A nothing We were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing —, the no one’s rose.
Paul Celan, “Psalm” (2001, p. 179)
I
In an episode from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, the title character is in-structed to tune a piano at the house of a friend. Failing the task, the distress caused by the incident, Beckett writes, “was not so much that he did not know what had happened, for he did not care what had happened, as that nothing had happened, that a thing that was nothing had happened, with the utmost formal distinctness, and that it continued to happen, in his mind, he supposed, though he did not know exactly what that meant” (Beckett, 1953, p. 76). Whether or not we can begin to conceive of nothingness, even less write about it, is a central problem in Beckett’s text. The principal thought arising from this passage is how “nothing had happened”? When a thing happens, it defines itself through existing, and all the more so when we re-member it. For the protagonist in Beckett’s novel, to say, “nothing had hap-pened” is to suggest that no event had happened despite a reference to something. How is this so?
The question seems to necessitate failure. In the first instance, to speak about nothing is to evince a celebrated logical paradox. It appears to employ a counterfeit use of “nothing” which has the consequence of rendering some-thing ineffable seemingly effable. According to this view, the mere mention of nothing, nothingness, indeed zero, presupposes a context in which the act of negation must materialize or otherwise become apparent. To this extent, any mention of nothingness is always with reference to the thing it is negat-ing, without it ever being isolated as such. Can we infer that nothingness is an “impure” concept, relying upon “something” for its foundation? To con-sider the notion of pure nothingness, an autonomous concept would have to be present, thus removed from any “thing” delimiting its scope.
Yet how this transparency can exist without there being a “thing” that nothingness negates in advance is unclear. This is not a novel problem. The
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historical and philosophical linage concerned with unraveling the paradox of nothingness is broad. In ancient Mesopotamia, the first use of the zero was recorded. Here, the use of the zero was to indicate what had preceded an empty space. In his The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, Robert Kaplan tells us that the circular shape of the zero derives from the serrations made in sand when one of the round pebbles used for counting was removed (Kaplan, 1999, pp. 4–7). That this would substantiate the belief that no such thing as “pure” nothingness exists is confirmed by the intra-dependence the serrations in the sand have upon the pebbles previously removed. The pres-ence of nothingness can only be a detected because what was is now, in some sense, absent. Consider then, the oddity of a philosopher who claims that holding out into the “Nothing” is symptomatic of grasping Being (with a capital “B”) in its totality. Yet as Eli Diamond writes, against precisely this context the core of Heidegger’s philosophy grew: “For Heidegger, the Noth-ing is the impetus of our approach to what is most real in the world, although beyond essence and existence: the One, or Being” (Diamond, 2001, p. 201).
The implicit logic in this correlation is that nothingness is prior to being, so justifying the metaphysical question: why something rather than nothing? It is a question that haunted Heidegger throughout his academic life.
Heidegger’s onus on the Nothing (das Nicht) derives from his preoccupa-tion with “uncovering the original meaning of Being,” a meaning that he be-lieves Western philosophy has forgotten. When Heidegger writes about this forgetfulness of the original meaning of Being, what he has in mind is Being as taken for granted rather than an outright amnesia. We have become too acclimatized to the world, to the extent that we have lost sight of why such things as beings exist in the first place. We take it as self-evident that Being is at all. Such is our everyday intimate proximity with Being that our habitual familiarity with it has meant that its overarching significance has been lost in a “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) manner. Through approaching the world as a solely ontic phenomenon (that is, as a being), the ontological as-pect (that is, as a Being) is neglected. Western metaphysics and science, ac-cording to Heidegger, has only concerned itself with the “what” of being:
what is manifest in its outward representation. Physics, chemistry, and biol-ogy are engaged with the specific aspects of phenomena which, being essen-tial to experience, remain dependent upon and presuppose the underlining Being for their existence. A mistaken reliance on particular disciplines, sug-gests Heidegger, coupled with a conviction that epistemologically such dis-ciplines are absolute, entails a neglect of the wholeness of Being. Heidegger writes: “The question of Being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities
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as entities of such and such a type, and in so doing already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies them-selves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their founda-tions” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 2). By inverting the priority that the ontic dimension has over the ontological dimension, Heidegger will seek to re-claim the totality of Being by placing it firmly within the grasp of Dasein (the being-there of beings). We now turn to the means by which he seeks to invert the priority.
We find Heidegger’s exposition of the Nothing, and its transcendental possibility, most evident in his short lecture, “What is Metaphysics?” The es-say begins on a note of procedure by proposing to answer the given question, what is metaphysics?, by circumventing the question and instead tackling an actual metaphysical question. Only in this way, he tells us, will we arrive at what metaphysics is. The Nothing arises through Heidegger’s contention that science excludes the Nothing from its scope of inquiry. Science presupposes itself to inquire into the specifics of being, the “this” and the “that” and noth-ing else. Heidegger, not content with this dismissal, probes the question
“what about this Nothing?” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 97). The Nothing gives rise to the possibility of being, which firstly oppresses and secondly evokes won-der in consciousness, causing the question “why” to emerge. The Nothing leads to metaphysics, since it is the Nothing which “puts us, the questioners, in question. It is, writes Heidegger, “a metaphysical question” (Ibid., p. 111).
