( 1 ) Other cultures have different ideas of nothing. In Zen Buddhism, mu, often translated as “no,” “not” or “nothing,” is used to negate the terms of a question and encourage a direct encounter with nothingness itself. In Sanskrit, śūnya, meaning “empty” or “void,” describes a state of emptiness or absence and is theorized to have allowed the concept of the number “zero” to arise.
A Short History of NothingHow emptiness begets everything.
A Short History of NothingHow emptiness begets everything.
Jonathan Lear’s 2006 book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, is haunted by the final testimony of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Native American Crow Nation. Plenty Coups had told the story of his life to the writer Frank B. Linderman in 1928, a few years before his death, but he refused to speak of what happened after the buffalo were cleared from the Plains and the Crow were forced to adopt a settled life on a reservation. He said: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”
Lear is fascinated by this “nothing,” partly because Plenty Coups’ life on the reservation was filled with many achievements and events. Yet, as Lear understands it, for Plenty Coups “nothing happened” because, on the reservation, with his traditional way of life disappearing, nothing he did, or experienced, felt meaningful to him.
Here we have an understanding of “nothing” as abyssal: a void one might stare into; be trapped by. But “nothingness” can also be profoundly liberating, as it is into this void—this vacuum or lack—that possibility is born. When French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that man was “the being through whom nothingness comes into the world,” what he really meant was that we are able to negate whatever presently exists, to transform it; that we are free.
Sometimes, of course, it can feel like we will be trapped forever on the same endlessly downward roller coaster of boredom and decay. But it is precisely our thinking that nothing matters that might, provided the conditions are right, allow us to think about how to live better. For Lear, Plenty Coups was someone whose life gives us a hopeful example, since despite his sense that “nothing was happening”—that nothing really mattered for him—he never stopped living and trying in the hope that things that might start mattering again, both for himself and his people. It is only through nothing that anything becomes possible. We should look into the void with hope.
