Have you ever tried to think of how mind-bogglingly big infinity is? I mean, really, have you tried to picture it? You wouldn’t be able to do so, of course. If you did, I expect the sheer volume of the concept would shatter your mind. On the other hand, however, are you able to picture nothingness? This probably sounds a lot easier, although you may be familiar with the struggle of trying to think about nothing and thinking of something in the process. Nevertheless, it seems much easier to think of nothing at all than the infinite. It’s infinitely smaller, after all, thus you might suppose that (in theory) it’s a concept that you can more adequately apprehend. Unfortunately for you, however, I’m here to tell you that this is “poppycock”. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is just as difficult—nay, even more so—to picture nothingness than infinity.

The ideas of nothingness, emptiness, or whatever you wish to call it have probably been my greatest philosophical fascination in 2024. Truth be told, it’s the only notion in metaphysics that would receive my stamp of approval these days. Ideas of absolute categories, forms, and substance have sort of fallen out of favour with me, particularly as I read the opening chapters of Keiji Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness for the first time. The notion that all things are impermanent, that it is senseless to talk of things “essentially in themselves” struck a chord with me. This was a long time coming. I have long felt that metaphysics can easily devolve into a bullshit philosophical discussion. Consider the thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus in identity metaphysics: the ship’s wood planks rot over time, and are replaced with new ones. Eventually, none of the original wood planks remain—so, is it still the Ship of Theseus? In my estimation, problems like these arrive because we begin our enquiry with concepts like “the ship of Theseus” that are ambiguous. No—not only that, but they are metaphysical assumptions that we make because, for practical purposes, that is how we make sense of the world. All of which is to say that the concept is essentially empty, an emptiness into which I wanted to dive deeper, and so I kept looking into it.

What I came across was a cheery looking book by Roy Sorensen called Nothing: A Philosophical History. It’s rare that I say this, but the book left much to be desired for me. I confess that I couldn’t even get through it. It was painful reading. The writing style was rather rambling—often, I feel, missing the subject entirely—and as I glanced through the bibliography and read some reviews about the rest of the content, I decided that it wasn’t worth my time. (I stopped mid-way through the chapter on Buddha, which I don’t remember as citing a single primary source.) The fictitious reviews “written” by the philosophers of history on the back cover are, while cute, the only sensible inclusion, as I would not expect any genuine review of the book to be a glowing one, especially if it were written by philosophers of that calibre. Still, there was one idea that did stick with me, so the book wasn’t a total disappointment.

What caught my attention was Sorensen’s explanation of the vanishing point as a representation of nothingness. It’s quite apt when you think about it, and serves to illustrate what it ultimately my thesis: the smallest conceivable spatial representation—a point; viz., a one dimensional thing—is used to illustrate a space in which nothing is seen. Of course, one might think as I did that this isn’t really what we mean by nothingness in a metaphysical sense. However, let me ask you, when you think about nothingness is, what do you picture: is the “vacancy” that comes to mind imagined as black or white? I daresay that no matter how you respond to this question, you would not have grasped the concept because it isn’t even a concept to be grasped. It is nothing. It is not a thing you can give a name to, not an image you can conjure up in your head, nor a category or property of things-proper. Instinctively, our brains seek a representation of something which cannot be represented, much like infinity albeit in the exact opposite way.

So, there is some irony in my philosophical excursion since it is doomed to end in failure, but I have since learned that can be fruitful as a meditative practice as well as an intellectual one. Chan (that is, Chinese Zen) Master Sheng-Yen wrote a book called Shattering the Great Doubt, which talks about the spiritual practice of hua tou. Hua tou is somewhat like and unlike the koans which I’ve likely discussed previously in that, rather than trying to answer the question, the practitioner is simply expected to keep asking it; and when an answer does come to mind, you simply tell yourself that it’s not the answer you are looking for. You don’t need to bother intellectualising it. Doing this, the idea is that great doubt and insight will arise. Funnily enough, the hua tou recommended by Sheng Yen is the question I began with in the first place—what is nothingness? —and it is easy to understand why. Trying to wholly understand this elusive non-concept is, as I said, doomed to failure. Nevertheless, attempting to do so is sure to, like looking through a microscope, shed some light into the depth and richness of the world we share; and such experiences, I believe, demonstrate the role of questions not as a roadblock but as fruitful in and of themselves.