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guide
to nothing
in philosophy
philosophers, have never felt easy on nothing. ever since
Parmenides laid it down that it is impossible to speak
of what is not, broke his own rule in the act of stating it,
and deduced himself into a world where all that ever happened
was nothing, the impression has persisted that the narrow path
between sense and nonsense on this subject is a difficult one
to tread and that altogether the less said of it the better.
this escape, however, is not so easy as it looks. Plato,
in pursuing it, reversed the Parmenidean dictum by insisting,
in effect, that anything a philosopher can find to talk about
must somehow be there to be discussed, and so let loose upon
the world that unseemly rabble of centaurs and unicorns, republican
monarchs and wife-burdened bachelors, which has plagued ontology
from that day to this. nothing (of which they are all aliases)
can apparently get rid of these absurdities, but for fairly
obvious reasons has not been invited to do so.
the logicians will have nothing of all this. nothing,
they say, is not a thing, nor is it the name of anything, being
merely a short way of saying of anything that it is not something
else. "nothing" means "not-anything"; appearances to the contrary
are due merely to the error of supposing that a grammatical
subject must necessarily be a name. asked, however to prove
that nothing is not the name of anything, they fall back on
the claim that nothing is the name of anything (since according
to them there are no names anyway).
the friends of nothing may be divided into two distinct
though not exclusive classes: 1: the know-nothings, who claim
a phenomenological acquaintance with nothing in particular,
and 2: the fear-nothings, who, believing, with Macbeth, that
"nothing is but what is not," are thereby launched into dialectical
encounter with nullity in general.
for the first, nothing is a genuine, even positive, feature
of experience. it is far from being a mere grammatical illusion.
we are all familiar with holes and gaps, and we have a vocabulary
for lacks and losses, absences, silences, impalpabilities, insipidities,
and the like. voids and vacancies of one sort or another are
sought after, dealt in and advertised in the newspapers. and
what are these, it is asked, but perceived fragments of nothingness,
experiential blanks, which command, nonetheless, their share
of attentions and therefore deserve recognition? Sartre,
for one, has given currency to such arguments, and so, in effect,
have the upholders of "negative facts" -- an improvident sect,
whose refrigerators are full of nonexistent butter and cheese,
absentee elephants and so on, which they claim to detect therein.
if existence indeed precedes essence, there is certainly reason
of a sort for maintaining that nonexistence is also anterior
to, and not a mere product of, the essentially parasitic activity
of negation; that the nothing precedes the not. but,
verbal refutations apart, the short answer to this view, as
given, for instance, by Bergson, is that these are but
petty and partial nothings, themselves parasitic on what already
exists. absence is a mere privation, and a privation of something
at that. a hole is always a hole in something: take away the
thing, and the hole goes too; more precisely, it is replaced
by a bigger if not better hole, itself relative to its surroundings,
and so tributary to something else. nothing, in short is
given only in relation to what is, and even the idea of
nothing requires a thinker to sustain it. if we want to encounter
it an sich, we have to try harder than that.
the alternative theory promises better things, or rather
nothings. it argues, so to speak, not that holes are in things
but that things are in holes or, more generally, that everything
(and everybody) is in a hole. to be anything (or anybody) is
to be bounded, hemmed in, defined, and separated by a circumambient
frame of vacuity, and what is true of the individual is equally
true of the collective. the universe at large is fringed
with nothingness, from which indeed (how else?) it must
have been created, if created it was; and its beginning and
end, like that of all change within it, must similarly be viewed
as a passage from one nothing to another, with an interlude
of being in between. such thoughts, or others like them, have
haunted the speculations of nullophile metaphysicians from Pythagoras
to Pascal and from Hegel and his followers to
Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre. being and
nonbeing, as they see it, are complementary notions, dialectically
entwined, and of equal status and importance; although Heidegger
alone has extended their symmetry to the point of equipping
Das Nichts with a correlative (if nugatory) activity of noth-ing,
or nihilating, whereby it produces Angst in its votaries and
untimely hilarity in those, such as Carnap and Ayer,
who have difficulty in parsing "nothing" as a present participle
of the verb "to noth." nothing, whether it noths or not, and
whether or not the being of anything entails it, clearly does
not entail that anything should be. like Spinoza's substance,
it is causa sui; nothing (except more of the same) can come
of it; ex nihilo, nihil fit. that conceded, it remains a question
to some why anything, rather than nothing, should exist. this
is either the deepest conundrum in metaphysics or the most childish,
and though many must have felt the force of it at one time or
another, it is equally common to conclude, on reflection, that
it is no question at all. The hypothesis of theism may be said
to take it seriously and to offer a provisional answer. the
alternative is to argue that the dilemma is self-resolved in
the mere possibility of stating it. if nothing whatsoever existed,
there would be no problem and no answer, and the anxieties even
of existential philosophers would be permanently laid to rest.
since they are not, there is evidently nothing to worry about.
but that itself should be enough to keep an existentialist happy.
unless the solution be, as some have suspected, that it is not
nothing that has been worrying them, but they who have been
worrying it.
- based on Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 5 Paul
Edwards, editor in chief, The Macmillan Company and The Free
Press, New York 1967
---
selected links:
| Parmenides:
On Nature | ~ | Plato)
| ~ | Hegel
| ~ | Heidegger
| ~ | Ts
| ~ | Sartre
|
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