enowning
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
 
In Reason magazine, Mark Goldblatt notes that God is nothing.
That is, God is no thing in the narrow sense that “thing-ness,” the starting point of every rationally meaningful statement, and the baseline quality of existence, cannot be stipulated of Him. So He must be conceived as inconceivable. Posited as impossible. God, in short, does not exist. That which is no thing is not and cannot be. The realm of possibility excludes nothing—literally. Nothing is beyond the laws of thought, which circumscribe possibility, and which are invoked in every assertion or denial. Thus: God.

But without the law of non-contradiction, you cannot make true (or untrue) statements about God; they have no logical traction. You can neither assert nor deny. This was the insight that Cusa intuited but did not, and perhaps could not, confront. If I assert that God is just, I must also deny that God is unjust—or else the initial assertion was empty. But once a subject has been absented from the realm of possibility, any assertion can be simultaneously denied; whatever God is, He is not. Just and unjust. Loving and unloving. Eternal and not eternal, since God’s eternality is reconcilable with its logical contradiction. God, in essence, can “be” both eternal and not eternal at once—which effectively voids the initial assertion that He is eternal. Whatever is said is simultaneously unsaid. That “is” (and even the word is here must be qualified) the nature of the non-being that precedes being, the Nothing or Nihil that caused the world.
 
Comments:
If I assert that God is just, I must also deny that God is unjust—or else the initial assertion was empty.

Well He might--positing His existence for a few nanoseconds-- change His mind, right? Not to deny the LONC, but..God's like..a Being (supposedly) ,not a proposition. Or is it decide on the LONC, then..discuss theology (or ~(theology))? Maybe Im too literal but Being/not-Being (ie no-thing) seemed with Hegel sort of..manichean-- though some Hegel-hipsters would probably cringe.

Anyway, interesting reflections from the glibertarians at Reason--quite different than the usual ..pro-booze,gambling and porno jazz.
 
If only it were that simple. My former philosophy of science prof did mention in passing that some are working on a logic that does not depend on non-contradiction. I have not heard nor read anything more since.

Yet I understand MH's "truth of beyng" also to rely on something other than traditional logic?
 
The short answer is that the truth of beyng is based on unveiling, then there's voluminous discussion in the corpus. Trad logic is fine within its domain, but insufficient for explaining phenomena outside its domain.
 
There are many things outside the domain of trad. logic--
Listening to Beethoven ..or Bill Evans--or a good merlot, and the ...Daisy Mae yr drinking it wit'. Literature (tho that might be debated)

But..can philosophy be??Or even language? (of a non-literary sort). That's a bit different. Just by using language seems to involve truth claims of a sort.--even "Dasein exists".
 
"No human being has ever lived, no human society has ever existed, that did not accept and rely upon the validity of the laws of thought."

Not correct. LNC has never been proved. The onus is on proponents of LNC to prove it, at last. Many logicians, from Cantor to Graham Priest, have produced systems that are consistent yet violate LNC. LEM is also in trouble. See anything by Graham Priest for further details. He is a genius.
 
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