(November 1, 2021 at 9:59 pm)Belacqua Wrote:Quote:Okay, I think I see now... that's a bold claim. I'll have to think hard about that to get my head around it, but first impression is that sure there may be these fuzzy edges of definition, but there is something in reality... something for instance qualitatively different between consciousness itself and anything outside of it (ie mind vs matter)... so what I'm saying is, even if you can't put a box around it and say 'this is a thing' in mereological nihilism, in some situations at least, there clearly is some differentiable 'thing' there to explain (ie 'mind' or 'matter' in this example), even if that's not the case at the fuzzier edges when definitions get harder.
It's one of the absolute basic tenets of Christian theology that God has no parts. This is called Divine Simplicity. It is especially important in Scholastic, Thomist thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_simplicity
It's basic in Neoplatonic thought, Christian Neoplatonism, ancient thought from India (Brahman), and Buddhism, to say that the world before we perceive it is One, with no real divisions. The divisions arise because of our perception. They are misleading (because we stop believing in the One) but necessary to live in the material world.
The Neoplatonic term, the One, may itself be misleading, since it implies that there will be a second thing or a third. That God is something that can be counted. That's why the negative way, as Neo says, is preferable. In fact Buddhists solve this problem by referring to basic reality as the Not-Two. 不二.
Many important Christians wrote about this concept, both within mainstream theology and in minority traditions. It is crucial to Jacob Boehme and William Blake, for example.
Nietzsche considered himself an anti-Christian because he also believed that our perceptions are creations of the mind, made by dividing up reality, but he said that instead of God being behind the illusory divisions, there is only chaos.
Cool, thanks for the info. It's a bit ahead of me at the moment, but at the same time I can feel it going in that direction in my reading... ie I presume this stems from the influence of Parmenides and Heraclitus... The One on the one hand, and ever changing flux on the other. As an aside, I've always been interested in Buddhism, and, in light of this, yeah I can see the same ideas in that, especially the flux.
