maybe it has to do with that occasioanal terrifying part of meditative experience?

or how in your view do they see that apophatic emptiness that does not lead to being? you notice i just assumed that the “other” of being would be terrifying.

(2) Though some traditions of Buddhism see the “emptiness” as ontological, others, I feel, see it in a deep apophatic sense which does not even lead to being.

This is how the scientific method now works, and the sciences are more productive than ever; their discovery-procedures are of course brilliant and still exceedingly well-warranted, even though they are now always provisional and subject to radical reinterpretation in the future, in anticipation of paradigm shifts as yet unimaginable. At any given point in time we never as yet have enough evidence and enough theorization of the evidence to know how to ask the next testable questions of the to-be-known, the questions capable of bringing further experimental evidence to light.

Every kind of phenomenon is so many-faceted and multi-layered that we must always be selecting certain aspects and combining them according to a heuristic theory of their relevance, their significance. What the Newtonian era called “knowledge” we call the current heuristic model and recognize that the reality can be so complex that we need to employ complementarity, the strategic use of incommensurate models in order to get at different aspects of the reality in question.

This means we are always engaged in trying to separate the essential features from the incidental or peripheral, with respect to a given enterprise of knowing. But what is incidental to one endeavor may be quite central to another. We are constantly interacting with the external world and with genuine physical reality (or with whatever sort of reality our discipline is concerned with seeking through its own characteristic kinds of evidence, with theology attempting to interpret the biblical materials by building and testing heuristic models just as physics attempts to interpret physical phenomena).

The classical Newtonian empiricists believed in “positivity all the way down.” But cutting edge physicists today do not call themselves empiricists for this very reason. Nature’s stubborn complexities have rebuked them; they realize that they do not base physical theory upon empirical reality, but upon empirical evidence, which is quite a different state of affairs. So today they call themselves positivists rather than empiricists, by which they mean to acknowledge the gap between their models and whatever it is that they are attempting to model. (That gap is all about the negativity that makes any progress possible. As C. S. Lewis said, “We can only make progress into a resisting material.” The to-be-known manifests itself to us in large part by eventually saying NO to our best interpretations and models; “No, that’s not good enough.”)

Stephen Hawking speaks for the positivists (because he is one) when he says, “I don’t care about reality, because i don’t know what the word means. I’m happy as long as the experimental evidence agrees with the theory.” When it doesn’t, he changes the theory and does more experiments. But he doesn’t claim that it’s a positivity that’s “out there.” It’s a vast unknown — the quantum world — into which we journey by foregrounding some features while backgrounding others… and seeking a formal patterning through one heuristic strategy, while knowing that with other approaches and for other purposes, other valid strategic patterns will emerge.

Does this make any sense, Scott? Why it’s not so feasible today to make ontology and epistemology mutually exclusive domains tas it was in the heyday of Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian matter-mind dualism?

In a wholistic and more contextual model or strategy, the negative being is actually constitutively within the positive essential feature making it the positivity it is.

And I’m not interested in what “exists.” I’m interested in knowing, as a human mode of being, myself, all the other modes of being, insofar as they make themselves available to me for being known.

I agree, Scott. There are positive features all over the place, in the world as we know it, positive aspects that are constituting all kinds of positive things. But how do we know when a given contrast is significant; when it needs to be taken into account with reference to the positive thing in question? We do know, because in fact the relative importance of various contrasts is (for the human perceiver) constitutive of the essential identity of the positivity in question.

Take black and white or red and green. All are colors; a fundamental underlying sameness. The first contrastive pair invokes a color spectrum, in terms of which black and white take their identity from being one another’s opposites. That is, they are the SAME (at an extreme end of the spectrum) but obverses of one another. That structure of relationships is not “there” in the same way that a particular black is there on the couch, but it is still there in our perception as a contrastive negativity that helps to constitute the identity of the couch’s color for us. Red and green, however, invoke a different structure of relationships/contrasts; to see how they are opposites or negatives of one another will require the context of the three primary colors. Plato in “Sophist” was getting at something like this: that the forms or essential identities of things intersect with one another or exclude on another, and these very patterns constitute them.

Plato was talking without distinction about physical positivities AND about the words that we use in order to name the formal essentiality of things, because we attempt to know all positivities by a ongoing journey of determining their most relevant and incisive formal structures of similarity and difference. Names are what keep all these heuristic structures distinct from one another for us and keep them in play as we increase our knowing of the essentiality of positivities. The not-being-a-tree or the not-being-a-rose are very important negativities for knowing what a daffodil is, because they are closer to its identity (think relations like genus and species) than its not-being-a-rock. In fact, these not-beings are all contrastive negativities operating on different levels of structural relationship, and the structures themselves can also be viewed as in their own positivity being structures of contrastive negativity with reference to the positivity they are illuminating.

I think Plato and Aristotle were closer intellectually to the structural linguists and the poststructuralists than to the modern analytics, because for the former thinkers a specific difference always requires a similarity (sameness) on a deeper (say, generic) level, and any constitutive relationship, composed as it is of both sameness and difference, is therefore also always a negation at the same time that it is an identity.

When it comes to the law of identity so fundamental to early-modern epistemology, that (f/a), a = a, Aristotle never said that. He said that a cannot be other than a “in the same manner at the same time and with respect to the same context.” In other words, that which is a in some manner at some time with respect to some context cannot be other than THAT kind of a. He invoked a multi-leveled structure of relationships as constituting any a, recognizing that any essential element of that a can shift, depending on the time and situation and even on the goals of the knower. Contemporary physicists are right with us here, when they note that the experimental tests employed will depend upon “which aspect of the phenomenon in question” we wish to examine and evaluate.

We aren’t living in a world of simple positivities anymore, a world of inert objects to which static words merely refer, but of multi-leveled structures of constitutive relationships, i.e. contrastive negativities constituting positivities that actively contrast (or negate) at several different levels of structuring. The world of simple positivities was the world of “solid bodies,” upon which external “impressed forces” impinged, with no glimpse of “energy” yet in sight: the 17th-18th century “clockwork universe” of Newtonian-era physical mechanics.

I get the point of e.g., John Scotus Erigena’s affirmation-negation-superaffirmation dialectic. But I don’t know where ‘nothingness’ comes into play. I thought that the thing closest to nothing –’prime matter’ was supposed to be most unlike God (at least according to Aquinas).