ipernity: "Nothingness"

Dinesh ^club

The extreme point of this brilliant and mortal literature was nothingness. Its extreme point and its deeper essence. There is nothing positive in the new spirituality. It was a pure and simple negation of the temporal. In the Middle Ages it was the temporal which was the Inessential in relation to spirituality; in the nineteenth century the opposite occurred; the Temporal was primary and the spiritual was the inessential parasite which gnawed away at it and tried to destroy it. It was a question of denying the world or consuming it. Of denying it by consuming it. Flaubert wrote to disentangle himself from men and things. His sentence surrounds the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as well. It is blind and deaf, without arteries; not a breath of life. A deep silence separates it from the sentence which follows, it falls into the void, eternally, and drags its prey along this infinite fall. Once described, any reality is stricken from the inventory; one moves on to the next. Realism was nothing else but this great gloomy chase. It was a matter of setting one’s mind at rest before anything else. Wherever one went grass stop growing. The determinism of the naturalistic novel crushed out life and replaced human actions by one-way mechanisms. It had a virtually but one subject: the slow disintegration of a man, an enterprise, a family, or a society. It was necessary to return to zero. One took nature in a state of productive disequilibrium and one wiped out this disequilibrium; one returned to an equilibrium of death by annulling the forces with which one was confronted. . . . Page 119

2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

Thus nothingness in Hegel’s thinking, the very nothingness that he attributed to Buddhists, is to be understood not as the absolute opposite of Being, but as it undetermination. Nothingness in the Absolute considered in its generality, its pure abstraction, its lack of determination. So Buddhism is not atheistic; it considers God in his pure infinity, in the impossibility of his receiving any concrete determination. Which finally comes back to nothingness. This equivalence undoubtedly has something shocking about it, and Hegel was aware of it:

From the outset, it must seem surprising that man thinks of God as nothingness; that must seem like the strange thing in the world; and upon closer examination it means nothing more than that there is nothing determinate about God, he is indeterminate; there is no concrete determination that is appropriate for God, he is infinity . . . When we say: We can know nothing of God, no representation can be made of him,” it is a toned-down way of saying that God is nothingness for us” ~ Page 67

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . When the missionaries tried to convince these representatives of Zen that “there is a principle that constitutes the origin of ll things,” the Japanese are said to have replied:

This [nothing] is a principle from which all things arise: men, animals, plants: every created things has in itself this principle, and when men or animals die they return to the four elements, into that which they had been, and this principle returns to that which it is. This principle, they say, is neither good nor bad, knows neither glory nor punishment, neither dies nor lives, in a manner that it is a “no”
` Page 138

14 months ago. Edited 14 months ago.

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