Nothingness in Asian Philosophy

Jeeloo Liu, Douglas Berger, Jeeloo Liu, Douglas Berger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317683834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A variety of crucial and still most relevant ideas about nothingness or emptiness have gained profound philosophical prominence in the history and development of a number of South and East Asian traditions—including in Buddhism, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, Hinduism, Korean philosophy, and the Japanese Kyoto School. These traditions share the insight that in order to explain both the great mysteries and mundane facts about our experience, ideas of "nothingness" must play a primary role.

This collection of essays brings together the work of twenty of the world's prominent scholars of Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Neo-Confucian, Japanese and Korean thought to illuminate fascinating philosophical conceptualizations of "nothingness" in both classical and modern Asian traditions. The unique collection offers new work from accomplished scholars and provides a coherent, panoramic view of the most significant ways that "nothingness" plays crucial roles in Asian philosophy. It includes both traditional and contemporary formulations, sometimes putting Asian traditions into dialogue with one another and sometimes with classical and modern Western thought. The result is a book of immense value for students and researchers in Asian and comparative philosophy.

Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Emptiness in Brāhmiṇical and Early Buddhist Traditions

1
The Unavoidable Void

Nonexistence, Absence, and Emptiness

Arindam Chakrabarti

CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord.

KING LEAR: Nothing!

CORDELIA: Nothing.

KING LEAR: Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

—Shakespeare¹

What is Nothing?

Philosophically, the Nāsadīya Hymn of Beginning (RgVeda X.129) remains by far the richest poem in the Vedic Indian literature. “Not nothing was” are the first three words of this difficult text, which has been copiously commented upon in the last two thousand years. Out of those three words, the last two appear to propose a prima facie theory of the origin of everything, which the first word negates. Where did this universe come from? Before this universe (anything) existed, what was there? If “the universe” means all that exists, the logical answer should be “nothing.” But that answer, the hymn tells us, must be mistaken: “asad āsīt ādau iti (cet) na”—if you say, “In the beginning, there was nothing,” that is not acceptable. It cannot be true that nothing was there, before anything was there, for in sheer nothing no world can originate; as King Lear warns Cordelia, nothing will come out of nothing. That seems to be the line of thought captured in those three cryptic words “na,” “asat,” and “asīt.” Yet, as Bergson (1911) remarked with uncanny precision, the deepest philosophical question, why is there something rather than nothing at all, inexorably pushes us to the notion of “naught,” as if all positive entities that exist have to make room for themselves by pushing out a bit of the ontologically prior omnipresent mud of nothing. But what is this nothing?

There has been much woolly thinking about “nothing” between the time when Parmenides cautioned philosophers against diving into that bottomless swamp and when Heidegger recklessly disregarded the warning. Based on some well-established clarifications and debates in Indian metaphysics, this paper will draw attention to some important distinctions, ignoring which has led to part of the woolliness.

In cosmology, the possibility that the universe might not have existed at all seems to make sense to some philosophers even in recent times (see Parfit 1998; Holt 2012). In ontology and semantics, the questions of whether negative facts exist, and if the meaning of the expression “nothing,” or truth conditions of the statement that nothing exists, can be coherently conceived of or articulated has never lost its importance. All of this, of course, sprouts from the presence of negation in all languages. Whether negation devices would have existed if humans never committed an error that needed to be corrected is a seductive but idle thought experiment to conduct. Correction of mistakes seems as ingrained in human language and thinking as the drive to get it right. And correction, like the physical act of scratching through or striking out a written word or sentence, amounts to negation. Neither the negation nor what is negated has any touch of unreality, or fictionality, about it. If I say “Obama is Jewish,” my statement would be real but false. Corresponding to the falsity of my statement, once it is corrected, we can discover the unremarkable fact that Obama is not Jewish. That fact is as real as the fact that he is the current president of the United States. Independent of the negation devices in our thinking and language, certain things or features are missing in certain places. There are no snakes in Hawaii, and no nitrogen in pure water. These lacks are absences. Neither the snakes nor nitrogen need to be non existent like Santa Claus or his elves in order to be absent in a place. In Sanskrit, absences are called “abhāva-s” (literally: not-being-s). They are real; for example, the fact that there is no wine in my fridge, is existent, a real fact, unlike non existent entities (e.g. the fortieth planet in the solar system) which would be termed “asat” or “alīka.” Turtle-hair is a typical asat. But the real abhāva of real hair on a real turtle-shell is not asat (unreal) but sat (real). What if one takes this notion of absence and applies it to the universal set of things? Could we make sense of “nothing” as the absence of all things? We shall see in what follows that every absence requires both an absentee and a locus, or site. One problem about the absence of everything would be that it could not be hosted by any site, since all things are its absentees. The other problem—somewhat epistemic and phenomenological—is that we cannot imagine the absence of everything. The only nagging worry about this second objection against the idea of pure nothing is that if we commit some item to unimaginability, don’t we need to first have at least a concept of the thing in order to know that the thing is unimaginable? In that case, the absence of all things seems to have some kind of conceivability. Nothing may be unimaginable (though images, like a totally blank canvas or an entirely cloudless sky, suggest themselves) but it surely has to be conceivable insofar as we know what it is we are supposed to try and fail to imagine.

Utterly different from both total non existent(s) and absences, is the currently much-celebrated Buddhist śūnya and its abstract cousin śūnyatā (emptiness). Emptiness could be achieved by a reasoned rejection of all positions and disputations in philosophy (by thinkers like Nāgārjuna or Śrīharşa, for example), or through the contemplative, non conceptual, ineffable experience of “being no one,” or the transcendental experience of merging into cosmic pure consciousness, or identifying with the emptiness beyond the four logical options of real, unreal, real-and-unreal, and neither. We need, therefore, to distinguish very clearly between absences, nonentities and emptiness.

