Nothingness

Absence considered as a subject in its own right - and whether there is anything to consider.

Theme: Being and reality
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term: 無 · mu
Term fixed: c. 475 BC

In plain terms

Talking about nothing is difficult in a way that talking about other subjects is not. The moment you say what it is, you have made it something.

This is not word-play. Several genuinely different questions hide under the one word. Is there empty space? Could there have been no universe? What is it that a missing person is, when their absence is the most conspicuous thing in the room? Is death an experience of nothing, or simply no experience?

Each of those has been treated as the same question and they are not. The one that has produced most philosophy is the last one Leibniz put: why is there something rather than nothing - a question that cannot be answered by pointing at anything, since anything you point at is part of what is being asked about.

As a philosopher would put it

Parmenides sets the prohibition: what is not cannot be thought, so non-being cannot be spoken of at all, and change - which requires something to come from what is not - is ruled out with it. Plato's Sophist breaks the prohibition by reinterpreting it, treating not-being as difference rather than absolute negation, which is what lets falsehood be possible at all.

Heidegger reopens it as a question about mood rather than logic. In anxiety, beings as a whole slip away and what is disclosed is not any particular thing; the nothing is what makes beings show up as beings. Sartre gives negation a bearer: consciousness is the being through which nothingness comes into the world, and possibility, absence and lack are real features of a situation because a questioner is present in it.

The Kyoto School reads the whole subject differently. Nishida's absolute nothingness and Nishitani's śūnyatā are not the negation of being but the field on which being appears - a position with Buddhist rather than Greek ancestry, and one that treats the Western treatment of nothing as a specifically Western problem.

Where you meet it

Aristotle held that a vacuum was impossible, and for nearly two thousand years the argument was conducted with reasons rather than instruments. In 1643 Evangelista Torricelli filled a metre-long tube with mercury, inverted it into a dish, and watched the column fall to about 76 centimetres, leaving a gap at the closed top.

What was in the gap. The question was not rhetorical - it was the most argued-about empty space in Europe. Descartes said it could not be empty, since extension is the essence of matter and there is extension there. Others said a subtle matter had leaked through the glass. In 1648 Pascal had his brother-in-law carry a barometer up the Puy-de-Dôme, and the column fell as he climbed, which settled that the mercury was held up by air pressure and not by nature's abhorrence of a void.

What it did not settle was whether the space was nothing. That question is still open in physics, where the vacuum has an energy and a structure, and the thing at the top of Torricelli's tube turns out to be one of the busiest objects in the subject.

What is actually disputed

Whether the noun refers.

On one side, nothing is not a name at all but a quantifier: to say there is nothing in the box is to say that everything fails to be in the box, and any sentence that treats nothing as a subject can be paraphrased without it. Carnap made this the case study for his whole attack on metaphysics, dissecting Heidegger's sentence about the nothing itself nothings as grammatically well-formed and cognitively empty.

Heidegger's reply is that logical analysis has assumed what it needs to show, since logic itself rests on negation and cannot ground it. Beyond that dispute sits Leibniz's question, which resists both treatments: why is there something rather than nothing has no agreed status, being either the deepest question in the subject or a request for an explanation of a kind that cannot exist.

Commonly confused with

Śūnyatā c. 150 Emptiness is not the absence of things but the absence of independent existence in them. Things remain, function and matter. The identification is a nineteenth-century European misreading that has never quite gone away.
Nihilism 1887 Nihilism is a claim that nothing has value. Nothingness is a question about what is, and the two are related only by a shared prefix.
empty space A vacuum is a region with nothing in it, which is a fact about a region. Nothing at all is not a region.

Defined against

Being The oldest pair in the subject, and the one Parmenides refused to allow as a pair

Philosophers

Parmenides of Elea Ruled non-being out, and set the terms for everyone after
Plato Reinterprets not-being as difference, which makes falsehood possible
Martin Heidegger The nothing as what discloses beings, met in anxiety rather than argument
Jean-Paul Sartre Consciousness as the route by which negation enters the world
Rudolf Carnap The case that these sentences are well-formed and meaningless

Works

On Nature The prohibition itself
Being and Time Anxiety, and the nothing that is not a being
Being and Nothingness Negation given a bearer
Religion and Nothingness Nishitani, reading the subject from śūnyatā rather than from Greece
Language, Truth and Logic The positivist verdict, in its most quotable form

Schools

Eleatic School Where non-being is forbidden
Existentialism Where it becomes a subject about human beings
Philosophy of the Kyoto School Absolute nothingness as a field rather than a negation
Vienna Circle Where the whole topic is declared meaningless
Madhyamaka Buddhism Emptiness, which is repeatedly and wrongly read as this

Related concepts

Being c. 475 BC · Existence c. 1020 · Śūnyatā c. 150 · Infinity c. 570 BC · Death c. 300 BC

Parmenides ruled it out - what is not cannot be thought or said - and every later treatment is a response to that prohibition rather than an independent start.