What is nothing? Macbeth answered this question with admirable concinnity: “Nothing is, but what is not.” My dictionary puts it somewhat more paradoxically—“nothing (n.): a thing that does not exist.” Although Parmenides, the ancient Eleatic sage, declared that it was impossible to speak of what is not—thereby violating his own precept—the plain man knows better. Nothing is popularly held to be better than a dry martini, but worse than sand in the bedsheets. A poor man has it, a rich man needs it, and if you eat it for a long time, it’ll kill you. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further. It can be both black and white all over at the same time. Nothing is impossible for God, yet it is a cinch for the rankest incompetent. No matter what pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is mysterious. But that would only mean that everything is obvious—including, presumably, nothing.
That, perhaps, is why the world abounds with people who know, understand, and believe in nothing. But beware of speaking blasphemously of nothing, for there are also many bumptious types about—call them “nullophiles”—who are fond of declaring that, to them, nothing is sacred.
Ex nihilo nihil fit, averred the ancient philosophers, and King Lear agreed: nothing comes of nothing. This maxim would appear to attribute to nothing a remarkable power: that of generating itself—of being, like God, causa sui. The philosopher Leibniz paid nothing another compliment when he observed that it was “simpler and easier than something.” (Hard experience teaches the same lesson: nothing is simple, nothing is easy.) Indeed, it was the alleged simplicity of nothing that moved Leibniz to ask why there is something rather than nothing. If there were nothing, after all, there would be nothing to be explained—and no one to demand an explanation.
If nothing is so simple, so natural, then why, one wonders, does it seem so deeply mysterious? In the 1620s, John Donne, speaking from the pulpit, furnished a plausible answer: “The less anything is, the less we know it: how invisible, how unintelligible a thing, then, is this Nothing!”
And why should such a simple (albeit unintelligible) thing strike others as so sinister? Take the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, one of the most profound and brave thinkers of the twentieth century. What, asked Barth, is Nothing? It is “that which God does not will.” In his massive and unfinished life’s work, Church Dogmatics, Barth wrote, “The character of nothingness derives from its ontic peculiarity. It is evil.” Nothing rose up simultaneously with Something when God created the world, according to Barth. The two are rather like a pair of ontological twins, though contrary in moral character. It is nothingness that accounts for man’s perverse tendency to do evil, to rebel against divine goodness. For Barth, nothingness was downright Satanic.
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