"The Absolute is Lazy": Gricean Scenarios

---------- By J. L. S.


IN DISCUSSING with R. B. Jones, elsewhere, I promised, "Sure we are NOT to provide scenarios for nonsense". But maybe someone will, so what gives.

Consider "The Absolute is lazy". This was used in early discussions of Ayer. Ayer had translated Carnap,

Das Nichts nichtet

as

The Nothing nothings


--- later Pap will destroy that. And O'Connor had rephrased it as

"The Absolute is lazy". By 1960, the phrase, dubbed by O'Connor as "indisputable piece of indisputable nonsense" had acquired conventional implicatures of its own.

"The Absolute (King) -- vide Abolutism -- is lazy"

"The Abolute (one) is lazy"

--- The problem of course is what Hegel may have NOT meant by it: for his Absolute is on the whole either pressing people (Hegelians mainy) to _synthesise_ the Absolute, which MAY remain 'lazy' all the way. So one _has_ to be careful (not to wak him up, as it were).

Is a sleeping Absolute a lazy one?

Etc.