of its theoretic structure, we will have found outside ourselves a quanta of experience, an experience of our own outside of our own experience; The end result of rationalism, any and all rationalist schemes no matter their form and procedure, is to find yourself in two distinct places at the same time, which any rationalist would admit is absurd. Rationalism is undone ipso facto by rationalism itself.

—

Death, in its inestimatible way, has unique a logical property. It is always with us in the form of possibility. This is not like other possibilities, which only emerge when we comport ourselves in a specific way within the world. In other words, a thing is possible insofar that its conditions for possibility can be met. It is possible to go over a mountain only if a person puts themselves in front of the mountain and expends sufficient energy to ascend to its summit. In order to climb a mountain, a choice to engage with the possibility of climbing mountain must be made.

There is, however, one possibility that does not obey this rule. Death is the only possibility that has no contingency on history, on the subject’s so-called “facticity”. It haunts every moment, irrespective of where, how or when we find ourselves.

November

The true nature of being can be seen in its extremities, when it forced in an unsustainable mode. This is most apparent in experiences of great pain or ecstasy, when the self drains away, abstraction melts into concrete reality and we are left with the raw sensous impressions of experience itself; in these moments, the world narrows down to the immediate, to what is directly at hand and readily apparent in our senses. One need only attempt a calculus problem after shattering a femur to attest to the truth of this; It is only with tremendous effort the self can be reclaimed in moments such as these, and it is these stories we make legend, for resisting temptation in pursuit of a higher goal or ceasing to die in the face of death until your purpose is fulfilled are the highest marks a being can attain. These themes speak to us because they return us to a primordial state, before considerations of consciousness crowd out all others, and show what the self really is: a struggle to sustain itself despite the incessant efforts of nature to return to its primary state of nothingness.

—

We are asking if the conjugation of “am” deserves recognition as an ontological operation over and above the existential operation of “is” which structures language. We are asking if it is a redundancy that is already included in “is”, merely a syntactical construct with no semantic interpretation.

If the first case obtains, “am” provides structure distinct from the structure of the “is”, essentially performing the function of dimensionalizing language, and the question “what am I?” has been granted a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a meaningful answer. If the latter case obtains, then the answer we seek is clearly some variation of “I am nothing”.

—

In modern English, being is the marriage of two concepts that were previously distinct. Its etymology descends from the coupling of the Old English words “beon” and “wesan”, which can in turn be, if the theorists are to be believed, traced further back to the Proto-Indo-European roots of “bheu” and “wes”, respectively. For this reason, we conjugate from the infinitive “to be”” two distinct varieties of words:

1. B-root words: be, been and being

2. W-root words: was, were.

“Is”, a direct cognate from Old English, is the present tense conjugation of “wesan”, revealing its hereditary from the es-stem roots that form the concept of being in other Proto-Indo-European languages, such as the Spanish “estar” or the Italian “essere”, and thus belongs to the latter group of conjugated verbs.

It is in the meaning of these words prior to their symbosis we find a starting point for understanding the separation of “am” and “is”. The differences between the semantic function of “beon” and “wesan” is slight, but potent.

“Wesan” is the Being of objects and nouns. It is the “is” of the “this” and “that”, the “the” and the “a”. When affixed to a name, “wesan” indicates existence, what is actual about its subject. “He is here”, “you will be arriving soon”, “there are three of them”. These are all existential statements of particular cases, facts which can be determined true or false by reference to reality. This type of concrete Being is contained in “Wesan”.

wæron þa dura belocene (the doors were closed)

Her wearð Eadwine cing ofslagen (Here King Edward was slain)

To put it succinctly, “Wesan” is the empirical “is”, the “is” which refers to the external world.

“Beon”, however, is the being of the abstraction and adjectives. “Beon” indicates an object’s gnomic aspect. In the parlance of logic, a gnomic truth is a universal assertion, a statement of generality that applies to all things of which it speaks. While the Being of modern English does not have a direct gnomic form, a gnomic proposition can be induced by the removal of the particularizing article “the” in the following: the birds are fast. The use of “the in this sentence refers to a particular group of birds, whereas the proposition “birds are fast” does not refer to any definite bird, but references the gnomic aspect of birds, i.e. the abstraction of form common to all avian entities. It is in this context that “beon” is conjugated in Old English.

Ic beo gearo sona (I will be ready soon)

Wiga biþ strang (Warriors are strong)

Mandarin has a similar variation in how it unpacks the relations of Being into representative form. In Mandarin, the verb “是 (shi)” can only be affixed to nouns, to signs representing physical objects,

wǒ shì lǎoshī (You are a teacher)

However, “是 (shi)” cannot be affixed to adjectives, such as beautiful or loyal. For that, the extra verb “很 (hen)” is required,

Nǐ hěn cōngming (You are smart)

Again in “是 (shi)” and “很 (hen)” the distinction of meaning found in “wesan” and “beon” is encountered, that of actuality versus abstraction. Indeed, this is a common duality to be found in languages across the world.

When “wesan” and “beon” were gradually merged in modern English, two meanings came to inhabit the same word. Still, to this day, these meanings have not yet been fully integrated, perhaps due to their mutual exclusion. There are defects in the merger that can be glimpsed, when words falter slightly in their aspect and being reveals its separate meanings. The English being haphazardly applies the ideas of concrete and abstract reality simultaneously, thereby allowing assertions of existence to be mixed with assertions of conceptualization, as seen in the propositions “there is love”, “this is justice”, “hope is eternal”, etc. The English “is”” is capable of asserting abstracted existence, i.e. existence that is not reducible to objective reality.

December

The lack of precision in discussions of being often leads to the participants overlooking this subtle distinction between the two notions. Indeed, the course of western philosophy depended throughout most of its history on the unexamined assumption these two types of being were essentially the same, that is to say, that both “am” and “is” imply existence in the same way.

This necessarily leads to a duality of mind and body; if the primary mode of being of both “am” and “is” is existential, then there must be a rupture in being; things must divide into “res extensa” (literally: “the thing which is extended”), and into “res cogitans”, (literally: “the thing which thinks”). In other words, being is necessarily split into the physical and the mental because the “am” and “is” are both derivative of existence.

—

Is it enough that we have this brief moment where we are capable of creating and sharing, of love and tenderness, even though it is fated to mean nothing forever after? That all we sow we shall never know, that we plant trees for generations that will never know our names, this is all that can be granted as the best possible outcome. Rarely do we give voice to the silent thought which outlines the worst possible outcome, lest it in fact be case: that once we die it will be as if nothing ever was and all our acts, intentions and feelings will retroactively come undone, never to have been because nothing was all that ever was in the first place.

Is it cause for despair that we will never understand what we are, no matter how hard we try? That we must admit there is no answer to any of life’s fundamental questions is itself without question, undisputed in its integrity. You cannot answer the quedstion, “What am I?” , in any satisfactory sense. The writer of these words invites the reader to try; he will gladly read the five hundred page dissertation that results, even though he already knows its conclusion: certainty does not extend into the realm of death.