Nothing

From reading an article in The Philosopher (vol. 109, no. 1, winter 2021) these words and their points were interesting...

In the fundamental mood of anxiety, by contrast, nothing appears meaningful. Indeed, nothing appear at all. For things to appear as this rather than as that, as this next to that, there must be some structure of meaning. For a being to be, it must be determined, defined, delimited (near etymological synonyms) with respect to opposed, or adjacent, or somehow related beings. Beings are, by definition, relative to one another, and they necessarily relate to one another within some semantic structure of intelligibility. Determinate beings can only be what they are in a meaningful world. Yet what happens if the world no longer appears as meaningful? What happens when the world, as a linguistically structured meaningful whole, is shattered and mere unconnected shards floating in unstructured space remain? Then, says Heidegger, we come face to face, in the fundamental mood of anxiety, with the nothing. ‘All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. ... We can get no hold on things. In this slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over us and remains’.

[…]

Heidegger once wrote that the usefulness of philosophy lies in its immediate uselessness: ‘It only ever has an indirect effect, in that philosophical meditation prepares new perspectives and standards for all our comportments and decisions’. In this sense, all of our scientific and everyday dealings with objects and objectives, with things and tasks as they are disclosed within our current horizons of understanding, depend on philosophy’s wider outlook, which must remain ever attuned to the usefulness of the useless. Lost in the rat race of managing apparent necessities, we cover over the more profound need we have of ‘the unnecessary’. ‘Running around amidst beings’ (Umtrieben an das Seiende), we remain oblivious of our primal relation to the withdrawn reserves of being (Sein), to the undetermined abundance of nothing, which can be metaphorically understood as the dense ‘forest’ that encompasses the delimited ‘clearings’ we inhabit, or as the vertiginously vast ‘open-region’ in which the delineated ‘horizons’ of our meaningful worlds are housed. The early Heidegger famously described human being as being-in-the-world. Yet Ueda – interpreting Heidegger on the basis of his Zen Buddhist background – says that, in truth, this is always a matter of being-in-the-twofold-world, since we always dwell in a delimited world that lies, in turn, within an undelimited ‘empty space’ (koku), just as the finite earth can be pictured as resting in the infinite universe.

We typically have tunnel vision; we see only the ordered grid of our daily routines, a grid produced by our individual and collective projects, a grid within which we run about in the rat races of our lives. What lies beyond the borders of the boxes in which we habitually dwell cannot but appear as nothing, if and when it appears at all. We likely experience this nothing – if and when we ever do experience it – as a disturbing and inconvenient disruption of our busy lives, filled as they are with meaningful tasks that seem to constantly demand our full attention. The open-region beyond the horizons of our meaningful worlds cannot but appear, if it ever does appear, as a meaningless nowhere, as a rumbling chaotic mess, as a nihilistic void that evokes anxiety, or as a vacuum that induces horror.

‘Questioning’, Heidegger famously remarked, ‘is the piety of thought’. This makes for a nice philosophical sound bite, a catchy quote to put on a coffee mug at a café for philosophical posers. And yet, if we take it seriously and begin to question everything, it may seem as if nothing matters anymore, as if a rug of certainty has been pulled out from under our feet, exposing us to a meaningless abyss of nihility. We may even spill our decaf cappuccino. Nevertheless, if we tarry with, rather than flee from, that experience, we may find that it begins to feel freeing. As Heidegger says, when ‘when we release ourselves into the nothing ... we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which we are wont to go cringing’. We may experience this nothing, not as a vacuous nihility that invokes horror, but rather as a spacious openness that allows for freedom and creativity. We may find that the indeterminateness of the nothing is not merely an anaemic privation but rather an amorphous wellspring teeming with as yet undefined possibilities.

If we, as Heidegger and Zhuangzi suggest, open ourselves to that open-region, free ourselves for that freedom – for that openness beyond the domain of our predominate patterns of thinking and behaving – then we may find that the nothing turns out to be the very spaciousness of freedom: freedom from fossilised linguistic and conceptual constrictions, and freedom for rethinking the being of beings, for reimagining the possibilities of our lives, and for redrawing the parameters of the meaningful worlds we co-inhabit. If we, as Nishitani suggests, step all the way back through the field of nihility, we may discover that our original home-ground is a field of emptiness, a discovery that frees us from egoistic and communal reifications and attachments, and frees us for compassionate and creative cooperation.

This essay began with a reflection on the deeply unsettling feeling that nothing really matters. If you did not turn away, if you stayed the course even as it delved further into the abyssal topic of nihilism, and if you patiently pondered how East Asian philosophers may have been better equipped than Heidegger’s Western colleagues were to understand where he was headed with his strange and logic-defying locutions, you may now understand that, as it turns out, nothing really does matter. Indeed, ‘the nothing’ can be understood to be the ultimate concern of philosophers, which means of all human beings insofar as we heed the most critical and conscientious calling of our existence.