What is inconceivable to you is nothing to you.
Conception of the formerly inconceivable makes existence immerge (sic!) from nothingness.
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A witness of ex nihilo creation no longer trusts nothingness: infinity’s backglow betrays it.
Any apparent nothingness might be a blind-spot concealing a novel everythingness.
Witnessing ex nihilo creation transforms nihilists into exnihilists.
Taylor: “Any apparent nothingness might be a blind-spot concealing a novel everythingness.”
Hegel: “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same.”
Your use of “everythingness” for absolute being prompted an epiphany. Thank you!
The reason that nothingness and everythingness are one and the same is that both utterly lack “things”. Thingness emerges from conception. Prior to conception there are no things. So the source upon which conception draws in conceiving things is thing-less. Such thinglessness can either be described as no-thing or every-thing, though both are misnomers for the thinglesss source of all things.
That’s why I love the term “dao” so much. It does not denote or connote any sense of thingness regarding the source. It is not only unnamable, the dao is also unthingable. Saying that myriad things (the ten thousand) emerge from the dao immediately dissolves the pseudo paradox of things arising from nothing (ex nihilo). Things don’t arise from nothing; they arise from the dao.
All these years I’ve felt I couldn’t escape noumena even though I thought I understood the dao. I now realize that I can replace the noumenal with the dao, and thereby avoid any speculation (a la speculative realism) as to the “inner” nature of the dao, ie the nature of noumena. I don’t know why I didn’t realize this years ago.
While it is fruitful to speculate on the nature of conception, ie the process of the myriad thing emerging from the dao, our speculations should cease beyond the point of conception. Speculating on the nature of the dao, the nameless, is fruitless.
Thank you for prompting this long overdue insight!
Now if I can talking you into seeing that as a metaphysical insight! It is a metaphysic of indeterminacy that cannot be specified except by observing our relationship with it and the experiences we have connected with its stranger characteristics.
Thanks for continuing to push on this issue of the scope of metaphysics. It’s helping me clarify my thoughts.
Here’s a metaphor that illuminates our different stances on this. One’s relationship to the dao is mediated by an interface. Just as a perfect software interface reveals no information whatsoever about the internal structure of the software/data behind the interface, the interface with the dao reveals no information about the inner nature of the dao.
I restrict my application of the label “metaphysics” to the attempt to say something about what is on the other side of an interface. You appear to apply the label to the attempt to say something about the interface itself. The label I apply to the study of the interface itself is “triangulation” (a la Davidson), or more conventionally, just “physics” (or biology, chemistry, sociology, etc).
Since we have no access to what is behind the interface to the dao, we can’t “redesign” the interface by rewriting the “software” exposing the interface. Instead, we layer a new interface over the old interface. Eventually we forget the old interface even existed. Rinse and repeat.
Did I ever tell you the original title for “Geometric Meditations”? “10,000 Everythings”