So I was reading a little Plato and Aristotle, and very little Hegel.
From this mix a question springed in my mind while I was smoking… I first had the thought “Impossible is Nothing”, like in the Adidas slogan, then the question – “Is nothing impossible or possible?”. What is possible? Do we say that possible is “something”? If yes, what that something is? If it is a something, then not only it’s possible, but it already is. So if it is only possible, it can’t yet be something. But is it nothing? It feels like it is possible, so it is not nothing. Also, I’m not sure if there is strictly speaking a distinction between something and nothing, because I feel that nothing still assumes we are talking about a thing. So then I thought that “possible” is its own category. And that what we call nothing, is not exactly nothing, but is the absence of something.
So I thought that “Possible” is what is on the other side of “Something that is”.
So this established the model of the world the way I see it – There are things that are, a “world” of existing things; and there is a “world” of Possible where there is absence of any somethings, only possibility (there isn’t even a nothing there)
Then I thought about what is a something (an instance of the things that are) in relation to a possibility (the other side of things that are). And I think that a something is an actualized possibility. Meaning that a possibility becomes a something via an act, or that the thing becomes by a possibility getting actualized. So when we choose to act, we make possibilities become somethings. We create new worlds where there are things. Including the choosing itself, as some kind of impulse that got generated within us, is a product of an act that we performed, and a possibility was actualized in a choice. Choice to act in this case, but can be any other choice. Or any other thing of our consciousness like an idea or sensation.
So then I was reading Plato and Aristotle again and came across this discussion of happiness. And how we choose happiness.
Made me think if that’s really how it works. Do we choose happiness? Because the way I perceived it, when reading about it in Plato and Aristotle, is that it was some choice we applied after the things existed. It was some form of assessment where we chose if something qualifies or doesn’t qualify as happiness. But if happiness is something that’s a product of our human choice, what is the absolute objective happiness that doesn’t depend on a subjective criteria?
So it occured to me that “happiness” is way too close to “happens”. And happens is what is the actual moment of when a possibility becomes a thing – it happens. So I thought that the “happens” is the absolute happiness. When the magic of an act makes a possibility happen into an actualized something, then the world is happy. There is a new baby-something in the world. So in a sense we do chose happiness, but not after something has already happened, but it is our choice to act that automatically actualizes Possibility into a something, and this choice to act ultimately is what generates the (absolute) happiness.
Also, since what “IS” is the ultimate version of truth, it also happens to be the only option for happiness. Since everything else is on the other side, the side of possibility, but not of things.
And Possible can be actualized by any act, not only be a human act. So we can find happiness in many other happen-s, not only those we chose through our own act. This is how we can experience happiness and awe from looking at a sunset or falling rain, or anything else.
We can still have the subjective happiness applied over this, like an additional criteria that we chose for moral or intellectual reasons. We can say things like “This set of actualized possibilities, this set of happen-s, is good. And this set of happen-s is not good” And we can chose to feel subjectively happy only about the “good happen-s”.
Haven’t thought much of what is “not happiness”. It is possible that it is when things stop existing and move back into the world of possibility. Especially when they dive into the “black hole” which is the absence of any something. This black hole is a complete void and is one of the possibilities, namely a possibility for a void, but it can never be actualized into a thing. So when an existing thing becomes a possibility, either by moving from the present into the past (like when two lovers stop loving each other) or by completely ceasing to exist (like when a person dies for example), then sometimes there is some act that can bring it back into existence, and sometimes there isn’t such an act. And this in my mind defines the level of “not happiness”, along with any subjective overlay.
Disclaimer here is that I have not yet gone through Hegel’s metaphysics and phenomenology, so it’s possible that some of this matches the ideas around spirit and such. I’ll be definitely revisiting my model as I read more. But from the little I read I felt it was going in some other direction, and I also didn’t see anything about “possible”, so I feel it won’t be matching, but I rally hope it is complimentary or that it fits in this “Possible <-> Happiness(happens) <-> Thing” model.
In summary:
- The opposite of “what is” is not “what is not”, but is possibility. There is no “is” or “is not” in Possibility, as Possible is a separate category. Something like the mirror of the things that are, but somehow a mirror into the complete inverse of things, (maybe like the i, for i-rational, in math).
- (some) Possibility actualizes through an act, or maybe more precisely an act actualizes a perceptible thing out of (some) Possibility, thus the thing happens and becomes.
- Happiness is in the very origin of a thing happening out of a possibility. When the “happens” becomes. Happiness coincides with the birth of the happening. Happiness might be not same as the happening itself, but happiness and happening are linked inseparably at birth, so that for every happen there is an attached happiness. They are like two identical twins that are the product of the same nucleus splitting in two identical entities – one makes the happen, the other makes the attached happiness.
- We can narrow or widen the subset of happen-s that we chose to perceive as happiness subjectively. If we widen it to the complete maximum, then our subjective happiness coincides with the objective absolute happiness and I suppose we become fully present.
