Among the pre-Socratics (around 500 B.C.), Leucippus and Parmenides argued about whether a true vacuum was possible. This was an embryonic form of the discussion of nothing.
One of the earliest philosophers to write about nothing was Fridugis (also spelled Fredegis or Fredegisus), who lived in the early 800’s. He was a student of the noted philosopher Alcuin, and part of the revival of learning and intellectual life which occurred during the reign of Karl the Great (Charlemagne). He died in 834 A.D.
His major work is entitled “On Nothing and Darkness,” which hints already at the notion that as darkness is a lack of light, so nothing is a lack of something. Fridugis recognized that the investigation of nothing is, at least in part, a linguistic investigation. We are led, or misled, by the fact that “nothing” is a noun, and as such, represents a person, place, thing, or idea. So we are compelled to conclude that nothing is something:
This is the nature of the question: “Is nothing something or not?” If one replies: “It seems to me that nothing exists,” the very negation of it which he assumes to be the case forces him to admit that nothing is something in that he says: “It seems to me that nothing exists.” This statement is such as if he were to say: “It seems to me that nothing is something.” If it seems to be something how can it appear not to exist in some way? Consequently it remains that it seems to be something.
Frigudis proceeds along grammatical lines, establishing that "nothing" is a noun, and therefore - following Aristotle - the name of something, i.e., the word “nothing” names some thing. Taking this as sufficiently demonstrated, Frigudis goes on to ask what type of thing nothing is. It is, he writes, “something great,” because, given the fact that the known universe was called forth ex nihilo (out of nothing),
those which are the first and foremost among creatures have been created out of nothing. Therefore, nothing is something great and remarkable, and its magnitude from which so many and such noble things have been produced cannot be grasped.
Nothing, then, according to Frigudis, is the source of everything, and so, in some way, everything must have been contained, even if only in an embryonic state, in nothing. This eerily anticipates remarks written by a thousand years later Hegel.
Between Frigudis and Hegel lived Albert of Saxony in the 1300’s. He carried out a rather even-handed exploration of nothing, neither affirming nor denying much, but examining what nothing might imply or entail.
In several different books in the early 1800’s, Hegel devotes a number of pages to the topic of nothing:
Pure being, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect, is just nothing. Hence was derived the second definition of the absolute: the absolute is nothing. In fact this definition is implied in saying that the thing-in-itself is the indeterminate, utterly without form and so without content - or in saying that God is only the supreme Being and nothing more.
(Hegel addresses here the philosophical system of Kant, in which “the thing in itself” is an object before it is processed by cognition of the mind, which is to say before it is placed into time and into space. The thing in itself lacks any of the properties which an object can have only if it is in time and in space - which is to say that the thing in itself is undefined and indeterminate.) Hegel writes that this “pure Being” is
in its indeterminate immediacy equal only to itself, and yet not differentiated in respect to other, and has no differentiation inside itself, nor towards anything external.
Any determination or content, which would posit any form of distinction or contrast, cannot be found in this “pure Being,” because it would no longer be pure. It would no longer be
maintained in its purity. It is pure indeterminacy and emptiness. - There is nothing to be perceived in it, if one can speak here of perception; or it is only pure empty perception itself.
And so nothing appears as the sole ingredient or content of pure Being!
Being, indeterminate immediacy, is in fact nothing, and no more nor less than nothing.
Hegel arrives at nothing by examining Being, just as Fridugis arrived at everything by studying nothing.
A century after Hegel, the philosopher Martin Heidegger researched nothing, and found it to be not merely a question in philosophy, but rather one of the central and foundational questions in philosophy, and specifically in that branch of philosophy known as metaphysics. Heidegger notes that modern science unwittingly includes nothing in its self-stated objects of study:
What is to be investigated is what-is — and nothing else; only what-is — and nothing more; simply and solely what-is — and beyond that, nothing.
Yet the study of nothing requires a different approach than the study of something. Different methods will be required.
we shall endeavour to enquire into Nothing. What is Nothing? Even the initial approach to this question shows us something out of the ordinary. So questioning, we postulate Nothing as something that somehow or other “is” — as an entity (Seiendes). But it is nothing of the sort. The question as to the what and wherefore of Nothing turns the thing questioned into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object.
Heidegger’s exploration of nothing is perhaps the high point of such studies. He will explain to us that emotion has a role in informing us about nothing. He contrasts fear and anxiety (Angst). Fear has an object: we are afraid of something. But anxiety is when we have a sense of fear about nothing. So it is anxiety, in contrast to fear, which leads us to learn about nothing.
Following Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre took up the study of nothing. Contrasting Heidegger’s investigation of nothing with Hegel’s, Sartre writes:
Heidegger, while establishing the possibilities of a concrete apprehension of Nothingness, never falls into the error which Hegel made; he does not preserve a being for Non-Being, not even an abstract being. Nothing is not; it nihilates itself.
The reader is advised to study the works of Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, from which he can learn much about nothing.
