“That asked, I have to take an off bounce/ trajectory on your point about Being as concerns my own experience with it (perhaps out of a desire to show off –that is mainly in the spirit of the experiment of seeing what your response will be. Back in my old Sartre/Existentialism days, I use to talk a lot about Being and Nothingness -not Sartre’s book, but the actual concepts. I actually formed a lot of my intellectual constructs around it. The problem I came up against was that while Being (via beings (was incontestable, the concept of nothingness or non-being was always contentious since we can never look at it directly. I eventually came to the tactic of talking in terms of presence/absence since absence seemed like a much more credible term. But, as far as I’m concerned, the two are not interchangeable. The Being/Nothingness dyad is an ontological issue. The presence/absence dyad, on the other hand, is a phenomenological one.” –me: forum.philosophynow.org/posting. … 53#preview
“As to nothingness I didn’t see how your change in concepts solved the problem so I would like to hear more about it. My problem with purely phenomenological answer is that the lack ontology. It is essential to think the presence of things (their phenomena) together with their existence (their ontology.)For now I will limit myself to saying that the fact that we cannot see absence/nothingness does not mean it cannot be thought. I think that thinking the absolute difference between Being (I used the concept of being rather than mind because it refer to our existence as a whole, as in the question of ontology rather than the question of mind as in an epistemological question. “ –Yoni:ibid
The main reason I made this distinction is that throughout my process on the boards I have come up against hardcore materialists or what could also be referred to as metaphysical atheists (those who don’t stop at not believing in God (theological atheism (but go further in not believing in any transcendent property (love, consciousness, etc., etc. (and found myself distracted by a lot of arguments about whether nothingness can exist rather than making the argument I was based on its possibility. I just thought it a lot less contentious to speak in terms of presence and absence since absence is a much more tangible phenomenon: it can actually be observed. Nothingness, on the other hand, can only be inferred by the fact (and may the wrath of Strunk rest in its grave (that things are. I could easily see such metaphysical atheists argue that Sartre was actually confusing absence for nothingness when Pierre didn’t show up at the café.
(It was mainly a practical matter that I developed for another more finished piece I wrote on another board: [viewtopic.php?f=15&t=179930(](http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=179930()
In other words, as much as we may hate to do so, we have to concede to the metaphysical atheists that any talk about Nothingness, in the ontological sense, requires a leap of faith. But I am perfectly willing to take that leap with you. Once again, I have developed conceptual constructs around it. The main one is what is as about as close to a religion as I get. I personally believe that all perceiving things are the eyes and ears of God, that it is through them that nothing becomes something. To me it is the answer to Leibniz’s question: why all this rather than nothing: to which the answer would be: so that there can be something.
And it is this sense of nothing expanding into to something that underlies my sense of philosophy and the creative act as a function of our evolution as a species. But then I have to make this argument by appealing to resonance and seduction through the language game of writing ‘as if’ everything I say is true.