Not if the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Then all the parts may be zeroes, and yet the whole may still be more than zero.
It seems to me that no parts have being in the Parmenidean sense, but becoming itself has. Change never stops (being (change)).
That sounds amazing, at least on first hearing, but doesn’t that deeply devalue eternal meaning?
I can appreciate what you say about exalting our being as follows, though: when we transcend the self-valuing that we are into mindful awareness of the infinite whole, we embody that whole, because we are our embodied mind.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the idea that meaning is subservient to scarcity”.
Yeah, I don’t find this very convincing… I mean, I think you’re confounding different senses of the word “meaning” here.
Also, like above with the term “being”, I don’t think changing the meaning of “meaning” solves the problem of meaning.
What is sensible is to ask what we mean by “meaning” in this sense. I think the answer is something like “intention”. Then we do bring the two meanings of “meaning” somewhat together, yet there’s still a significant difference between the meaning of words and the meaning of the things those words refer to. For example, the word “you” refers to you, yet the meaning of “you” is not the same as the meaning of you… The meaning of “you” is what’s intended to call to mind by the word “you”, whereas the meaning of you would be the intention behind you. Thus if we replace you by Jesus in this example, we can indeed see him as Word with an intention behind it. What did God intend with Jesus? If the answer is “For him to die for our sins”, then that’s the meaning of Jesus. Likewise, classical philosophy considers the end of a thing the meaning of that thing–and it considers attaining to the complete logos the end of man. This similarity gains even greater poignancy when we consider that authentic dasein for Heidegger meant being-toward-death… “Know thyself” means “know that thou art mortal”; in Buddhist terms, it means “know that all selves are fleeting, that only fleetingness itself is not fleeting”.
θάνατός ἐστιν ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ὁρέομεν, ὁκόσα δὲ εὕδοντες ὕπνος
“Death is all we see while awake, all we see while asleep is sleep.”
(Heraclitus, fragment DK B21. More literally than “Enlightened one”, Buddha means “Awakened one”.)
This reminds me of the second of the “three marks of existence”, though: “all saṅkhāras are unsatisfactory”. Of course, “deeply” is a relative term, so it may be that, when our being is relatively fulfilled, we can exalt it to absolute fulfillment. I’m afraid this reminds me again of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, though, where the fulfillment of the highest need, self-actualization, rests on an adequate fulfillment of the lower needs. All I can offer for the sake of reconciliation at this point is that, when the need for self-actualization is adequately fulfilled, the “lower” needs turn out to be even higher than that (one goes back down, in a way), perhaps as needs for fuller self-actualization.
That makes sense. But then being a “true being” means being aware that there are no beings in the Parmenidean sense (a person being the latter kind of being).
Right. The will to truth. The lust (eros) for truth, or even moral indignation/vengefulness (thumos) against truth.
Right again. My jogging, for instance, tends to be quite meditative. I wonder what physical exercise our academic interlocutor gets.