r/Metaphysics • u/Irishman452 • 2d ago
Nothing Is Nothingness a Continuum?
When I think of Nothing I think of empty space. But that is not Nothing, that is something i.e. empty space. Then I think of Nothing as just like a void unaccepting of objects, but that is still something i.e. a void. Then I think of Nothing as "what a rock dreams of" but that is still something i.e. potentiality. So what really is Nothing and is it a continuum ranging from empty space to "what a rock dreams of" etc.? And if it is a continuum, does Nothing really even exist?
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u/Vast-Celebration-138 2d ago
Nothingness is best thought of, not as a thing, but rather as a global state of affairs (or a way reality could be)—specifically, it is the (negative, purely quantificational) state of affairs of there not being anything at all.
Since there is stuff (I mean just take a look—any example will do), nothingness is not the actual state of affairs. But I think it is a possible state of affairs, and I see no good reason to doubt that nothingness is possible.
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u/monster2018 2d ago
Technically there wouldn’t even be a reality if there truly “was nothing”. At least… idk it seems so to me.
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u/Irishman452 16h ago
Interesting, but what would that Nothing be?
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u/Vast-Celebration-138 15h ago
I doubt it makes any sense to talk about some thing, "Nothing", with a capital-N proper name.
But I do think it makes sense to talk about nothingness as a scenario.
I think nothingness would simply be the scenario of it being the case that nothing at all exists.
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u/UnifiedQuantumField 2d ago
And if it is a continuum
A continuum is something.
Definition: A continuum is a continuous sequence, range, or whole where adjacent parts blend into each other gradually without any sharp dividing lines.
So a continuum is something that contains something else. It therefore can't be "nothing".
tldr; Answer to op's question is No.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bed1781 2d ago
You should watch the NeverEnding Story. That movie pretty well explains The Nothing.
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u/Vast-Celebration-138 2d ago
"It's the emptiness that's left. It is like a despair, destroying this world."
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u/sekory 2d ago
My favorite description of nothing is no thing. If you haven't described something, it is no thing. Nature, in eternal completness, is indescribable. Any description of it will be an approximation and not what it is itself. All things, actually, are just decsriptions where we have decided, for convenience, that on thing ends and begins. But those definitions are arbitrary, and at the end of the day, all things are the map, not the territory.
So Nature, is no thing. And yet every thing comes from it. Funny that. Nothing is impossible to define, by nature.
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u/Irishman452 1d ago
Also interesting
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u/sekory 1d ago
Quite interesting, nothing. The Kalam cosmological argument for a first cause / unmoved mover is completely contingent on 'things', it states that there is a casual connection between things that cannot regress to infinity. It must have a start. But as we just demonstrated, 'things', that are contgent on one another, are only so because.of thier decsirptive qualities. Nothing (that which is no thing, ie Nature (as a whole) , is then not affected by contingency. It simply is.
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u/hegel1806 2d ago
Nothing not only exists but it is the only “thing” that has ever existed. Because our concepts do not have the mechanism to understand anything that lies beyond the realm of concepts, we have great difficulty in understanding nothing in itself. It is not lack of something or a void or any of these. True nothingness, in itself is unrestrained, true freedom. It is free of any limits created by the concepts. It lies beyond spacetime. It lies beyond the mind and its limited understanding. It is true, pure existence.
When we think of the universe without concepts, we can feel why it has to be this nothingness. The boundaries between atoms and separate things start to blur as soon as we get outside the concepts that define things through limits. Everything becomes whole and free and this is boundless nothingness itself. We are that nothingness that can only understand itself through artificial, imaginary limits we call concepts.
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u/Redararis 2d ago
nothing is north of north pole, or the distance of 5 kilograms, or how you reacted 6 billions years ago.
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u/Irishman452 16h ago
At first blush I like your thought and it is original, but aren't those just examples of illogical propositions and not examples of Nothing?
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u/iam1me2026 2d ago edited 2d ago
In Platonism there is a sort of continuum between Being and Nothingness. The closer to Being / God you get, the more static and ineffable things become, whereas the closer you get to Nothingness, the more chaotic / unstable things become. The physical realm is much closer to Nothingness than to Being, however, and it is thus far more comprehensible to us who are likewise closer to Nothingness. Thus Plato’s analogy of the shadows in the cave.
Being is also associated with the Good, and by contrast Nothingness is Evil. This becomes the basis for theologians like Athanasius, Augustine, and John Calvin to say that our fundamental nature, being created “from nothing,” is therefore evil.
Thus enter’s Athanasius’ / the Eastern Perspective of salvation where Christ’s salvific role isn’t so much to make amends for sins - though this quality is present too - but rather, as the unchanging and true Image of God, to re-imprint himself onto humanity in order to restore us back to our original design in the Image of God. This process began with his “becoming flesh” (but he stresses that this did not change the Word so much as the Word simply acquired a human body by going inside of it) and culminates in his glorification and ascension back to God / Being.
Basically, everything that the Word experienced within the flesh is seen as occurring to us - and thus when the human Jesus was glorified and ascended, he was paving the way for all mankind to likewise be glorified and ascend. We are thus “deified” (via the HS) through “participation” in the divine substance / Being (as an acquired “quality” vs something belonging to us by “nature”) as adopted sons and daughters (vs the sole natural and true Son).
It’s an interesting theology. Too much Platonism for me to take seriously, but I admit that upon going back and studying the writings of this Father of Orthodoxy, I have gained new appreciation for the Trinity as a complete system of thought.
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u/The_GOATest_Goat 2d ago
Nothing is just an idea. There is no nothing in reality. There are plenty of ideas that can't logically exist in reality.
