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The argument goes as follows:
"God is the perfect being. As He is most perfect, He must have all perfections. If God lacked existence, He would not be perfect, as He is perfect he must exist."
The problem here is the implication that nothing is not something that isn't, since it implies the existence of something that contains negative characteristics. But something (in this case, God) that lacks everything is still something. To say that God IS, gives him an existence. Nothing has no existence. It isn't the LACK of characteristics, but the absence of everything.
I'm trying to think about nothing, but I can't. A flood of thoughts instead: the banks, money, why I'm not writing, family... The more I try the louder and more incessant is the cacophony in my mind.
But of course I can't think about nothing. I should have realized that before my attempt. Attempt? Of course any attempt at nothing is doomed. How can one attempt nothing? After all, if I succeed, I would be succeeding at something; and surely something is not nothing.
All that led to this blog, which is not nothing. And if not nothing is something, is not something nothing? Somehow I don't think so.
Thinking about nothing is very depressing. When I mentioned that to a friend, he told me that I am, in fact, lucky because it is better to be depressed with nothing than to have something to be depressed about. When I mentioned that to someone else, she told me that I was indeed lucky because I had nothing to be depressed about.
Which got me thinking...
If people had nothing to be depressed about, then they would actually be happy. But that would apply only if nothing is the absence of everything. If, on the other hand, nothing is something, then they would be depressed.
The Beatles said that Happiness is a warm gun. Now even if I knew what they meant, it doesn't satisfy me.
I mean, I know when I feel it and I know what it does to me. But what is it? Why do we feel it? Does everyone? How is that some people never seem to feel it? And is it the same as contentment? No, I don't think so. Is contentment just a different degree of happiness, a sort of lesser version? Or is contentment something different entirely
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One thing that seems to be common to theists and atheists is nothing. Both sides hate it. Believers cannot accept the idea of nothing, since that would mean a situation where God is not present. Atheists have a similar problem with the idea of the universe being formed from nothing. For both, there was always something. For believers, it is God; for atheists/scientists it is energy, according to the First Law of Thermodynamics that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Is nothing something just because we can talk about it? In other words, does nothing exist if we can refer to it? An example is the unicorn. Does a unicorn exist? If I show you a picture of a unicorn, you would recognise it. "It's a unicorn," we would all say. We don't have to physically see something in order for it to exist.
So I'm wondering: Does nothing exist?
Minimalism as an artform is the idea of reducing something to its most basic form including colour, shape, value, lines and texture - or lack of. Basically a reduction of form to only the essentials of geometric abstraction. Within this, no attempt is made at representation or to symbolize any other object or experience. Rather it is what it is and take it at that.
It seems to me that the ultimate aim of minimalism is nothing. The bare essentials - the essential of art itelf - is nothing. Unreachable though it is, it is what art strives for: an understanding of what nothing is, reflecting the urge of philsophers to understand nothingness in order to understand existence
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Can silence be nothing or does silence always mean something?
Susan Sontag may have been right when she said, "Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech." Beckett, of course, loved silences in his plays and has been called "the poet of nothingness
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To howls of rage, the Supranos final episode ended in a black fade-out on June 11.
For me, though, it was the pefect ending. It ended as does all life: in nothingness. A neat interpretation is that we see the world through Tony's eyes. There are certainly enough hints in the last scene that he would get killed. If he did, then he didn't see it coming. The screen and sound went dead because Tony did. That was it. The end. Nothing
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The point of nothing - to paraphrase Bertrand Russell on philosophy - is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth examining, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
There is more to nothing than meets the eye. What I want to do, with those who want to contribute here, is to try to discover what it is all about, while showing that thinking about nothing means thinking about everything. History, philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science - all are touched by nothing. Who could have believed that nothing would turn out to be so interesting, so laden with intrigue, mystery and hidden information
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Comment by Ronald
on Replies to Sartre
nothing