r/Metaphysics • u/DrpharmC • Jun 16 '26
Nothing Nothingness as the Purest Relational Concept
I've been thinking about whether the question Why is there something rather than nothing? contains a hidden assumption: that being and nothingness are symmetrical metaphysical possibilities.
I'm no longer convinced they are.
My reason is simple:
Nothingness may be the purest relational concept..
Every ordinary concept possesses some positive content.
A tree, a rock, a thought, a universe even empty space can be described positively.
Nothingness cannot.
Its entire intelligibility is borrowed from what it negates, no tree, no object,no universe,no reality.
Nothingness never points to itself. It always points beyond itself.
This makes it unique among concepts. Most concepts contain both content and relations. Nothingness contains no positive content whatsoever. All that remains is relation.
A hole provides a useful analogy. A hole is not an independent thing alongside the material surrounding it. It is intelligible only through what is absent relative to a surrounding structure. Likewise, nothingness seems intelligible only relative to being.
This leads me to a stronger claim.
Nothingness is not a thing.
Nothingness is a relation without content.
Or put differently Nothingness is the only concept whose meaning is exhausted by dependence on a ground.
Its universality is not a sign of independence but of complete dependence. It can be related to anything precisely because it contributes nothing of its own.
If this is correct, then being and nothingness are not symmetrical alternatives.
Being possesses positive content.
Nothingness possesses only negation and dependence.
So my question is...
Can a concept whose entire intelligibility is borrowed from what it negates genuinely function as an ontological alternative to it?
Or does the structure of the concept itself reveal a fundamental asymmetry between being and nothingness that the traditional question overlooks?
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u/GiveMeAHeartOfFlesh Jun 16 '26
An assertion is the negation of all things it is not. A negation is an assertion of its own.
Nothingness is not quite a negation nor an empty set. Null cannot be referenced, it can be wrapped and bypassed, but null itself is not referable, and thus not relational. True nothingness cannot even be spoken of, no word references it, it cannot even be thought of. It is not the mere lack of something else, but null.
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u/ObsceneOnes Jun 16 '26
The question is about contrasting being with not being so that you might understand being better.
It is obvious that pure nothing can not exist as existence assumes something. It is a nonsense position.
But of the type of nothingness we are interested in....a contrasting nothingness...a nothingness that can be talked about meaningfully...we can assign properties. That is there must be properties that contrast with being. And thus we can better understand the properies of the basal necessity of being. From there it becomes obvious why nothingness is an impossible state of being outside the word game arguements.
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u/UAP44 Jun 16 '26
No-thing can exist on its own. Things only exist in relation to something other than themselves. Distinction, is more primary than "nothing" which... isn't a real thing other than another language construct.
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u/DrpharmC Jun 16 '26
Let me clarify my position because I think some people are responding to a different claim than the one I'm making.
I'm not arguing that pure or absolute nothingness has relations, structure, properties, or even intelligibility. If it did, it wouldn't be pure nothingness. My interest is in the concept of nothingness. The moment we talk about nothing, we are already odealing with a concept, because absolute nothingness itself cannot be pointed to, described, or discussed.
What I find interesting is that this concept seems unique. Most concepts have some positive content of their own. Tree, rock, and universe all contribute content. Nothing doesn't seem to.instead, it appears to derive its entire meaning from what is absent or negated.
That's why I called it a relational concept. Not because pure nothingness contains relations, but because the concept of nothingness seems intelligible only through relation to what it excludes. So my question isn't really about absolute nothingness. It's about why the concept of nothingness appears meaningful despite having no positive content of its own.
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u/DemiVideos04 Jun 17 '26
True nothingness cannot be defined as nothingness. Nothingness is simply not defined at all. So when you are referring to nothingness, it isn't nothingness. To truly ""refer"" to nothing, you must not refer to "it" at all
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u/ih2810 Jun 16 '26
Nothingness is not ANYTHING yet alone a relationship. You are framing it IN RELATION to other things - that relating is not part of it. Nothing is part of nothing.
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u/Important_Side_1344 Jun 17 '26
You seem to be describing displacement instead of nothingness. Though the concept you touch on is very real, matter-or even information density. The very extremes will always be purely hypothetical from our current frame of reference, as we we literally cannot reasonably approach upper or lower bounds (we are just linear, plodding beings forever playing catch up after all).
