Ma Jong-gi, Beauty's Hidden Breath, and Ontology

20210518, #breakfastdiary 94, 13°C/foggy, 25min/exercise Blanch tofu noodles briefly in boiling water and drain — today's guilt-easing solution. Heat olive oil in a pan, sauté mushrooms, then pour in a jarred cod-roe cream pasta sauce for that indulgent, worldly flavor. Add a little butter to make the indulgence even richer. When the moment feels right, add the drained tofu noodles. Plate it nicely and top with an egg yolk and grated Parmesan. There's a South African proverb that also appears in the lyrics of a popular song there: 'Umuntu ngumuntu ngubantu.' It means 'a person is only a person through other people.' I read that line in a book I've been going through lately. It's a kind of ontology — the idea that I only take on meaning through you, the other who is not me. Ontology, also called the study of being, is a branch of metaphysics concerned with what all beings — not just particular ones like nature or mind — hold in common simply by virtue of being beings, and with the fundamental determinations a being has as a being. (Wikipedia) #Ontology is the discipline that asks questions like this: given a cod-roe cream pasta sauce whose label clearly states '3% wine-aged cod roe,' yet no cod roe is anywhere to be found, can we really say it doesn't exist just because we can't see it? This connects to #metaphysics and #epistemology.