Such a vast topic here with all its concepts and ideas, conceptual thinking, realisations and vicissitudes (changes) that it is not difficult to become fatigued, lost, confused, and so forth. Philosophy was my real love don't you know? I followed the course of thinking and love of wisdom and all the realisations they put for us to fathom. And really it is the only subject worthy of investigation. Mathematics? Some call it finished, others say it has never begun, whilst in the last century they realised it hardly even had a grounding. However, philosophers are sometimes mathematicians, being that it would be the logic of said discipline in appeal through the thought of not only the west but the east and middle east to booT! And while logic and the symbols thereof are for the philosophers a possible desire for purity (hence pure mathematics), and said discipline being just a system like science or this "system of things", the real pinnacle of thought transpires in language. For when they say that this phenemonena seats the entire group of disciplines they mean only one thing. Everything is language, and we can move as swiftly through the conceptual theories of science as we can through the mire of history, religion, and even psychology, for who really is mad?
Semantics, for the likes of the poets and prosaic ones, for the cats and dogs and birds, instantly appeals to our conscious nature. Those with consciousness, like many of us, or even the few, can feel the will of the word. And if we are religious (not to bash the bible too much!) we percieve unto the lord through liguistic beauty. It is not only words such as essentially used to express how the mediums of our desires are fluctuating for the propagation of meaning, but also every possible concept there is in the universe. Time, essence, being, gravity? Colour, even, is a form of language that the generally sighted can understand... for what of the idea that colour could be in some way a definite semantics, that is, say, understanding the word, say, "animal" through the colour red, to cite an example. It is not only a question of understanding meaning, all things considered. But I would say that is foremost in beauty; meaning. There are books written most obviously with a meaning to purport and those most beautiful have some philosophical stance: Sartre, or Levinas, or even the bible. I like when you read some sentence of depth in some story or prose that upturns your thinking, gives you some much needed inspiration, and confirms your intelligence, even if the rest of the thing is completely obscure. Levinas is one for that, and also i think Kant and Heidegger, to name three. For example, Kant thought that the manifold of intuition intermingled with the pure apperception of imagination is the foundation for consciousness. He also said that imagination is nothing. I digress, with the world of sensible objects to percieve we find that the only thing that IS nothing is imagination; it is 'empty'. I can align this with the thought of Sartre who said in so many words that consciousness is nothingness. There are ways of understanding this.
Consciousness is nothingness, he said. And I agree wholeheartedly, for I realise through existence at first hand that the thinking being which I am must be somehow seperate from consciousness as it is. In other words, consciousness is the seat of thinking. Not only this, but consciousness is the seat of thinking for each of us. We may not even be conscious and there is no real reason why we should think so. This is because the relation between consciousness and thinking being firstly disparate, or disconnected, and the fact of the thinking being as being on the whole, we can only recognise our own consciousness as a possibility. Ours is like the consciousness of the other person; we are never sure of theirs, only we 'recognise' that certain behaviours must lead therefore to conscious being. It is also the same as awareness of God's being. The flowers, for example. How do they 'know' to be beautiful to the eye? It must be that in their subjective being they have an awareness of another existence. Consciousness is the seat, thinking being is the existence, and we are aware of our own conscious life; it is never a given. We may think we are conscious and so on, but really it is very slight, very tenuous to call ourselves that. Also, therefore, we need not have consciousness in order to experience life. How else do we explain other people, other animals, other life? We cannot prove we are conscious. Can we?
Yes, philosophy has been a love of mine. I have tried to understand physics and in some way succeeded. I have tried my hand at mathematics, only to be lost in the meaning of the symbols, sin, cosine, and so on. I can say i have developed love for many of the disciplines and I have studied and will continue to study. But ask me to come to academia and we may have lost interest. How much of the subjects in hand i have understood is something to inquire, as it were. Reading for a down feeling my year old diaries i find the best was when i was doing philosophy. Consciousness is not the only concept. Thinking is not consciousness. The body is thinking, but as i say, the whole thing can be understood in terms of semantics (language). Gravity, for example, is a theory we use to explain falling things. But like evolution, it is just a theory. In fact, as theories go, I'm all for evolution since it describes nature quite eloquently. In addition to doing that it also supports the idea of consciousness, which supports the idea of God. I think we are at a philosophical loggerhead when we fail to take into account the 'third idea', the third way, the third in itself. I am even guilty. But with more to say on the subject, I come to and end of this post. Feel free to comment on anything in here, especially that idea that consciousness is nothingness.
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