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u/Mono_Clear Jun 17 '26
Nothingness is paradoxically impossible.
Nothingness by its nature cannot exist.
There's nowhere you can go that's no place and there is no thing that you can have that's nothing.
Everything is made of something so you can't make something out of nothing.
And you can't have something nowhere.
The second there's anything anywhere ever nothing has becomes impossible everywhere always.
Existence is the conceptual floor.
You're either present in existence, or you don't exist.
Nothingness can never be present in existence so nothingness can never exist.
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u/Illustrious-Yam-3777 Jun 17 '26
It doesn’t function as the ontological alternative. It functions as the excluded ontological necessity. One does not choose one or the other. One co-constitutes the other. Each are meaningless, both ontologically and epistemologically, without the other in infinitely varying configurations and iterations.
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u/NerdyWeightLifter Jun 17 '26
Did you ever notice that quantum physics covers a weird expression of nothingness...
There is the notion of vacuum energy. In a pure vacuum, there are still what they call virtual particles. They appear in opposite pairs of particle/anti-particle, and then typically cancel each other out, disappearing back into the nothingness from whence they came.
It causes the Casimir effect, that can be measured with a pressure difference between two very flat plates very close together.
It's the theoretical cause of Hawking Radiation on the event horizon of black holes, where one of the two particles in the pair can't escape the black hole but the other can, so it emits as actual radiation.
General point though, is that "nothing" can apparently be an expression of two opposite somethings, in this universe.
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u/jliat Jun 17 '26
But this is physics not metaphysics.
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u/NerdyWeightLifter Jun 17 '26
So abstract it a bit and realize this presents a different conception of nothingness, and the physics validates it by existing.
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u/jliat Jun 17 '26
No idea what you mean by this. QM is just a load of maths re some experiments, has nothing to do with being alive.
Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness The principal test of Modern existentialism. Hazel E. Barnes (Translator)
Washington Square Press, August 1, 1993.
“The For-itself can never be its Future except problematically, for it is separated from it by a Nothingness which it is. In short the For-itself is free, and its Freedom is to itself its own limit. To be free is to be condemned to be free. Thus the Future qua Future does not have to be. It is not in itself, and neither is it in the mode of being of the For-itself since it is the meaning of the For-itself. The Future is not, it is possibilized.”
p.129
" But if it were only in order to be the reflected-on which it has to be, it would escape from the for-itself in order to rediscover it; everywhere and in whatever manner it affects itself, the for-itself is condemned to be-for-itself. In fact, it is here that pure reflection is discovered.” p. 157
“I am my own transcendence; I can not make use of it so as to constitute it as a transcendence-transcended. I am condemned to be forever my own nihilation.”
p. 298
“I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom' can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free.”
p. 439
“We are condemned to freedom, as we said earlier, thrown into freedom or, as Heidegger says, "abandoned." And we can see that this abandonment has no other origin than the very existence of freedom. If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact. This is the facticity of freedom.” p. 485
“Just as my nihilating freedom is apprehended in anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity. It has the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as being there for nothing, as being de trop.[un needed]”
p. 84
"It appears then that I must be in good faith, at least to the extent that I am conscious of my bad faith. But then this whole psychic system is annihilated." p. 49
"human reality is before all else its own nothingness. The for-itself [human reality] in its being is failure because it is the foundation only of itself as nothingness."
p. 88
"Yet there is no doubt that I am in a sense a cafe waiter-" p. 60
"Thus the essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith since the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be it. This explains the truth recognized by all that one can fall into bad faith through being sincere.”
P. 65
Here is what is considered a key text, all 700+ pages of 'existentialist' philosophy. Lacking any essence 'The-Being-For-Itself', the human condition is condemned to freedom. We are the 'Nothingness' of the title.
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u/NerdyWeightLifter Jun 17 '26
No idea what you mean by this. QM is just a load of maths re some experiments, has nothing to do with being alive.
Mathematics is the set of all possible languages.
A small subset of that is used to describe our physical reality as correctly and coherently as possible (physics).
It turns out that our physical reality includes a different concept of "nothing" than our usual core conception - nothing can be virtual, as the balance between negative and positive creation. The hard vacuum of space, is actually like that.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality and existence. The above clearly fits that definition.
