Nothing, Concept of

Note: Last Updated 7/31/2024.

David C. Downing:

     In Surprised by Joy Lewis notes that his reading of Henri Bergson in 1918 was an important first step in moving away from Schopenhauer. Bergson, says Lewis, showed him “the snares that lurk about the word Nothing” and helped him get past Schopenhauer’s “haunting idea . . . that the universe might not have existed.” The book Lewis has in mind here is Creative Evolution, first published in 1907. In it Bergson critiques the notion that the physical universe is a cosmic fluke, that it was preceded at some time eons ago by a pure Void, and that it need not have existed at all.

     Bergson argues that we can conceive of an empty glass, as opposed to a full one, by retaining the idea of the glass. And we can conceive of an empty universe, as opposed to one with galaxies, worlds and life forms, only by retaining the idea of a universe, something which exists. To posit the existence of nonexistence is, for Bergson, a logical impossibility. One might assert that a chalk circle is present or absent from a blackboard, but one cannot argue that the idea of a circle does not exist, for it is independent of, and logically prior to, any particular physical circle. In the same way, there are logical principles, such as that A = A, which are eternal, self-existing and have no meaningful logical opposites. To Bergson, existence itself is such a term, an object necessary for any contemplating subject, regardless of how dark and empty one might try to imagine the universe. For him a nonexistent universe is like a square circle, “a self-destructing idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word.”

(David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004], pp. 93-94.)

Henri Bergson:

…Existence appears to me like a conquest over nought. I say to myself that there might be, that indeed there ought to be, nothing, and I then wonder that there is something. Or I represent all reality extended on nothing as on a carpet: at first was nothing, and being has come by superaddition to it. Or, yet again, if something has always existed, nothing must always have served as its substratum or receptacle, and is therefore eternally prior. A glass may have always been full, but the liquid it contains nevertheless fills a void. In the same way, being may have always been there, but the nought which is filled and, as it were, stopped up by it, pre-exists for it none the less, if not in fact at least in right. In short, I cannot get rid of the idea that the full is an embroidery on the canvas of the void, that being is superimposed on nothing, and that in the idea of “nothing” there is less than in that of “something.” Hence all the mystery.

     It is necessary that this mystery should be cleared up. It is more especially necessary, if we put duration and free choice at the base of things. For the disdain of metaphysics for all reality that endures comes precisely from this, that it reaches being only by passing through “not-being,” and that an existence which endures seems to it not strong enough to conquer non-existence and itself posit itself. It is for this reason especially that it is inclined to endow true being with a logical, and not a psychological nor a physical existence. For the nature of a purely logical existence is such that it seems to be self-sufficient and to posit itself by the effect alone of the force immanent in truth. If I ask myself why bodies or minds exist rather than nothing, I find no answer; but that a logical principle, such as A = A, should have the power of creating itself, triumphing over the nought throughout eternity, seems to me natural. A circle drawn with chalk on a blackboard is a thing which needs explanation: this entirely physical existence has not by itself wherewith to vanquish non-existence. But the “logical essence” of the circle, that is to say, the possibility of drawing it according to a certain law—in short, its definition—is a thing which appears to me eternal: it has neither place nor date; for nowhere, at no moment, has the drawing of a circle begun to be possible. Suppose, then, that the principle on which all things rest, and which all things manifest possesses an existence of the same nature as that of the definition of the circle, or as that of the axiom A = A: the mystery of existence vanishes, for the being that is at the base of everything posits itself then in eternity, as logic itself does.

(Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, [London: Macmillan and Co., 1911], pp. 291-292.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria