When I look at a tree I see no 'thatness,'
for to my way of thinking 'that'
is
simply a pronoun that stands for 'the
other one from this'.
I cannot conceive of a 'thatness' and
a 'thisness'
- for the moment one swings the attention
from this to that, or from
that
to this - this becomes that and that
becomes
this.
Anyway to award the suffix '-ness'
to an
adjective to form a noun, or to append
or
attribute a state or condition
upon
a pronoun [like 'that' or 'this'] is
exactly
the same as attributing 'You-ness'
or 'Me-ness'
to you and I - what is the point? The
entitative
uniqueness of form and behaviour of
you and
me needs no additional attributive
states,
for we already exist as we are.
I already 'am what I am' and you already 'are what you are,' and we are in no need of an additional,
extra, bolt-on, dual-version of our
already
existing existential reality.
'Being' cannot wrest anything from oblivion because
it doesn't exist to wrest anything
from anything.
It is only your own mind which you
conceive
of as wresting the observed tree
from oblivion through the medium of
your
own looking at it. In fact there are
millions
of trees in the world that exist in
areas
that will probably never be seen by
human
eyes - but they still exist. How
do
we know that they exist? By trusting
the logic of our own brains and making
judgements
based upon our experiential involvement
with
such things. The tree exists, but its
being
only exists in the sense that it exists
as
being a tree in the continuous present. |