The idea of “nothing” was the unveiling of many thinkers, perhaps from the very beginning of philosophy. And perhaps it is also the question by which many of us have been interested for the first time in matters of a philosophical nature. Several ideas go around the concept of “nothing”, let us see therefore, some of the best known in this brief review, following the dictionary of philosophy of José Ferrater Mora.
Among the Greeks, as a common denominator it can be observed that they seem to have focused on the problem of being. In some cases they took “nothingness” as the denial of being: what is there is the “being” and only when it is denied, “nothing” appears. Thinkers, like Parmenides argued that only being is, and not being, is not. In different lines, it has been argued that nothing should come from nothing, so that to assert such a thing would destroy the notion of causality and things would arise by chance. Platon sought to understand what could be the function of a participation of nothing in the conception of the entities that they are. Artistoteles, he argued that both denial and deprivation occur within statements, because even the “not being” can be claimed to be not. But then, the Christian council installed the idea of God creating the world from nothing, which significantly transformed the foundations of philosophical speculation by exerting subsequent influence on modern philosophy.
While Kant will establish different categories of “nothing”, it will be Hegel who will assert that being and nothingness are equally indeterminate because nothing has the same lack of determination as being. This idea starts from emptying the being of any reference after the goal of achieving absolute purity: thus, purified, being and nothing are the same. The absolute immediacy of being places it on the same plane as its denial and only in becoming can it arise as a movement capable of transcending the identification of thesis and antithesis.
Bergson points out that metaphysics has always rejected duration and extension as the basis of being as contingent. Bergson, to solve this question, argues that the idea of nothing is a pseudo-idea, because in reality it cannot be imagined or thought... and that thinking only suppresses a part of the whole and not the whole itself: that is, it suppresses a being by another being. Representing an object as non-existent incorporates the idea of exclusion. Hence there is more or no less in the idea of an object conceived as non-existent than in the idea of an object conceived as existing.
Heidegger suggests thinking the problem of “nothing” from a different paradigm: he does not wonder why it is claimed that there is nothing but why there is none. In reality, what Heidegger intends to observe is that the denial of an entity is nothing but the very thing that makes denial possible. Then, nothing is the “element” upon which existence is sustained, and what leads to the discovery of the existential temperate of anguish. For the philosophers of the analytical school, this conception is tantamount to holding that “the notch”, which would be something like saying “rain rains”, and therefore reject it because they consider them unacceptable rebellions to the syntactic rules of language.
Sartre, on the other hand, accepts and corrects Heidegger, arguing that the being by which “nothingness” comes into the world must be its own nothingness, because only the radical freedom of man, allows to enunciate these affirmations signficatively.
In short, the ultimate assumption of existentialists is the logical impotence to solve the problem of “nothingness” because it only appears when someone enunciates it, which is only possible after having transcended “nothingness”.
