I woke up early today - earlier than usual that is - because I was lying in bed thinking of “nothingness.” I am very aware that having a very beautiful young wife and lying in bed thinking of “nothingness” may be thought of as being rather peculiar behaviour, and in my mind's eye I can see the fresh-faced (now wrinkled) countenances of the urgent, companionable Lotharios of my youth laughing and pointing at me derisively.

The things that I have said, and the things that have been said about my use of what I have increasingly come to think of as: “Other People's Words,” that is, words which, though I use them, have no meaning for me, has prompted me to consider the question of how I handle them, and if I am handling them in the right way, or even if I should use them at all and simply avoid them to try and attain a conversational methodology which is more conducive with the continuance of civilised communication between the monad that is Jud Evans, and the rest of the world out there? But how can one try to philosophise if the very words of philosophical intercourse are to be ruled as being “out of bounds” just because they have no meaning for somebody that rejects their notional referentiality. Is not a thinker who does this not cutting off his cognitive bollocks, which is a drastic sexually self-immolationary extreme that some religious fanatics sometimes resort to, in order that they might expunge themselves of “naughty thoughts?”

Firstly some background information.

Using “Other People's Words,” that is words that for other people contain some inherent referential meaning, and yet do not incorporate, lack, or signify the same meaning for me has always caused me trouble since I was a kid.

Being rather like somebody with an undiagnosed medical problem, who goes to the doctor not so much in an effort to be cured, but rather to be told by the doctor what the name of the complaint is, and having the satisfaction of labelling the complaint, I have recently taken to referring to myself as an “experientialist.” I have done this because it seems to be a description, or a label that appears to best fit what can be rather humorously referred to as my “philosophical position,” which is a highly individualistic one, which does not automatically accept an idea because it was ideated by some “great man”, and perhaps in some subliminal Nietzschean way I am prompted to shy away from any popularist philosophical position, even the one of existentialism, which seems to be a club for incurably unclubable solitudinarians, whose qualification for membership appears to be that they are able to demonstrate by the employment of certain cultic language that they are in possession of a belief in their own individuality, which they are apparently willing to sublimate by sacrificing their "Daseinic uniqueness" on the altar of a transcendent cultic communality.

I realise that in many ways I am an “outsider,” for it matters not to me however much an idea or concept or view of the world is part of any philosophical tradition belonging to: “my European culture,” or the "incipiency" of the genius of Ancient Greece, or anybody else's incipiency that has raised its head since, or whether some idea which I may have read about in a book, “fits in” with some other received philosophical or physical incipient approximations that I have inherited simply by being an Englishman living in the twenty-first century.

Most of my thinking life I have only been what I can describe as a rejectionist like in many ways Kevin has been, for I have constantly judged ideas against the backcloth of my own experience, and whether the phenomena I encounter makes sense to me as far as the dreaded word: “common sense” is concerned in relation to what I have learned from my experiences.

One of the early results of what I now recognise to be my incipient experientialism was my rejection of religion, which happened for me at a very early age. This rejection was unaccompanied by any theological discussion and there was no “crisis” of belief or dramatic incident. One day, standing in the middle of a field I simply casually told God to f--- off, which is the only example, (to my knowledge) where I have deliberately referred to a “non-referent” in that way. My father was an atheist, and that may suggest that his disbelief may have had some influence on me, but in fact the reverse is the case, for in a manner typical of young teenagers my first instinct was to do or think the opposite of what my father did or thought, following the well known fact that parents, though being stupid at a time when a young person is in their teens, become mysteriously less stupid as the teenager reaches maturity, and in some cases even make that transcendental leap into “wisdom” by the time the teenager is - let's say about forty?

Perhaps because I was brought up in a working-class district of Liverpool - that most Irish of English cities, I was able to observe from the vicious street-fighting between the Catholics and the Protestant Orange Lodge, that professed Christians very seldom seemed to adhere to the admonitions of Jesus to love their neighbours, and the message certainly didn't seem to have sunk in as far as the disorderly, struggling religionist descendants of the escapees from the Irish Potato Famine, who had descended upon Liverpool in the mid nineteenth century were concerned, and whose skirmishing masses who surrounded me were not so much struggling against poverty and ignorance, but struggling against each other using tactics which put Al Capone and Baby Faced Malone to shame.