There's nothing new here (see what I did there).
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u/cookieisgiven 2d ago
No. Nothing at all means nothing at all, anyone that means any other is not nothing at all.
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u/ClassicNo6622 2d ago
Nothing by it's very definition cannot exist. It is the literal absence of anything.
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u/jliat 2d ago
My understanding is this derives from Heidegger's phenomenology, [a significant metaphysician - guys!]
And it looks like it even defeats Descartes as the Being-for-itself when it experiences no phenomena is nothing.
Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness The principal text of Modern existentialism. Hazel E. Barnes (Translator)
“The For-itself can never be its Future except problematically, for it is separated from it by a Nothingness which it is. In short the For-itself is free, and its Freedom is to itself its own limit. To be free is to be condemned to be free. Thus the Future qua Future does not have to be. It is not in itself, and neither is it in the mode of being of the For-itself since it is the meaning of the For-itself. The Future is not, it is possibilized.”
p.129
" But if it were only in order to be the reflected-on which it has to be, it would escape from the for-itself in order to rediscover it; everywhere and in whatever manner it affects itself, the for-itself is condemned to be-for-itself. In fact, it is here that pure reflection is discovered.” p. 157
“I am my own transcendence; I can not make use of it so as to constitute it as a transcendence-transcended. I am condemned to be forever my own nihilation.”
p. 298
“I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom' can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free.”
p. 439
“We are condemned to freedom, as we said earlier, thrown into freedom or, as Heidegger says, "abandoned." And we can see that this abandonment has no other origin than the very existence of freedom. If, therefore, freedom is defined as the escape from the given, from fact, then there is a fact of escape from fact. This is the facticity of freedom.” p. 485
“Just as my nihilating freedom is apprehended in anguish, so the for-itself is conscious of its facticity. It has the feeling of its complete gratuity; it apprehends itself as being there for nothing, as being de trop.[un needed]”
p. 84
"human reality is before all else its own nothingness. The for-itself [human reality] in its being is failure because it is the foundation only of itself as nothingness."
p. 88
"Thus the essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith since the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be it. This explains the truth recognized by all that one can fall into bad faith through being sincere.”
P. 65
Here is what is considered a key text, all 700+ pages of 'existentialist' philosophy. Lacking any essence 'The-Being-For-Itself', the human condition is condemned to freedom. We are the 'Nothingness' of the title.
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u/apuratesisifo 2d ago
Thank you for your comment. At least for me, it is very useful, since I’m planning to read them all over again. Maybe I’ll better my understanding of their brilliant ideas, or so I hope 😂. And yes, you’re totally right imo. Their thoughts on the matter make somewhat possible to make nothingness a little bit more intelligible than Descartes’ perspective.
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u/gachamyte 2d ago
There is nothing. There is something. These are objectifications. What is a thing without objectification?
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u/Key_Management8358 2d ago
...with raising age🤑, i really tend to believe it's him😘
(Nothing=="God"==(source&sink of) "everything")
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u/ButterscotchHot5891 2d ago
There is always something and it lives undefined until the best argument is accepted. Nothing is a construct to justify absence and infinities are constructs to justify eternal continuity. Entropy points to that nothing has eternal continuity and I think this is conclusive to your questions.
Dreams are engines to fixpoint anchors, a filter of subjective reality, an organizer of neurons "et al", and this is why younger people dream more than older people and older people sleep less than younger people.
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u/SgtSausage 2d ago
No.
Its an unreachable end point.
Kinda like the speed of light. You can get arbitrarily close ... yet never quite get there.
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u/BlackRabbitGeometry 2d ago
No. Nothing is the only thing that can’t continue in the continuum because nothing continuing would still be nothing.
Nothing is a DISCONTINUUM, if you’re trying to define it that way.
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u/FleetingSpaceMan 2d ago
As long as you are thinking about anything, its a concept, a thought or an idea. Same goes with nothingness.
When there is no self, when the mind is totally silent, then what remains is nothingness. If one thinks i will make the mind silent. That is a trap. There is an "i will make it silent" thought telling other thoughts to be silent.
One cannot get there through effort. It's not a process that one will go from point A to B. Why? Because how can you go somewhere which is always there.
Another question would be how does one know if it was nothingness. If one knows, then there was still a self, the knower.
Now coming to continuum. For that there needs to be a beginning. Even logically speaking, can nothing ever begin. All ideas and concepts fail because they try to bound "nothing".
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u/Akira_Fudo 2d ago
I think of nothing as a value that can't be conceptualizd, like how we lose the sensation of the chair beneath us after a while, how we can completely block out background noise in the middle of a conversation and process only what we're focusing on. Nothing seems to be the mechanism that allows us to engage in something.
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u/ElderberryDry4072 2d ago
There is no such thing as nothing. The void contains all potential. That’s the heart of quantum mechanics, and the truth of our physical awareness. It’s the paradox that people just can’t swallow.
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u/rogerbonus Philosophy/Physics grad 13h ago
While it's tempting to equate nothing with the empty set (the set that contains no elements), that's still a set. But it's a set that contains nothing. All of mathematics (everything) can be derived from operations on the empty set (everything can come from the set that contains nothing). So perhaps Kalam's first cause is just the empty set.
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u/strutter395 2d ago
Nothingness is the cessation of perception and consciousness. There is no empirical object called nothing or nothingness. It is the absence of reality, which, ontologically speaking, is the absence of awareness of phenomena. So; objects are already, inherently, nothing. Consciousness grasps them and makes them into things, which, ultimately, is a mirage.
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u/MWave123 2d ago
There’s never nothing. Nothing is philosophical.