Nothing is the Problem

In Search of Absence: Introductory Remarks

Before we get into the meat of this topic, I want to orient my own research a bit by providing some context, aims, and problems of methodology.

When it comes to definitions, it is common to make the distinction in method between analytic and continental philosophers: for the analytic philosopher, a definition of a word or idea is fixed, articulatable, and reducible to finer and finer parts. For the continental philosopher, a definition is wrestled with, developed in a dialectic or a process, and never fully arrived at, at least in no meaningfully definitive way. Well, good thing I’m not a philosopher! — I will be drawing upon both traditions, as I think both can be useful. Many of the authors and thinkers I will be pulling from fall on both sides of the camp, and some squarely in the middle. Nevertheless, I do want to sketch out some brief definitions of our method and leave the definition of our object to later sessions, and hopefully both method and object can be up for discussion and questioning — and hopefully neither fall into complacency.

My method is informed by the likes of Rudolf Carnap, who obsessively seeks a final and fixed meaning of an idea or word, and also by psychoanalysis, which is comfortable in never finding the final thread which pulls everything together. Freud was also famously dancing with these two methods: the Oedipus complex explains everything — but also the analyst must be radically open-minded. The limitation of both methods to me are clear, as are both advantages. But how can they apply to our search for absence, or the problem of nothingness?

In a famous essay from 1932, the Viennese positivist philosopher Rudolf Carnap criticized metaphysics, and especially the metaphysics of Martin Heidegger and related thinkers. He thought that most of their statements, ideas, and words were meaningless. In fact, meaning, for Carnap, has very narrow guidelines:

1. The empirical criteria for the word is known;

2. We know what can be deduced from the meaning of a sentence if a word is within that sentence;

3. The truth conditions of the word is fixed;

4. The method of verification of the word is known.

We have a very scientific undersanding of meaning, here: it is reproducible, verifiable, and clear. Now, a sentence or idea can go wrong in any number of ways if it deviates from this four-part standard. For example, there is the pseudo-statement, which Carnap believes infests metaphysics all over. Sometimes, metaphysics takes metaphorical words to be literal, and this obviously creates all kinds of problems, because it can’t be verified, deduced, or fixed. But Heidegger, a special target for Carnap, commits a different crime of logic when he claims that the “Nothing nothings” — i.e., that nothingness creates nothingness or that it negates thing-ness. Carnap can’t stand this, and he tells us that “here we confront one of those rare cases where a new word is introduced which never had a meaning to begin with”!

Nothing makes no logical sense to posit as a noun, because it’s very positing undermines its possible existence. Perhaps, Carnap speculates, Heidegger uses the word “nothing” in a very idiosyncratic way, maybe it’s closer to a feeling or a religious mood — maybe it’s just a vibe, and a vibe certainly cannot be used in philosophy given our criteria of meaning.

So, Heidegger, in Carnap’s mind, finds that the investigation and problematic of nothingness isn’t conciliatory with modern science and logic. Carnap also rejects the idea that there is some extraterrestrial or metaphysical being who can tell us of metaphysical questions and answers. Even if that being understood and could teach those questions and answers (for instance, the metaphysical nature of nothingness), they would still be meaningless if we could not verify it by the method of logic. He tells us “no god and no devil can give us metaphysical knowledge”.

Well, this is precisely the problem I want to address in this seminar: the problem of nothingness and our knowledge of it. I want to avoid the pitfalls that Carnap, whether they are fair evaluations or not, accuses Heidegger and other metaphysicians of. But I also realize that I can’t give a definition that Carnap would like right out of the gate. This is where the continental bent in me takes over.

The seminar is divided into three series, each tackling the question of nothingness from a different angle or tradition.

The first will be on phenomenology and psychoanalysis, asking the very humble question, in light of Carnap’s destruction of the metaphysical attempt to posit nothingness, is nothingness a psychological experience, a subjective encounter born from the realities of being a limited human without a full and complete knowledge of the world?

In the second series, I will move to negative theology, and the question of nothingness from a theological perspective: at the very least, I think, we maybe can draw some lessons from the theologians who are concerned with the non-being or non-relation between man and God.

Finally, I want to do something that Carnap would find horrendous. In the last series, I want to explore the ontology or metaphysics of nothingness. Because his essay was published in 1932, I wonder if any advancement has been made into the question of nothingness alongside the question of being.

A Personal Statement

My personal route to this idea is circuitous. I remember first reading Slavoj Zizek and encountering, for the first time, the idea of nothingness. I was very frustrated that he never gave what I thought was a good old Carnapian definition, he just employed it in his metaphysics. I got frustrated with the question of nothingness and tried to forget it.

Then, when I encountered Lacan on his own terms, I encountered it again, this time in the form of ‘void’ or ‘lack.’ This made more sense to me, because it it seemed like a Parisianized form of Freudian castration or trauma. But still, Lacan took this to be an assumption, and even spoke in metaphysical terms without showing his cards.

Some time later, I started reading Sartre, particularly his Being and Nothingness, which I found to be, among other things, a central and fundamental statement on the ontology and phenomena of nothingness. For the first time, to my mind, I found a thinker who took the problem of nothingness seriously and did not take it for granted. Sartre goes through painstaking effort to articulate a theory of nothingness in its relation to being. I began reading Lacan through Sartre, and vice versa, and many other topics fell into place, including theology and some Eastern philosophy.

So, this series of essays, which will also be delivered as a seminar in the Denver Theory Society over the course of 2025, are born from this effort of mine to understand the problem of nothingness and its related terms: lack, non-being, lack, and void.

I am not expecting a final answer — sorry to disappoint my Carnapian readers. Instead, I am aiming for the development of an idea and sometimes even a genealogy, jumping between historical contexts and drawing on the twists and turns of the fields that try to search for absence.

Rudolf Carnap, “The elimination of metaphysics” (1932).