nothingness

n.

1. The condition or quality of being nothing; nonexistence.
2. Empty space; a void.
3. Lack of consequence; insignificance.
4. Something inconsequential or insignificant.

noun

1. The condition of not existing: nihility, nonexistence, nothing. See absence.
2. Empty, unfilled space: barrenness, emptiness, vacancy, vacuity, vacuum, void. See full/empty/capacity.

n

Definition: insignificance
Antonyms: being, eminence, existence, importance, significance

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(Heb. Ayin). Term prominent since the beginning of the 13th century. In theosophical Kabbalah, it corresponds to the different attributes of the first divine emanation or sefirah: Keter (see Sefirot). This means that the first divine emanation is too pregnant for the human understanding to comprehend and thus embraces a negative description. From this point of view, Ayin is closer to the negative theology of Neoplatonic origin than to the Pseudo-Dionysian theology. According to other descriptions, the theosophical systems assume that all the privations, in the Aristotelian vein of steresis, are found within the first divine manifestation, and any act of creation means negation of a form, namely the return of a divine attribute to the higher realm and thus its absorption or annihilation, and then a new emanation. Especially important inthis context is the term imké ha-Ayin, the depths of nothingness. This theosophical sense has been used to reinterpret the principle of creatio ex nihilo (yesh me-Ayin) in a new way, as pointing to a supernal fullness that precedes emanation. In addition, in some kabbalistic sources and mainly in Polish Hasidism, a psychological process of self-annihilation became prominent as part of the mystical path. The assumption is that the ascent of the human soul to the highest divine plane is possible only if the ego-centered consciousness is effaced. This stage is often part of a larger model which includes the return of the annihilated self, enriched by its encounter with the Divine, to communal activity.

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Nature abhors a vacuum — and so do we. The idea of a void — of emptiness, nothingness, spacelessness, placelessness, all such 'lessness' — is at once abhorrent and inconceivable, and yet it haunts us in the strangest, most paradoxical way: 'Nothing is more real than nothing.'

For Descartes there was no such thing as empty space. For Einstein there was no space without field. For Kant our ideas of space and extension were the forms our 'reason' gives to experience, through the operation of a universal 'synthetic a priori'. The nervous system, intact and active — Leibniz's stream of 'minute perceptions' — was envisaged by Kant as a sort of transformer, forming ideality from reality, reality from ideality. Such a notion has the virtue — very rare in metaphysical formulations — that it can instantly be tested in practice — specifically, in neurological and neurophysiological practice.

Let us proceed at once to examples. If one is given a spinal anaesthetic that brings to a halt neural traffic in the lower half of the body, one cannot feel merely that this is paralysed and senseless; one feels that it is wholly, impossibly, 'non-existent', that one has been cut in half, and that the lower half is absolutely missing — not in the familiar sense of being somewhere, elsewhere, but in the uncanny sense of not-being, or being nowhere. The terms that patients use communicate something of this incommunicable nothing. They may say that part of them is 'missing', 'evacuated', 'gone': that it seems like dead flesh, or sand, or paste; devoid of life, of activity, of 'will'; devoid of the organic, of structure, of coherence — without materiality or imaginable reality; cut off or alienated from the living flesh (with which, none the less, it forms an impossible continuity). One such patient, trying to formulate the unformulable, finally said that his lost limbs were 'nowhere to be found', and that they were 'like nothing on earth'. Hearing such phrases, as one will hear from every patient who finds himself in such a situation — or, more properly, 'situationless' — and from every patient who can articulate this ultimate abhorrence, one is irresistibly reminded of the words of Hobbes: 'That which is not Body ... is no part of the Universe: and since the Universe is all, that which is not Body ... is Nothing, and Nowhere.'

Spinal anaesthesia is common — perhaps a million women have had it for painless childbirth — but descriptions are most rare, partly because the experience is so abhorrent that it is instantly banished from the memory and mind, and partly because the experience (or non-experience) is an experience of nothing. How can one describe nothingness, not-being, nonentity, when there is, literally, nothing to describe? This paradox is pungently expressed by Berkeley, in his denunciations of the nothingness of 'matter': 'It neither acts, nor perceives, nor is perceived ... it is inert, senseless, unknown ... a definition entirely made up of negatives.' Spinal anaesthesia provides a striking and dramatic example of a transient 'annihilation' (although it does not seem transient, but endless, when it occurs — a part of its peculiar horror).

But there are many simpler examples of annihilation in everyday life: all of us have sometimes slept on an arm, crushing its nerves and briefly extinguishing neural traffic; the experience, though very brief, is a terrifying one because (it seems to us) our arm is no longer 'our arm', but an inert, senseless nothing which is not part of ourselves. Wittgenstein (following Moore) grounds 'certainty' in the certainty of the body: 'If you can say, here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.' When you wake up, after nerve crushing your arm, you cannot say 'This is my hand,' or even 'This is a hand,' except in a purely formal sense. What has always been taken for granted, or axiomatic, is revealed as radically precarious and contingent; having a body, having anything, depends on one's nerves.

Yawning is the abyss of nothing. It is only 'by favour of nature' that there are countless other situations — physiological and pathological, common or uncommon — in which there is brief, or prolonged, or permanent annihilation. Strokes, tumours, injuries, especially to the right half of the brain, tend to cause a partial or total annihilation of the left side — a condition variously known as 'imperception', 'inattention', 'neglect', 'agnosia', 'anosognosia', 'extinction', or 'alienation'. All of these are experiences of nothingness (or, more precisely, privations of the experience of somethingness).

Blockage to the spinal cord or the great limb plexus can produce an identical situation, even though the brain is intact but deprived of the information from which it might form an image (or a Kantian 'intuition'). Indeed it can be shown by measuring potentials in the brain during spinal or regional blocks that there is a dying away of activity in the corresponding part of the cerebral representation of the 'body image' — the empirical reality required for Kantian ideality. Similar annihilations may be brought out peripherally, either through nerve or muscle damage in a limb, or by simply enclosing the limb in a cast, which by its mixture of immobilization and encasement may temporarily bring neural traffic and impulses to a halt.

To conclude. Nothingness, annihilation, is a reality in this ultimately paradoxical sense. There is, indeed, no space without field, but there are conditions in which the 'field' may be lost — a perceptual-ideal 'Kantian' field which is closely analogous to an Einsteinian field. One's sense of being is entirely contingent upon, coextensive with, and contained in such a field. And anything that produces 'fieldlessness' (or field defect, or scotoma) is certain to produce a corresponding nothingness.

Clinical descriptions of this neuropsychological nothingness may be found in Oliver Sacks's books A Leg to Stand on (1984) and The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985). While nothingness has long been a central concept in mathematics ('zero'), and in philosophy and theology (the 'Void' of the Gnostics, the 'Tsimtsum' of the Kabbalists), it has recently become a central topic in physics and cosmology too, so that the 'Vacuum' is no longer seen as empty, but as filled, charged, with potential existence and 'vacuum energy', as the very cradle and origin of everything. The concepts are discussed by K. C. Cole in The Hole in the Universe (2001). Many further references may be found in Cole's bibliography.

(Published 1987)

— Oliver Sacks

Bibliography
• Cole, K. C. (2001). The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything.
• Sacks, O. (1984). A Leg to Stand on.
• — —  (1985). The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

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