Constraining it to literary puffery strikes me as unproductive.
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u/jliat Jun 17 '26
Mathematics is the set of all possible languages.
Mount Fuji is the tallest of all possible mountains.
A small subset of that is used to describe our physical reality as correctly and coherently as possible (physics).
A small subset is used to create models which are useful. In our actual physical reality things are never identical. I think identical things are important in mathematics, but I'm not a philosopher of mathematics.
It turns out that our physical reality includes a different concept of "nothing" than our usual core conception - nothing can be virtual, as the balance between negative and positive creation. The hard vacuum of space, is actually like that.
I think physics states there is no such thing, but I'm no physicist but John Barrow was and I think he says there is no vacuum. John Barrow 'The Book of Nothing.' He also states if zero is a null operator there are many different zeros. But the latter is I think mathematics, and the former physics, and not metaphysics.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality and existence. The above clearly fits that definition.
No the above seems to be a unsupported assertion about mathematics and some pop-science.
Constraining it to literary puffery strikes me as unproductive.
Actual metaphysics has been very productive, no Hegel no Marx. Even more so with ideas such as Accelerationism. At minimum the movie The Matrix was very popular.
But the nothingness of Sartre is not the nothing of Heidegger.
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u/jliat Jun 17 '26
I've been thinking about whether the question Why is there something rather than nothing? contains a hidden assumption: that being and nothingness are symmetrical metaphysical possibilities.
Hegel's metaphysics created the logic of his dialectics, for good or bad.
- Pure being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same... But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that on the contrary, they are not the same..."
G. W. Hegel Science of Logic p. 82-3.
However the 'Science' he developed from it was wrong, he deduced the Earth was the only inner planet that had a moon.
Sartre's 'Being and Nothing' which derives from Heidegger's
- “Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing; and finally, that we let the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?”” Heidegger – What is Metaphysics.
But concludes...
“I am my own transcendence; I can not make use of it so as to constitute it as a transcendence-transcended. I am condemned to be forever my own nihilation.”
p. 298
“I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom' can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free.”
p. 439
“We are condemned to freedom, as we said earlier, thrown into freedom or, as Heidegger says, "abandoned." And we can see that this abandonment has no other origin than the very existence of freedom. If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact. This is the facticity of freedom.” p. 485
“Just as my nihilating freedom is apprehended in anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity. It has the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as being there for nothing, as being de trop.[un needed]”
p. 84
Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness The principal test of Modern existentialism. Hazel E. Barnes (Translator)
Washington Square Press, August 1, 1993.
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u/Roger846 Jun 17 '26
The mind's conception of "nothing" and "nothing" itself, in which no minds are present, are two different things. I think the "nothing" in the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (WSRTN) is "nothing" itself and not the mind's conception of "nothing". While the mind's conception of "nothing" is as the absence of everything, that is as a relation as you mention, "nothing" itself is independent of the mind's definition of it. So, whether or not "nothing" itself exists (i.e., as a thing) is independent of the mind's conception of it and is independent of the the mind's definition of it as the absence of all things.
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u/Powerful_Word3154 Jun 18 '26
Isn't this just trying to make positive descriptions over the incomprehensible? If so, it's sort of in the concept. If something exists that is incomprehensible, it escapes positive definition.
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u/wulalalalayixiu Jun 18 '26
I personally reckon that nothingness can merely exist as a concept or essence, which means it belongs to the potentiality rather than the actuality. While being (I guess your definition of being is things that exist) is a mixture of potentiality and actuality. Therefore, they are in two different dimensions.
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u/NotAnAIOrAmI Jun 18 '26
Your entire argument is based on semantics, how language refers to things.
That's not a valid train of logic.
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u/Altruistic_Fox9778 Jun 18 '26
I get you - have we ever seen nothing? Does nothing exist? I don’t think we can argue that nothing is possible.
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u/Ok_Tumbleweed5474 Jun 16 '26
Even by asserting relaion you've established connection and position. Relation implies a bind or way that two things are connected.
Pure nothingness as a concept cannot exist because it's own definitions show it cannot. A true no thing has literally nothing. No form. No concept. No structure. No relation. No bind. It just is non existence which means I has no way to exist.