You're talking about opposites. When you say that the presence of scarcity is the absence of resources and therefore is non-existent, i.e. is nothing, you simultaneously negate that there is a resource. But scarcity and abundance speak of one and the same thing. The resource.
As a child I did not know that my body serves as a host to countless micro-organisms and provides a complex organic habitat for them. Despite the absence of my imagination, these micro-organisms lived within me.
If you translate absence literally, equating absence with non-being, I naturally agree with you. If a branch crashes down from a tree in the forest and there is no ear with a membrane near that the sound can hear, it means the absence of membranes on whose resistance the sound meets.
The colour red is absent for those who have no eyes, on which light strikes and refracts. Therefore the colour red does not exist.
Without resistance there can be no non-resistance. Everything objective and non-objective cannot exist unless it meets its opposite.
There is the logic of the "excluded third". When one speaks of justice and injustice, one excludes a third party. So what could this third party be in the example of justice versus injustice?
But, abundance speaks of resources and scarcity speaks of the absence of resources, so they don't speak exactly of the same thing but of something similar.
This is true speaking subjectively. The color red does not exist only for them. But it does exist objectively because we can see it.
I believe that opposites are an appearance, and that there really is only one and not two, that is, justice is, and injustice seems to be but is not. Here it is unnecessary to look for a third party, because if there are not two much less there can be three.
No, to be precise, scarcity also speaks of a resource, just one that is not infinite. It is scarce. If it were not scarce, but absent, you could not speak of a resource.
A ton of ore is a resource. If ore wasn't a resource, we wouldn't be talking about ore to be scarce, for example.
When I wrote that down I was thinking of insects or other animals which do have a different retina. For them the color red does not exist.
.... I think I .... understand. Is what you are saying, that if justice "is", then the opposite is an abstraction/distraction from that same thing? One is real, the other abstracted? But so could injustice be in the same way, and you would have to prove what came first. HaHa :D
I am sure that I am using your argumentation elsewhere, where I have the conflict of two people in my counselling, for example. There it is about fairness in many cases. We all basically know what fairness is, but as soon as we talk about unfairness, we still talk about fairness, but we pretend that we are talking about something else, while we are talking about something similar.
But to make it clear that it is one thing and not two, the logic of the excluded third party (concept, person, property) is very helpful. An entity - that is, one - always needs something that makes this entity as such possible. So "one" is not a singularity, but something made up of several (at least two).
I think the word "entity" is often misunderstood as strictly "singular", as "one", but something can only become a "one", an entity, if it previously existed as two or more separate things and then merged together. This is similar to cells that join to form a heap and later become an organic living being. But even before that, the single cell did not just live as single in the nowhere, it was in unity with something else, maybe not cell-like, maybe a kind of primordial soup, where it again formed a unity with the surrounding habitat. So entity and unity, just as you say, cannot be separated. However, the excluded third element is always what you can hardly think of, because each unified is embedded in something else unified, which is difficult to think about. It's the third "element" (for a lack of a better word).
When I talk about justice, I always talk in context. That context is significant. It's the hidden superstructure of every human being, unseen by another human being. Every word is embedded in a universe of contexts, and what those contexts are is what needs to be found out, and that is probably what is meant by "injustice" when the context of one seems unable to take into view the context of the other.
In that sense your expression "there really is only one" is kind of confusing when it stands alone. Haha :D
Yes, but scarcity is a relative term. Something is scarce because it is insufficient. And insufficiency is non-sufficiency. And here you go down the same stairs as with all other words.
I say that if justice is, then its opposite is a concept and not a reality.
I think this is valid if we talk about material things like a cell, because material objects are a compound. A cell is tall, wide, one, and many other things. On the other hand, ideas such as justice are simple, that is, they are only one thing, justice is only just. Therefore, it is only one. And we say that there is injustice when the just is not found.
I agree with you if you say that injustice is simply us not understanding the context. For me it's us not seeing the whole picture.
The problem with saying that injustice is, is that it is a concept that is based on denial, and denial is something that is said in correlation to something else, in this case, justice.
Are you talking about terms in absolute and relative expression?
If someone hides part of the revenue in his tax return, he is dishonest in his tax return.
He behaves dishonourably, the counter term of honour. Without dishonor, we wouldn't know what honor is. At some point, someone started using a term that had to do with an act or omission. Terms that have to do with actions, such as honour, have to do with their omissions, such as dishonour.
I still cannot follow your basic argument.
I would think that there is no beauty because beauty is a concept. If a concept is present, it is not present forever, but only in a context. Contexts change over time and are therefore not permanent. They are subject to change. So I would argue that the only thing you can nail down is change itself.
Change is. The absence of change would be immutability, permanence. It seems to me that not a single proof of permanence has yet been provided, either in explanatory models of a scientific or religious nature.
This brings me back to our previous dialogue on the concept of "I".
The Buddhists explain the absence of an I by saying that consciousness is like a candle flame. If you light another candle with the burning flame of that candle, is it still the same flame? Where is its essence? In this description consciousness is the flame. But nowhere is it understood that the one flame that lights the other candle is still the same or similar flame.
It's not the best of analogies, but I think it's a pretty good one.
Right. But although we would not know what honor is, it would still exist, being the rule and not the exception.
I would ask you then, have you seen a beautiful person? Because for a beautiful person to exist, beauty must exist. And here we realize that beauty is not a concept, a word nothing more, but refers to something real that exists.
Beauty is as permanent as the color red. Would the red color exist if there are no red things? We could say that there are no red things, but the red color could be created by mixing other colors. So, it exist?
The context changes, and people consider other things beautiful, but the beauty taken in itself has always existed. So that for beautiful things to exist, beauty must exist.
And I also believe that there are things that don't change, such as ideas, or colors. Red things fade over time and change color, but red taken itself is never another color.