[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

You do like Immanuel Kant, don't you Nog?

Well, he's not exactly my favourite philosopher but I do agree him being one of the sharpest minds there ever has been... and he has good points on certain areas - like the one in my sig and what I quoted there from his argument against the ontological proof of God's existence against St. Thomas Aquinas (as a North-European protestant he thought the thing with God was "belief" and not "knowledge" - that the point of religion was to believe in something that can't be known instead of trying to prove something that was beyond proof).

I just want to point out that things like "Void" and "Ainulindale" can also be quantitative (if i got your definition right), in the sense that there is lots of music but none as grand as Ainulindale, or spaces with little in them but the Void is the most empty of all of them. You can quantify such things not only by their innate qualities but by an event or role they play or etc. There is an infinite number of categories you can look at. You can also say that things existed for a long time, but the Void is the oldest still - which also gives it a quantitative "extraordinariness".

Haha. That's a nice one! But The Music of the Ainur still was the act of creation - of bringing being into existence instead of letting the Void, the non-being rule supreme. It is said it was brought by means of music - but surely you can't compare the Music of the Ainur to any music we can hear or play. From the Pythagoreans onwards (about 2600 years) the latest we have "known" that the "music of the spheres", as the echoes in the physical univedrse of that creating music were called those days, was not something any human being could hear or understand.To say it is music is rather a way of trying to paraphrase something to human understanding that is by it's nature understandable: hah, creating being from nothing... pretty hard to go and figure what it is or means.

And what comes to the arguments between The Void and The Music of the Ainur there is one pretty tough one: The Void can't be extraordinary as it is - by definition - nothing. Well, one can't even say it "IS" something, even nothing (not to say it is extraordinary). Is that an argument for the Void to be the really extraordinary thing then? Nope. It's just contradiction in terms: that which is not can not be anything: honest, insane, deadly, neglected, cuddly... or extreaordinary.

Only that which is, which exists, can be something - and the Music of the Ainur is the very thing that caused existence to exist, the most extraordinary thing that made it possible for fex. itself to be such an extraordinary thing.

And if we humans have gotten anything right in our myths and religions, then it must be that non-existence is the primordial norm which was overcome by divine creation - which is the wonder, the miracle, the extraordinary thing.

Originally Posted by tp

Of course if one chose to interpret "extraordinary" in a different way it would undermine everything. If we say it means "beyond ordinary" then the object must have an ordinary reference point and then surpass. But if we say "uncommon" then perhaps that which has no comparable moves to the forefront.

I agree with what you say but still think the division between the two is both reasonable and defendable in this case... Like I said - when you have two things (or more) you compare between each other (with shared reference points) you mostly end up in arguments where one side is more or less as right as another. And basically yes, this whole game is partly about just that: how you compare things trying to find a reference between some of the choices... and which reference points you think are noteworthy in any individual case. But on this round we have two pretty extraordinary things in play, namely nothnigness and the coming forth of being from nothingness. And those two just surpass any other comparison as they are the basis from which any comparisons can be made in the first case...