Nothing, What's a Matter With You?
- Aidan J
- Jul 24, 2018
- 2 min read
Nothing interests me. Oh, that’s not what I mean! The concept, nothing, has so much depth that it should not be dismissed as nothing.
Nothing exists in two forms, a number and an abstract. There’s the ordinary nothing that we use in everyday life, but then there’s this esoteric, incomprehensible nothing. There’s also two words used, naught and nothing. I am assigning the more common word, nothing, with the more intuitive meaning.
Nothing is much like zero. “There is nothing of importance” implies that there could be things described as important, but in this case, there are none. I have no eggs in my refrigerator because I have nothing in my refrigerator. Of course, in the past, there were eggs, so we can talk about the eggs. Nothing is a present state of being. Nothing is a number, not a concept.
The other nothing is the brutal one: the inconceivable nothing: naught. It is only definable as the negative of everything that exists. For example, something impossible, like a chandelier made of water, does exist, because it occupies a space in our mind that is real. It is present, and so it is much like nothing. We are reminded of it, and it exists, but not in any quantity, and therefore is nothing.
People use naught to discuss the existence of God. The first instance is the firmament that gave rise to our universe created 13.5 billion years ago. Most people admit that the world came from naught, creatio ex nihilo, but without believing in God, it’s impossible to answer how the world came from naught. Since it’s impossible for us to understand, it’s impossible to conceive of, and we only rationalize it by redefining what naught means or explaining that God conceived the universe. The second instance is God. He exists out of our dimensions and can only be defined by what he is not: he is not evil, he is not powerless, he is not nescient. Since we cannot understand him directly, he is the truest form of naught.
So, nothing is the absence of presence, but naught is the concept of absence from the real world.
Why does this matter?
It plays a large role in the development of mathematics. It took six centuries for the number zero to be refined from ancient Mesopotamia’s scripts, and was officially invented in India in the sixth century. Before that, there was not a common understanding of zero as a number. They probably thought that, that which is not there, does not exist. That’s the same sort of expression a phenomenologist might use to describe reality. After George Berkeley, esse principi: to be is to be perceived. Phenomenology says only the observable present exists, and so it combines the concept of nothing to be naught. Knowing this distinction allows anyone to understand the history of math or philosophy just a little more.
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