Utterly Nothing

Empty Set

Next, subtract the set itself?

(Image from Wikipedia)

I want to pick up the thread of my thought on nothing and see where it leads me.

The philosopher Roy Sorenson, writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, discourses on "Nothingness" in an article first published on August 28, 2003 and substantively revised on August 30, 2006, and from my reading it on this 5th of July, I have gained not nothing . . . though I had hoped for something more.

Sorenson did provide a concept for use in thinking about nothing, but before getting to that, let's enjoy a couple of poems. The first is a riddle that Sorenson quotes from page 201 of Joseph Lemmings, Riddles, Riddles, Riddles (New York: Franklin Watts, Inc.: 1953):

What does a man love more than life?
Hate more than death or mortal strife?
That which contented men desire,
The poor have, the rich require,
The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,
And all men carry to their graves?

Sorenson holds that "[t]he answer, Nothing, can only be seen through a kaleidoscope of equivocations." I assume that he means that "nothing" in this riddling poem takes on a variety of meanings. I'm not sure that we encounter a "kaleidoscope of equivocations," for the correct answer, "nothing," seems each time to mean "not anything." The equivocation seems to me to occur between our expectation of a positive answer, such that "nothing" seems initially to be some thing, and our recognition that the answer is negative, i.e., no thing.

Sorenson links to another poem, a far more impressive one by the 17th-century libertine John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester:

Upon Nothing

Nothing, thou elder brother even to shade,
That hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixed) art alone of ending not afraid.

Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united -- What?

Something, the general attribute of all,
Severed from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall.

Yet Something did thy mighty power command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness's hand,
Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land.

Matter, the wickedest offspring of thy race,
By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace,
And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.

With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join,
Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine
To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line.

But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain,
And, bribed by thee, assists thy short-lived reign,
And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again.

Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes,
And the Divine alone with warrant pries
Into thy bosom, where thy truth in private lies,

Yet this of thee the wise may freely say,
Thou from the virtuous nothing takest away,
And to be part of thee the wicked wisely pray.

Great Negative, how vainly would the wise
Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise?
Didst thou not stand to point their dull philosophies.

Is, or is not, the two great ends of Fate,
And true or false, the subject of debate,
That perfects, or destroys, the vast designs of Fate,

When they have racked the politician's breast,
Within thy bosom most securely rest,
And, when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best.

But Nothing, why does Something still permit
That sacred monarchs should at council sit
With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit?

Whilst weighty Something modestly abstains
From princes' coffers, and from statesmen's brains,
And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns,

Nothing, who dwellest with fools in grave disguise,
For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise,
Lawn sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise.

French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy,
Hibernian learning, Scotch civility,
Spaniard's dispatch, Dane's wit are mainly seen in thee.

The great man's gratitude to his best friend,
King's promises, whore's vows, towards thee they bend,
Flow swiftly to thee, and in thee never end.

Sorenson's link has a pop-up, so here's a better link provided by Wikipedia. Incidentally, both links contain the line "Whist weighty Something modestly abstains" twelve lines up from the poem's end, but it should read "Whilst weighty Something modestly abstains" (though without the italics).

The opening lines seem to assign ontology to nothing, as though it were a sort of nothingness, a substance:

Nothing, thou elder brother even to shade,
That hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixed) art alone of ending not afraid.

Perhaps this was intended by Wilmot in irony, but the assertion is useful by contrast as a way of getting at what I mean by nothing. Let us return to Sorenson, who notes, in section 7 of his article, the "subtraction argument":

To many, the possibility of an empty world seems self-evident. Nevertheless, Thomas Baldwin (1996) reinforces the possibility of an empty world by refining the following argument: Imagine each object vanishing in sequence. Eventually you run down to three objects, two objects, one object and then Poof! There's your empty world.

Sorenson is citing Thomas Baldwin, "There might be nothing," Analysis 56 (1996), 231-38, but I've not read Baldwin's article. However, I'd like to use the subtraction method to get at what I mean by nothing. So far as I can see from Sorenson's deployment of Baldwin use of subtraction, one is still left with a remainder, a world that is empty, but nonetheless a world. So, let us subtract this world as well. In the absence of even an empty world, neither of either horn of paired opposites apply, e.g., neither nonpotential nor potential. This total absence lacks any property whatsoever.

What then?

At this point, I grow stumped. Initially, I intuited: "Anything follows." Commenter JK, however, intuits: "Nothing follows."

JK would therefore agree with the ancients, namely, that "ex nihilo nihil fit," first formulated by presocratic thinker Parmenides, or so I am informed, but presumably in Greek rather than Latin. I am not one to disagree with ancient wisdom, so I should point out that my intuition that "anything follows" leaves open the possibility that "nothing follows." I think, however, that I am playing word games at this point, so I will simply stop, for now, at being stumped.

For an entertaining essay on almost nothing at all, read Jim Holt's "Nothing Ventured" in Harper's Magazine (1994), which has come to my attention via Sorenson, in whose debt I once again find myself.