Once I had wiped away the blood-spots from my shirt and shovelled up the broken glass from the eyeless windows, resulting from this Hibernian mutually ruinous internecine religious warfare, other idealisms were similarly rejected as manifestations of my initial experientialist rejectionism, for the forswearing of religion was rapidly followed by my rejection of astrology, spiritualism and the belief in ghosts, and thought transference, monarchism, idealism, black magic, the meaningfulness of dreams, spoon-bending, fortune telling, flying saucers and alien abduction, theories of aliens ruling the world in the Von Dannikin sense, or theories that one race was inherently inferior or superior to another race, and a whole lot of other stuff including certain fringe explanatory psychological and psychiatric theories, which were taken seriously in my youth but are now looked back upon by many with embarrassment, like those of the theories of Freud etc.

I suppose that this process of rejection and reformation is one that is quite common, and may in fact ring bells with what happened in your life, and I am certainly not claiming that my experiences were unique in any way, but I am just trying to arrive at why I have problems in dealing with some words which for me are not attached to me by the umbilical cord of meaning and reference.

One of the words that has always caused problems for me is the use by others of the word “nothing” or “nothingness” for I have often come across people who employ the word without the customary introductory caveat: “I know 'nothingness' doesn't exist but…” and was absolutely amazed to discover recently that “nothingness” is even used in some types of logical theory and games as a valid variable, not only as a “non-subject” to compare with other “non-subjects,” but also as a part of some of the “non-predicational” conclusions.

It appears to me that now all the experientialist dust and smoke has settled that rather in the manner of the Trade Centre in New York remains, and I have been of a great part of my lexicon of referentiality, because in philosophical or ontological discussion I am left in a position where many of the words that I need to use are to me utterly meaningless.

And yet like the people who imagined that the change from the to the Julian calendar had robbed them of a couple of weeks of their lives when that in fact wasn't the case, it is probably not true for me to complain that I have been robbed of these words at all, and some people may say that its my own fault and that I wasn't robbed of them at all but threw them away, and if I want them back then I should jolly well start believing in “God” and “nothingness” and things like: “Your fortune is written in the stars,” again, if I want them back, to use them again, as they “should” be used again.

So what do I do about this black velvet bag of cognitive charades that is strung around my neck like some prophylactic token of meaninglessness? So many of the words I use are implicatory black holes of nonsensicality.

One disturbing early trait I noticed amongst some of my protagonists or opponents in discussions of “transcendentalist” issues, was the accusation that because I employed these for me meaningless words which were meaningful to them in arguments that I couldn't believe that they had no meaning, for the fact I was using then indicated or proved that I must believe that they have some meaning other wise I wouldn't be using them, and if I said: “There is no God” then my employment of the word “God” in my refutation of “God” meant that the word “God” must have some meaning for me. My explanations that for me the word “God” or “nothingness” are members of a category of words which I classify as “vacuum words,” which I use in the knowledge that though they have meaning for him and have no corresponding meaning for me, their use is forced upon me if I wish to discuss the subject with him. Sadly my explanations have usually fallen upon deaf ears.

In other words there is still a common belief amongst many people that a use of words which are claimed by the unbelieving user to have no referent for him, are triumphantly identified as evidence that they do have referentiality because he uses them, instead of understanding that the speaker's use of the words addresses not his own “missing version” of referentiality but his addressee's.

Now as I said that the experiential dust has settled and the errant sunbeams of actuality illuminate my current thinking, they affirm me as an atheistic, nominalistic, AITist, experientialist materialist which means I have exited the doctors clinic with more diagnostical labels tied around my neck than I ever dreamed of - for at least I know now what are the names of my ailment that causes me to appear stupid to other people because I can't bring myself to admire words “God” and “ “nothingness” as being bone fide kibbutzniks on my relational ranch of referential representation.

At my age to continually preface my use of vacuous words with such caveats as: “Assuming for the benefit of the discussion the “Flying Saucers” or “nothingness,” exists or is meaningful…” every time I use a empty word is frankly a bit of a bore for me, and in fairness to my addressees, most of them are content if I use “scare quotes” instead, even though for me on the occasions when I am typing and I miss them out it entails a complicated process of placing the cursor at the beginning of the offending word, then removing the hand to operate the lock shift to access the quote function, then repeating the process with the other quote marks on the end of the word again.

I suppose putting “scare quotes” around other people's words is a small price to pay for not believing in “alien abductions,” or “God” and “nothingness” and the “existence” of “ the reifications of verbs that don't exist?