NOTHING MATTERS
A mysterious black square symbolizing nothing and everything, from an occult tome from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd called Utriusque Cosmi maioris salicet et minoris metaphysica...
What is greater than God, but more evil than the devil? What do the rich need, and the poor have in plenty? What if you eat it will surely kill you? What, according to Socrates, is the only thing you can be certain you know? And what must you stop at if you want to find the answers?
‘Nothing,’ of course.
I’ve been thinking about ‘nothing’ recently, as I’m planning a new book on the subject. It’s a kind of sequel to a book that’s coming out with Reaktion in the spring of next year entitled The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art (more on this in future posts). The word ‘nothing’ usually refers to a state of nonexistence, or the property of having no property or of not being anything. By its very definition, ‘nothing’ is therefore boundless and eternal, beyond time and space. It eludes the coordinates that could turn it into something graspable. If you consider the idea of ‘nothing,’ you soon discover it cannot be conceived. If you try thinking about nothing at all, or try to do nothing, you also find It is impossible. Because the insertion of the word ‘nothing’ in a sentence usually implies that attention is to be given to the ‘something’ that has been negated, it’s necessary to place ‘scare’ marks around the word when it is meant to be understood as the focus of attention. Consider, for example, the difference in the meaning between the following: “I’m interested in nothing” and “I’m interested in ‘nothing’.”
‘Nothing’ is a constituent but inherently indefinable part of the reality we inhabit, and can incite potentially widely different conclusions about life’s purpose, spanning the extremes of hope and despair. In thinking about ‘nothing’ we must shift the usually unnoticed background to our thinking to the foreground. There are many things that concerns us that remain unsaid and unexpressed. Much of the time we dwell with absences, non-beings, nonexistence - the opposite of things actual and positive - but we rarely make them a manifest part of our thinking. Contemplating ‘nothing’ will mean getting acquainted with everything that is barely registered in our conscious and reasoning minds, but is nevertheless powerfully and sometimes violently experienced. We must redirect our attention away from a world dominated by the positivity of knowing and doing, of graspable things and bodies, and move into one that verbal language can only designate with negations or denials - not knowing , not doing, not existing, not being.
So, in some of the posts to come, I will be thinking about ‘nothing’ in particular. It is a surprisingly interesting subject. Here’s some Kierkegaard to get you thinking:
‘But the genuine subjective existing thinker is always just as negative as he is positive and vice versa: he is always that as long as he exists, not once and for all in a chimerical meditation…..He is cognizant of the negativity of the infinite in existence; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which at all times is a saving factor (the others let the wound close and become positive–deceived)…..He is, therefore, never a teacher, but a learner, and if he is continually just as negative as positive, he is continually striving.’