Nothing

Abstract

This book views history through the lens of nothingness. Lao-tzu and Buddha inaugurated a tradition of relativizing ‘nothing’. In response to the Confucian “What should be done?” the nature-loving Taoist answers: “Nothing,” that is, no action. Lao-tzu seeks a niche for the individual through omission. You harmonize with the greater whole by avoiding the dissonance of action. In contrast, Buddha denies the presupposition that there exists an individual who needs to fit in with a larger whole. All wholes are fabrications. A tower of bricks is just a collection of bricks arranged tower-wise. Since ‘nothing’ is used to measure something, most nihilist lenses are colored by what they measure. In Eastern philosophers, there is a consensus that this relativity makes nothingness iridescent, changing hue depending on one’s perspective. But Western thinkers, starting with Parmenides, have an ambivalent fascination with absolute nothingness. Parmenides, in meticulous abhorrence of the void, argues strictly against its possibility. He contends that relative nothingness (indeed any negation) implies absolute nothingness. Consequently, there is only the One. Subsequent Western philosophers try to rescue relative nothings, eventually seeking help from Arabia, India, and China. Bolder critics of Parmenides also sought rescue of absolute nothingness. Leucippus shrank Parmenides’s One to ones and set these atoms in the Void. After five centuries, the void sucked in Christians, through their bold defense of the Genesis 1:1 creation story. Physicists followed a millennium later, through their interest in explanatory fertility of atomism. The book chronicles the rescue up to the twentieth century.