Off The Wall, Or Up Against It

At first, to those of us unstudied in Philosophy, this question seems simple, and the answer simple: 'Nothing' is simply the absence of something. But the very fact that one can define 'nothing' means that it, too, is something that can be defined, which means it's no longer just nothing; it has become something. This is the dilemma that countless thinkers across thousands of years have come up against time and time again. If nothing is something, then is there really such a thing as 'nothing'? Logically, it is impossible to define 'nothing', because as soon as you define it, you've made it something. It is as if naming it negates it's meaning. Even thinking of it negates it's meaning. Once it is thought, it becomes something, even if the 'something' is an empty set. An empty set is something. A void is something. A vacuum is something. Nothing is nothing, there is no such thing as nothing. True nothing

What if there are people in the world who do not have the 'sense' of Love? Some of us, at least, wonder at the lack of compassion that others seem to show.  They seem to be able to go blithely about their lives, not caring that others are dying, starving, hurting. Here I'd like to make a distinction between those who don't let their compassion and caring take over and plunge them into despair, and those who just truly don't give a fuck.  Many compassionate, caring people also find a lot of joy in life, and rightly so, because this too is an expression and use of the sense of Love. But how can one explain a personage like Trump, who truly seems to love nothing? One cannot say that he even loves himself, because if he did, he'd be in better shape, and the capacity for love can never be confined to a single object. Those of us with the gift of sight, we cannot choose to only 'see' certain things, we must see all things in our 'line of sight'

There's a why and a how to these posts.  It all started obscurely. I cannot now tell you how I started reading "In The Dust Of This Planet" by Eugene Thacker.  I cannot now recall where I first heard the name of this book, except to say that it was referenced by some other writer's work I was reading, and the reason it was referenced was because some quirk of the internet had brought the book to that writer's attention.  This is a vexing matter for me now, but I do not know how to remedy it. This book turns out to be the first of three by Mr. Thatcher subtitled "The Horror Of Philosophy", and they are about the relationship between various horror genres in film, music and literature and various philosophical and mystical musings and writings going all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, thru Thomas Aquinas, Theresa of Avila, Kant and his ilk,  and coming up to the present time. Much of it seems to be about the nature of darkness and what is knowable

Love gives us insight to things we cannot know with our other senses.  We can 'feel' when someone loves us, if we let ourselves feel it. We can also 'feel' when others don't love us, although we rationalize and deny it in so many ways if we want to. Love can direct us to do things that don't necessarily make sense to the other 5 senses. But this is not some 'physical' sense that can easily be defined, as can Sight, Hearing, Taste, Touch, Smell. But there are those who are blind. Their eyes cannot 'see' the world. And those who are deaf; their ears cannot hear sound. Taste, Touch, Smell.....there are instances of people without these senses. So could there be people without the sense of Love? I believe there are.  And I believe there are many people who would believe the other 5 senses over their sense of Love, so might as well be Loveblind. We do not have common words (that I know of) for not being able to Smell or Taste or feel

ok, so there's the darkness that is night as opposed to day. This darkness is relative, because even in the darkest night, the darkest time of night, there is still some light, some glimmer of light, from the stars or the moon, or seeping around the edges of the planet (can a planet have 'edges'? That's another question).  There is this darkness of this relative sort. We say it is dark, but what we mean is there is not as much light available as there is in daytime, or when the lights are turned on, so shadows become larger, much of what we would normally 'see' in the day is obscured, dim, with colors drained away, because color requires light to be reflected off a surface (yet another subject) but we call this 'darkness' to differentiate it from the light of day. And by this I mean the literal light of day. Then there is darkness that is the true absence of light. Such as one might find in a deep cave in the earth, where sunlight cannot reach, has pe