Emptiness, a void full of effects

Emptiness and emptiness

The bottle of whiskey is empty at the end of the evening. The soul of the drinker of said bottle is empty, when he wakes up in the morning, when he thinks of the precariousness of his existence. There is certainly a link between the two voids mentioned here, the famous bottle, but this link is of course contingent. We could then consider that there is a common use of the word “ empty » and a metaphorical use, the existential void being grafted onto the understanding of the void in a material object. Frédéric Nef rightly chooses not to follow this type of path where metaphor serves as a pretext for apparently profound reflections but which would lock metaphysics into the phenomenology of certain human experiences such as that of contingency.

Metaphysics studies ultimate questions without relating everything that is to the human being, and one of the crucial points of this essay is to think rigorously, without sacrificing logical requirements, the emptiness of all things, emptiness which becomes a category ontological and not an experience adorned with the trappings of an intuitive knowledge of nothingness. The entire work is thus intended to be a geography of the void since it involves identifying the different areas where the void intervenes in order to distinguish two major meanings of the void. On the one hand, there is the relative vacuum as in the case of the empty bottle since it is a vacuum of this bottle or In this bottle (the void in physics has a meaning close to this), and on the other hand, there is the emptiness which is specific to a world, ours in this case, where nothing has essence and where nothing is independent. This emptiness will be all the better known if we practice semantic and logical analysis rather than intoxication.

Nef’s book is sober and reading it is, if not easy, at least without insurmountable difficulty because there is no real obscurity. The author is part of a small cohort of philosophers who have been able to reconcile real and recognized competence in the history of philosophy and work in contemporary philosophy, so-called analytical philosophy. In What is metaphysics ?, published by Gallimard in 2004, Nef was able, against deconstructionist and postmodern trends, to restore the nobility of argumentative metaphysics, concerned with truth and without dogmatism.

Before coming to identify the two meanings of “ empty “, we must be careful not to confuse emptiness, emptiness and nothingness. The difference between void and emptiness takes on meaning from the two forms of negation: presuppositional negation and absolute negation. In presuppositional negation, we deny by assuming something that is not negated. If the bottle were negated, that is to say broken, there would no longer be the emptiness of the bottle, the emptiness of the bottle presupposes the bottle. On the other hand, an absolute negation does not suppose any substance or any reality escaping this negation. Is it the mark of nothingness and therefore of emptiness? ? Nothingness is a negation or subtraction of being. In this sense, the creation ex nihilo is not from nothingness but from God and Nothing else. Now we must distinguish between emptiness and nothingness because emptiness must be able to characterize reality. This allows us to dismiss a certain representation of nihilism and metaphysics. By rethinking the void without nothingness, in addition to the gain in intelligibility, we make possible a metaphysical reflection that is clearly less romantic but not at all less profound. We thus leave the (mythological) history of metaphysics which, from its Greek origin to its alleged destruction by Nietzsche or Heidegger, is very often purely European. In this story, the thought of nothingness and nihilism obstructs an apprehension of emptiness which is not nihilism. One of the essential moments in the thought of emptiness comes from comparative philosophy, during the examination of the thought of Nagarjuna, without forgetting the subtleties of the negative theology of Eckhart or Nicholas of Cusa. The requirement for reflection on the semantic and logical use of negation will therefore be imposed on anyone who wants to think about emptiness, in particular in the form of a middle way in which the emptiness of reality is not thought of. neither from presuppositional negation nor from nothingness. This middle path will take the form of a reasoning practiced by Nagarjuna, called tetralemma and to which we will return.

Mathematics, physics and vacuum ontology

Three major areas are the subject of this geography of the void. As far as mathematics is concerned, the main lesson to be learned is that zero can be the fundamental number of arithmetic from which the emptiness of a concept is designated (there are zero drops in the bottle) but also a certain dynamic and not pure and simple nothingness. This dynamic is found when syntactically, 0 makes it possible to multiply entities (5 thanks to 0 becomes 50) or to generate numbers. This generation was discovered by Frege who defined zero by the concept of not identical to oneself which has zero extension, the set is empty.

In physics, two main meanings must be distinguished: the vacuum of classical physics and the emptiness of contemporary physics. THE vacuum is the heir of the debates between atomists and plenists, the former seeking to think of the gaps between atoms, conditions of their movements, and the latter thinking of movement thanks to substances and accidents of substances. For the partisans of the void, the void is not only the absence of fullness but also and at the same time the negation of a substantial and founding reality that is emptiness. The quantum vacuum is more surprising since it seems to be a positive characteristic of certain systems rather than a negation of something and the vacuum could be used to designate the cosmological landscape made up of a multitude of possibilities or even universes.

Ontology is the study of the reality of reality or of the possible structures of reality and the thesis according to which emptiness characterizes the whole of reality is indeed ontology. But to proceed rigorously, ontology must resort to logic, which in the case of emptiness poses a problem. If emptiness is neither nothingness as the absolute negation of all that is, nor the result of presuppositional negation, it seems that all that remains is to renounce logical principles such as non-contradiction or the third -excluded. But if fleeing the nihilism that confuses nothingness and emptiness led to generalized, self-refuting skepticism or irrational mysticism, the essay on emptiness would be a failure. It is a more dynamic reasoning, the tetralemma, which by rigorously confronting the limits of thought through logic or better a dialectic, allows us to understand this universal emptiness. The tetralemma or catuskoti in Sanskrit is present in Nagarjuna’s work and has the following form if applied to emptiness.

• • Emptiness exists
  • Emptiness does not exist
  • Emptiness exists and does not exist
  • Emptiness neither exists nor does it exist.

Nef examines several attempts at logical constructions preserving the meaning of all the stages of the catuskoti, to finally show that far from violating the principle of non-contradiction, the entire reasoning can be read as a change of ground compared to the current uses of affirmation and negation. THE catuskoti is the logical tool of a meditation leading to the intelligence of emptiness which is neither nothingness nor the essence of reality since essence and substances are negated. We see the ontological lesson that must be learned from this. Emptiness is not a property of substances since nothing is independent and substantial.

Emptiness takes on meaning in a tropist and non-substantialist ontology. A tropist ontology analyzes all reality as a conglomeration of tropes, of particular properties. From an ontological point of view, the structure of the whiskey bottle is to be a compound of a particular shape specific to this bottle, a label color specific to this bottle, etc., each particular property being able to resemble another particular property of another object without being identical to it. Emptiness which is the absence of substantial ground and interdependence of all that is, therefore describes such a world of conglomerations of tropes.

Interesting consequences that we would have liked to see more developed concern the theory of people and politics. If a person is not a substance lasting through time, he is a collection of temporal slices of an organism linked by memory: and X’. But if a person is not a substance and we do not rave about nihilism or skepticism, we must be able to give meaning to responsibility and commitment to values ​​or norms. Nef clearly indicates that substantialism is not necessary to understand that a person can contract and even feel responsible for others, but there is certainly room for fruitful and more precise developments in this sense. And the political question would be asked again. The idea of ​​emptiness seems to resonate with Lefort’s analyzes of democracy as “ empty place » of power. Here too, the focus on mathematics, physics and ontology seems to leave aside an aspect of the geography of the void without however removing the qualities of the work.