So, with Heidegger as taskmaster, we are led into an expedition to expose this neglected Nothing.
Already we are faced with our original problem of how we can unearth the Nothing without recourse to positing a predicate upon it, so rendering it a something. Phenomenological thinking is always intentional, that is, directed toward something as opposed to nothing, as Heidegger says: “phenomenol-ogy means…to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way it shows itself from itself” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 58). To let an object “show”
itself means to allow it to appear, or make itself known. Yet this phenome-nology of the Nothing seems destitute when it comes to disclosing itself.
Heidegger, anticipating this criticism, argues that its force is only tenable in accordance with formal logic, specifically the Law of Non-Contradiction.
The law, which finds its heritage in Aristotle, and was not broken until Hegel, declares that a “thing” cannot both be and be its own negation simul-taneously. The full extent of this claim is measurable when we contrast it with pre-Socratic philosophy. Consider, in the first instance, Heraclitus, who affirmed becoming over being and so advocated a philosophy of vitality and flux. Heraclitus’ thought recognized, indeed placed central, polarities
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servedly. With the arrival of Parmenides, the Heraclitean flux grew in disre-pute. For Parmenides, we can investigate what does exist or we can investi-gate what does not exist, but we cannot investiinvesti-gate both. When pushed, Parmenides will admit that the investigation of non-existence is groundless, since we cannot logically investigate what does not exist: hence, every sub-ject of inquiry must be existent. Through studying the Nothing in terms of logic alone, Parmenides’ thought had the consequence of implying a non-spatial, non-temporal existence that suggests no conciliation of change.
Aware of Parmenides’ error, Democritus sought to resolve the conflict be-tween being and nothingness by emphasizing the roles of atoms in the void.
For Heidegger, Democritus’ atomism defines itself as a characteristic of be-ing, and so maintains complicity with the Law of Non-Contradiction.
Heidegger believes that tradition and dogma have clouded any attempt to unearth the Nothing from the root of Being. In Aristotle, this dogma reaches its summit whereby it has rendered any investigation into the Nothing futile.
Heidegger is perplexed: since the Law of Non-Contradiction presupposes the possibility of negation by the intellect, how can the law emerge without the presence of the Nothing? For Heidegger, they are entwined. Negation, “no”
and the “not” are dependent upon the Nothing for their negativity just as they are dependent upon Being. Such is the core of Heidegger’s thesis.
II
We have found ourselves assured of the Nothing but unsure as to where it is to be found. Suggesting that the Nothing reveals itself in death proves inef-fective. As Wittgenstein and Heidegger noted, “death is not an event, but a phenomenon to be understood existentially in an eminent sense...” (Ibid., p.
233). In a similar vein, Kant also remarks that, “nobody can experience his own death (since it requires life in order to experience); he can only observe it in others” (Kant, 1978, p. 55). The objectification of death thus distances it as an experience in the category of other experiences. Reduced to appear-ances, the exterior manifestation of death precludes an interior competent.
Eschewing this limitation, Heidegger situates nothingness in an immediate fashion, thus contesting an unreachable metaphysics by positing it within the grasp of Being. The mode of being which discloses nothingness, Heidegger argues, is anxiety. Anxiety is the sliding away of things which enforces the gradual recess of the unity of being from where we find ourselves stranded in a disembodied, and so placeless, sphere of groundlessness. “We ‘hover’ in anxiety,” he tells us (Heidegger, 1977, p. 97). Concurrently, this hovering unveils the nullity in which Dasein finds its own definition.
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Heidegger’s account of anxiety is characterized by an existential frame-work that takes its inspiration from Kierkegaard, and was later adopted by Sartre, Jaspers, and Marcel. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is a call to the vertigi-nousness of freedom, to the presence of possibility and the exclusion that this possibility entails. Sartre affirms Kierkegaard’s vertiginousness of freedom while endorsing it with the presence of inward-negation: “I distrust myself and my own reactions” (Sartre, 1956, p. 29). This inner contingency renders freedom a burden upon consciousness, since it places freedom as solely re-sponsible for what it is, so evoking the anxiety of the existential conscience.
Heidegger agrees with Kierkegaard and Sartre in the emphasis on anxiety as an ontological disclosure and the groundlessness therein. Nevertheless, anxi-ety, Heidegger is keen to tell us, should not be compounded with fear. Bound by the object it seeks to surmount, fear is rooted in the phenomenon itself, while anxiety, resting upon a nspatial, ntemporal precipice, exists on-tologically.
