SubStance

In introducing this enigmatic topic, I often begin with a riddle that points to its elusive, mobile character: What is greater than God, more powerful than evil, the rich have it, the poor need it, and if you eat it, you die?—Nothing.

In the multiple contexts in which I've navigated the topic of nothing (course, conference, collection of essays, special issue), it has proved a subject that provokes mirth, irony, and skepticism. When I have told colleagues that I'm teaching "A Course About Nothing," the responses I get range from "Oh...it must have a short reading list," to "Well, I'm going to teach my class now—at least it's about something," to "Uh-huh" or just "Huh." (I have a slight preference for "huh" because it is linked to nothing through its palindromic symmetry (h-u-h), plus it is resolutely noncommittal; it says nothing.) And when I sent out a Call for Papers for this special issue, several people thought it was a hoax; I received many responses that said, "Dear Dr. Harris, please find below my submission for your journal issue," with the rest left blank. Still others wondered whether the topic of Nothing could lead to anything but more postmodern nihilism or empty intellectual solipsisms. Finally, on a pragmatic, pedagogical level, in setting out to investigate Nothing, one faces fundamental questions regarding both the utility and the futility of the topic. On the one hand, of what use could it be to pursue Nothing? And on the other, how can any search for it, any attempt to define or capture it, end up in anything but futility?

While I have obviously not found definitive answers to these queries, I would maintain that a preliminary way of responding to them has emerged from teaching a class on Nothing. The use of Nothing lies in the simple fact that reading and thinking and talking about it leads down paths one would otherwise never traverse, and in following these lines of thought, one begins to develop a different way of thinking. This mode of reflection strives to avoid approaching Nothing from a standpoint grounded in the world of Being, where Presence and Something are presupposed to exist, and Nothing is seen as nothing but nonbeing. It is [End Page 3] extremely hard to break habits of thought formed by a western tradition in metaphysics and physics, because this tradition usually upholds a strictly diametric opposition between being and nothing. And as I just noted, this opposition is not really a symmetrical one, for "nothing" tends to be thought about or predicated from the standpoint of "being," and seen in the light of being, Nothing remains simply an absence in the midst of presence, or plenitude. Parmenides sets the tone for this metaphysical tradition when, in Fragment Two, he posits that philosophical inquiry can go either of two ways, that of being or of nonbeing. And because nonbeing does not—indeed cannot—exist (a tautology if ever there was one), then it cannot be known, and therefore cannot provide an origin for philosophy. Ancient physics also casts Nothing as only a kind of passive substrate for things, a background against which bodies and things appear. Heraclitus and later the atomists deemed the void a necessary component in the universe, but only insofar as it was the necessary condition that enabled bodies to move—without the void, they believed, there could be no motion. The non-existence of Nothing in both philosophical and physical terms finds affirmation in Aristotle's axiom that nature abhors a vacuum. And with St. Augustine, the cosmological horror vacui is integrated—by way of Plotinus rather than Aristotle—into Christian theology: if God is an original presence and the source of plenitude and fullness, then nothing, no-thing, an absence, becomes indicative of a spiritual absence of God. Nothing is rendered heretical, if not evil.

Faced with the polar opposites of being and nonbeing, atoms and void, I can only echo...