“What’s the good of anything? Nothing!”

These 6 words, placed in the mouth of 12 year old Archibald Rennick in a 1892 play, “The New Boy”, may be more philosophically important and ontologically revolutionary than Nietzsche’s entire corpus. How so?

As a child of the ‘50s, I thought I had witnessed the virgin birth (1956) of 12 year old Alfred E. Newman in the pages of Mad Magazine. Four years later (1960), I followed closely his Quixote campaign for the Presidency against Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. (Spoiler alert: Newman did not win.)

Mythology exists in the space between cosmology and psychology. It is consistent with the modern notion of Being as a fractal: it reveals the same patterns on every scale.

Ancient Norse cosmology begins with Yggdrasil, the ‘Tree of Life’. It is the center of the cosmos and all else exists around it. It includes the Nine Worlds, each one inhabited by a unique ‘ontic entity’, for example, gods, elves, wolves, humans, etc.

Earlier we talked about Zeno. In most minds it is thought that Zeno proved that any tortoise with a head start will always beat Achilles in any foot race. But of course, we know that that is not true…and Zeno knew so too. What Zeno did prove is that we cannot account for Achilles’ victory based on ordinary mathematical assumptions. Achilles wins the race but how does he do it?

Everything that is is in motion. As Thomas Aquinas pointed out, that ‘motion’ can take at least two different forms: (1) the growth and subsequent (or simultaneous) decay of an entity itself; (2) a shift in an entity’s position in space and time relative to the other entities in its frame of reference. (Ultimately, these two forms of motion may turn out to be one and the same – but that’s not what I’m thinking about today.)

You’ve no doubt heard about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. My 8 year old grandson has so I assume you have too. It took place 2,500 years ago. The tortoise challenged Achilles (an anachronism in itself) but asked Achilles to give him a head start (1/2 the distance to the goal line). Supremely confident , Achilles agreed.

A subscriber to Thoughts While Shaving recently sent me the following:

“This moment that humanity is living through can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the door is yours.

If you consume information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole.

In the context of a conversation about Being and Becoming, a friend of mine asked, “Is eternal becoming possible?” My first reaction was that the concept of becoming was inherently dependent on time and that time is the antithesis of eternity. But then I got to thinking…

A cursory reading of ethnographic surveys (Frazer, Spengler, Toynbee, et al.) shows that almost every human culture includes the recognition of a ‘transcendent’ dimension to reality. Sometimes this dimension is called “God”; other times it is better described as a “force” or as a “layer of eternal values”. What is not found are cultures that embrace WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) aka ‘naïve realism’…with one glaring exception: the culture of contemporary Western Europe and North America.

Nothing is everything” is an advertising slogan for Skyrizi (AbbVie), a dermatological drug. I assume it means that the absence of skin blemishes is ‘everything’, at least for some people.
But it got me thinking: what else could “nothing is everything” mean?

Following up on an earlier post, in an I – it relationship, the ‘I’ has complete dominion over the ‘it’. The ‘it’ is merely a passive receptor for the actions of the ‘I’. Therefore, this model ascribes infinite intrinsic value to the ‘I’ and zero intrinsic value to the ‘it’. But can such an arrangement be called a relationship?

Classical Western languages (e.g. Hebrew, Greek and Latin) for the most part lacked anything we would recognize today as ‘punctuation’. When marks did appear in texts, they were merely to guide actors and orators in their declamations. The same is true of Medieval languages (e.g. Old English, Old French and Old Norse).