Oct 5, 2025 07:28 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/how-nothing-has-i...-millennia
EXCERPTS: Is there a way to speak or even to think of nothing without making it something, betraying its character as nonexistent? The idea of nothing pushes at the limits of thought and language, demanding new modes of analysis and expression. Moreover, if nothing is something, that would seem to complicate the definition of ‘something’ as an entity that really exists in the world. And if it is not something, then what ‘is’ it?
A paradoxical question if there ever was one. More than just a linguistic puzzle, the idea that ‘nothing exists’ challenges our understanding of existence itself and spurs more nuanced theories of reality. To speak of nothing raises questions about everything. One can see why philosophers and artists alike have been drawn to it.
The history of nothing in Western philosophy is long and varied. Philosophers have distinguished between different kinds of nothing (what is not absolutely, not a specific something, not real, etc): its vagueness is part of the fecundity of the concept. They have treated it as a problem of theology (the heretical idea that everything may come not from God, but from nothing); of ethics (for Jean-Paul Sartre, nothingness is the precondition of human freedom); and of logic, as when Bertrand Russell scandalously conceded the logical existence of negative facts.
[...] Ontology’s fascination with nothing and its relation to both terms – onta and logos – goes back to the ancient Greeks. The sophist Gorgias (483-375 BCE) wrote an entire treatise on it. His ‘On Nonbeing’ proposes that ‘nothing exists; that if something does exist it is unknowable; and if it exists and is knowable, it cannot be communicated to others.’ Through a series of brain-teasing syllogisms, he deploys the ironies of nothing to build a counterintuitive (and frankly dodgy) case against anything, on the premise that, since being and nonbeing are opposites, if nonbeing exists – as it does, as soon as we speak it – then being must not. Sliding between two senses of the phrase ‘nothing exists’, Gorgias’ claim would seem to be refuted by the very logos that asserts it, a logos that survives, albeit only in paraphrases and scattered quotations, to this day.
How does one speak of nothing without turning it into something, rendering one’s own logos self-negating and nonsensical? As the Eleatic stranger puts it in Plato’s Sophist, to speak of nonbeing is not only to say nothing but not to speak at all – which he will continue to do for many pages in arguing dialectically for the existence of nonbeing and the possibility of naming it. To speak of nothing strains against the very raison d’être of language. It is no wonder that for the ancient Greeks ouden legein (‘to say nothing’) meant to talk nonsense... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Is there a way to speak or even to think of nothing without making it something, betraying its character as nonexistent? The idea of nothing pushes at the limits of thought and language, demanding new modes of analysis and expression. Moreover, if nothing is something, that would seem to complicate the definition of ‘something’ as an entity that really exists in the world. And if it is not something, then what ‘is’ it?
A paradoxical question if there ever was one. More than just a linguistic puzzle, the idea that ‘nothing exists’ challenges our understanding of existence itself and spurs more nuanced theories of reality. To speak of nothing raises questions about everything. One can see why philosophers and artists alike have been drawn to it.
The history of nothing in Western philosophy is long and varied. Philosophers have distinguished between different kinds of nothing (what is not absolutely, not a specific something, not real, etc): its vagueness is part of the fecundity of the concept. They have treated it as a problem of theology (the heretical idea that everything may come not from God, but from nothing); of ethics (for Jean-Paul Sartre, nothingness is the precondition of human freedom); and of logic, as when Bertrand Russell scandalously conceded the logical existence of negative facts.
[...] Ontology’s fascination with nothing and its relation to both terms – onta and logos – goes back to the ancient Greeks. The sophist Gorgias (483-375 BCE) wrote an entire treatise on it. His ‘On Nonbeing’ proposes that ‘nothing exists; that if something does exist it is unknowable; and if it exists and is knowable, it cannot be communicated to others.’ Through a series of brain-teasing syllogisms, he deploys the ironies of nothing to build a counterintuitive (and frankly dodgy) case against anything, on the premise that, since being and nonbeing are opposites, if nonbeing exists – as it does, as soon as we speak it – then being must not. Sliding between two senses of the phrase ‘nothing exists’, Gorgias’ claim would seem to be refuted by the very logos that asserts it, a logos that survives, albeit only in paraphrases and scattered quotations, to this day.
How does one speak of nothing without turning it into something, rendering one’s own logos self-negating and nonsensical? As the Eleatic stranger puts it in Plato’s Sophist, to speak of nonbeing is not only to say nothing but not to speak at all – which he will continue to do for many pages in arguing dialectically for the existence of nonbeing and the possibility of naming it. To speak of nothing strains against the very raison d’être of language. It is no wonder that for the ancient Greeks ouden legein (‘to say nothing’) meant to talk nonsense... (MORE - missing details)