The Nothing, then, entails a strange attraction for Dasein. In the essence of the Nothing awaits the nihilation of the individual being, but within this nihilation lies the actual revelation of Being: “In the clear night of the Noth-ing of anxiety the original openness of beNoth-ings as such arises: that they are be-ings—and not Nothing” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 105). This revelation of Being is riddled with ambivalence. To be conscious of Being is to be conscious of finitude. Heidegger’s Nothing gives rise to authentic Dasein, by which he means a courageous confrontation with the givens of Being (i.e. death, free-dom, and anxiety). The Nothing does not, we discover, purport to be purely negative. Indeed, for Heidegger, “Dasein means: being held out into the Nothing” (Ibid.). This “holding out” implies a continuity of being despite the absorption of the Nothing.
III
We see that with the experience of anxiety, invoking repulsion and attraction simultaneously, the Nothing presents itself. In turn, this has the consequence of disclosing the “openness of Being,” which for Heidegger is a revelatory and therefore privileged state. While Heidegger’s correlation between anxi-ety and the Nothing demonstrates a persuasive logic that relies on the ineffa-bility of nothingness and anxiety, his account of the Nothing remains ambiguous. Firstly, we discover the awkward correlation between anxiety and the Nothing despite their outward compatibility. That anxiety, groundless and without end, should be equated with the Nothing lies with disquiet on Heidegger’s account. Epistemologically, the disquiet is traceable to a
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sion between consciousness and self-consciousness. If the self is dissolved through anxiety, as Heidegger claims, how can it recognize the Nothing without being distinct from it? Knowing the Nothing presupposes knowing what the Nothing is not. Yet if the only occasion in which the Nothing un-furls is when consciousness is absent, then this lack of space for distinction means that consciousness is never in a position to stand outside of itself.
Furthermore, we would do well to recall that Heidegger’s usage of anxi-ety is largely a platform whereby his fixation on being qua being can emerge.
Equally, we would also do well not to forget the temporal context in which the issue of anxiety arose. Walter Kaufmann writes correctly that, “Heideg-ger’s talk about anxiety should be read as a document of the German 1920s, when it suddenly became fashionable to admit one was afraid” (Kaufmann, 1976, p. 202). It is logical that the indeterminacy of anxiety evades any spe-cific quality, so enforcing a metaphysical impression. As a result, the ques-tion of being anxious in a particular place is a quesques-tion that would reduce the metaphysical disclosure of the “openness of Being” to a mere experience limited by spatial and temporal categories. As we have seen, the mood of anxiety, for Heidegger, is purely abstract: an absence by which the Nothing emerges.
Against this fixation on Being, the prospect of a self-conscious reflection upon the Nothing is lost, while anxiety “proves thereby to be a ‘metaphysi-cal’ question” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 109). This simple dichotomy between anxiety and the Nothing is incomplete. While it is true that Sartre would later posit nothingness in a more definite fashion, affixing it to a sense of con-scious indeterminacy, even there nothingness is reduced to an absolute, whereby the preparation for an ethics between authenticity and inauthenticity is implicitly engineered. This surreptitious use of a metaphysical ethics founded in anxiety is also foreshadowed by Heidegger.
Despite a lack of reference toward being-toward-death in “What is Meta-physics?,” the overtones of (the already written) Being and Time are visible.
Not least the redeeming possibility of death as a liberator from the clutches of “the they” by corresponding with death as a certain possibility. In “What is Metaphysics?,” we find this redemptive aspect transposed to a distinction, not between Dasein and death, but between science and Being. By way of a conclusion, Heidegger writes:
Scientific existence possesses its simplicity and aptness in that it relates to beings themselves in a distinctive way and only to them. Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand. But in our inquiry concerning the nothing it has by now become manifest that scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing (Ibid., p. 111).
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At stake in Heidegger’s account of metaphysics is an ethics of inquiry that can only be realized if science “dares” to engage with what it had origi-nally discarded. This response to “the crisis of European science,” which Edmund Husserl had already initiated, entails Heidegger manipulating the question of anxiety to the extent that it is no longer consistent with knowing the Nothing. By way of contrast, the task confronting Heidegger is to demon-strate how science has been led astray by not seeing how the Nothing is, as he deems, the pathway toward the openness of Being.
IV
My objective is not to refute Heidegger’s metaphysics through expounding a counter-argument teased in logic and persuasion. Instead, I will seek to re-claim the Nothing from its anxious roots and place it within a spatial realm while simultaneously retaining its metaphysical significance. Insofar as Hei-degger has correlated the experience of anxiety with the metaphysics of the Nothing, I am in disagreement. In the present context, I will make two as-sumptions. Firstly, that the presence of anxiety is entirely separate from the Nothing. Secondly, that only through a pre-reflective meditation on what nothingness is can its character unfold as such. In the following pages, the overall aim will be to sketch this view of spatialized nothingness from the vantage point of self-consciousness: in that way, its entirety will be realized.
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