Saying Nothing
"Nothing" presents a unique window into the illusions hidden within language, and the roots of its power--in this core excerpt from my coming book, I explore the power of Nothing.
(~5 Minute Read)
Picture Nothing.
Absolute No-thing;
Total negation: no-thought, no-sound, no-life, no-existence…
How, and why, do we have a word for that which we cannot even imagine, let alone experience?
Something that is, by its definition, utterly beyond all conception or sensation?
We appear to be able to talk about Nothing, and to play with it as an idea, but if anyone claims to understand or fully comprehend “nothing” they are deceiving themselves, for by its very definition as “the absence of any thing whatsoever” there can be no room for the thing of you experiencing or comprehending it.
It is an enigma— simultaneously terrifying and yet beautifully peaceful; totally impossible, and yet strangely comprehensible; only one little word, and yet it enables reflection upon the wildest of ideas. Because of this, it has been the subject of discussion for seemingly as long as we have been able to write, from the biblical Tohu wa-bohu - the nothingness from which God created the universe - through countless philosophers, from Parmenides through Descartes to Sartre. And yet, all seem to have bypassed the most fundamental step, taking as given that since we can talk of Nothing, and since it makes sense to us as an idea, it must be real (or at least possible).
The power of language is such that, even in the face of something completely impossible to experience or in any way phenomenologically identify (i.e., to access through sense-experience), we choose to argue over what the word tells us about the world, instead of ever considering the possibility that the word itself might be “false”— a mis-label or simply useful nonsense.
When we look closer at nothing - hold it up so close it starts to blur - it becomes possible to notice the illusion at the heart of all language: that while our words grant us access to wholly unique perspectives on reality, they are not (and will never be) “real” themselves.
Nothing is purely a word— it allows us to stretch our minds into new shapes, to point them in novel directions, but no matter how well the idea fits within our understanding of reality, it can never be true; never be more than a contradictory abstraction. Nothing is an imposter, it is a placeholder for an idea that can never be proven to be real, based entirely upon the assumption that because we can negate some things, we must be able to negate everything.
Yet if we plumb deeper still, what is this notion of “negation”? It makes total, logical sense to imagine un-doing something, of reversing it and defining its negative. In our minds, this process is easy and perfectly sensible to enact. But again, where is negation in reality? In our sensory experience of the world, there is absolutely no tangible experience of any sort of process in line with “negation”, let alone one so widespread as is our usage of “no”, “not”, “negative”, “un-…”, etc., etc.
We might make a mark on some paper, and erase it so as to “undo it”, yet that is simply a verbal perspective— you can never “undo” something that has been swept into the past. We can negate something somebody says - “No”; “That’s not true” - but that remains safely within the realm of language, beyond which is simply an expression of emotion (note, that being against something said is not negation—we may verbally negate the idea, to say it is or is not true/right, but beneath those words is purely an emotional “revulsion” to what was heard or understood).
Reality, on the other hand, is only ever a continual alteration, an unceasing creation into the present, even if it involves a process that leads to the original state of a thing before it was changed (like a tree dying, or something spilt being wiped away). Not only does the act of “negation” in fact take us into a new and different moment, but moreover, such a perspective on what was the “original” state is completely arbitrary— under any kind of scrutiny, any attempts to clearly identify a start or beginning of a thing or event quickly become lost in the continual flow of existence.
Hence, even the words that constitute “Nothing” are themselves built on illusion. The process of ‘negation’ is a human, linguistic invention. It is not something “out-there”, it is something we do in order to make sense of our environment and the other humans within it. In fact, it is only in relation to other humans, and because of the nature of our communication, that we developed the notion of “negation” in the first place, so as to convey our feelings and intentions. It just so happened, however, that this underlying process was found to enable highly practical “cognitive leaps”, wherein we are able to create short-cuts in our internal mapping of reality.
What Nothing illustrates is, first and foremost, that language is a tool. It stems from reality, and allows us to make imaginative leaps that culminate in a highly intricate map of it, but it remains purely a model. The ability to talk about Nothing - not just to others, but even more so to ourselves, in our heads, as thoughts - allows us to paint a picture and broaden our understanding. Being able to juxtapose it, to hold it against what we know and understand experientially, allows us to form complex and highly imaginative ideas.
This brick-laying process, of looking out upon the world we experience, labelling it so as to communicate with ourselves and others, then building on each brick and weaving a network of ideas and interconnected meaning— this process has created and defined our minds as we know them today. Beginning with the bedrock of reality, we have built our way up to models so advanced and complex, that we can discuss the nature of reality itself; our tower has become so tall we can look upon the world as a whole, and touch the skies above. For it is these words, these complexes of thought, that enable the imagination necessary to launch rockets to the moon and beyond.
Next week we will explore the origins of language, and reflect on the theory and evidence presented by authors like Noah Yuval Harrari (Homo Sapiens) and David Abrams (Spell of the Sensuous) strongly endorsing the picture that written script led to our evolutionary “explosion”.
What are your thoughts on Nothing and language? Do you think we can think without words? Which is closer to the truth: our complex, verbal ideas, or our raw sensory information? Stir the discussion, and encourage some much needed critical reflection in the comments below!