Besides these very large issues of metaphysics, verging on soteriology (some form of “experience of emptiness” is supposed to be liberating), there is a simple phenomenon of a felt lack of feeling. Expressed in negative introspective reports, for example, “I am not in pain” or “the excitement is gone,” a happy relief or a lamentable lack is often felt, which is of great importance for our ontology and phenomenology of the self. Indeed, just before he drank hemlock, in Phaedo 60c, Socrates describes the simple absence of the pain of the chains on his legs as a pleasure following pain. The positive claim of this sort of “feeling of a lack of feeling” is what I would like to discuss at the very end of this paper. In that context, we shall switch gears and dwell on the contemplative phenomenology of “thinking or feeling or imagining nothing at all,” going back to Bergson’s and K. C. Bhattacharya’s (1976) description of attempted imagination of such an absence of not only of this or that introspectable feeling, but even the lack of an introspecting self.

Real Not-Beings: The Logic of Lacks

Let me begin by drawing some distinctions. Distinctions, by the way, are themselves negative things. Sheldon’s being distinct from Penny consists in Sheldon’s not being Penny. This is true of both type distinctions, like the distinction between ants and antelopes, as well as numerical or token distinctions, like the distinction between one ant and another ant. The only difference between the two kinds of distinctions (if we ignore, for the moment, the complication about distinction between distinctions) is that in the first, the otherness (anyonyābhāva) resident in the antelope is delimited by the generic property of anthood, whereas the otherness of each ant is determined by the haecceity of the other individual ant.

To come back to absences, lacks are not-beings, not to be confused with nonbeings, because lacks are there whereas nonbeings are simply not there. My bedroom lacks a television. The television’s not-being there is a bit of reality, not a bit of unreality. I can artificially or imaginatively cook up a nonbeing out of this absence and call it “the television in my bedroom.” That is roughly how all nonbeings are “manufactured” in language and in imagination. You take a concept like the concept of a mountain and combine it with another concept, say of gold, when you know the intersection set generated by the extensions of the two concepts is the null set. The combined concepts such as that of a golden mountain, a rabbit horn, or turtle wool, would be distinct conceptual modes of presenting pure nullity. Often in this manner are constructed the intentional objects of our unfulfilled, sometimes unfulfillable, desires. If I have the desire to own a dog as a pet, but also have the conflicting desire that my pet must sing and have wings, then I end up desiring a winged, singing dog, a nonexistent entity, a nonbeing (unless facing both the desires I cancel out one with the other). A not-being—to be clearly distinguished from a nonbeing—is either not-being-there, such as the actual absence of the Statue of Liberty in Pakistan; or not-being-the-same, such as Obama’s not being Bush. The present (2013) Queen of the United States, on the other hand, would be neither an absence (there is nothing negative about this fictional woman, unless she is described as non-blonde or powerless) nor a non-identity (she, in a fictional plot, may be very distinguished, but she is not a distinction). She would simply be a nonbeing, a creature of fiction, a figment of imagination, a wisp of unreality. The absence of color in air is not such an imaginary fictional nonentity. The only “reason” why someone may think that such an absence is imaginary, is—alas a very common—confusion between the absence and the absentee, what it is an absence of. That absence is real rendering air colorless.

Indian metaphysicians spent a lot of defensive and offensive argumentative energy on the nature, varieties, and objectivity of such gappy realities. They are most generally called “a-bhāva-s,” which I have literally translated as “not-being,” although once it was fashionable to translate that word as “negation.” Bimal Krishna Matilal called his book on abhāva Navya Nyaya Doctrine of Negation, and before him Gopinath Bhattacharya wrote The Category of Negation (see Kellner 2006, 530–533). I do not approve of that old-fashioned translation because it makes the absence or not-being sound like something we do, like denying or negating. It is very hard to imagine even such realists as the Naiyāyika-s insisting that negations are there in the objective external world, just as one cannot imagine them being realists about disjunctions. Denying and considering two states of affairs as alternative scenarios are cognitive acts a conscious being with linguistic and representational capacity does. But the negative fact that there is no water in large stretches of the Sahara desert is not something we do by our thinking or speaking. We cannot do facts. We can assert that fact by negating or contradicting someone’s false claim that the Sahara is full of water everywhere, but our asserting or negating does not make the desert arid.

The closest that early (Western) analytic philosophy came to sorting out the issue of the ontological status of lacks was when Bertrand Russell and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein engaged in the controversy regarding negative facts (later on in the seventies, there was an erratic discussion on the ontological status of holes, which has been revived in more recent times by Casati and Varzi [1995]). In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell (November 2, 1911), Russell complained: “My German Engineer, I think, is a fool …. I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t.” After rummaging under all his furniture and not finding a rhinoceros, when Wittgenstein would still not confess to seeing this plain negative fact that there is no rhinoceros in the room, he was not being obstinately skeptical as Russell thought. Given Wittgenstein’s puzzlement, in this period, with the “mystery of negation” (G.E.M. Anscombe reported that Wittgenstein was obsessed with the problem of our judgment about nothing first raised by Plato in Theaetetus 189a), we can surmise that at least part of his problem was ontological. It had to do with his deep suspicion that, on top of Russell’s furniture, books, and so on, it would be extravagant to posit an item of reality called the absence of a rhinoceros in the room, just to account for the truth of the negative statement that there was none. Simply the falsity of the sentence “there is a rhino in this room” should be enough. The absence of food on an empty plate need not be anything over and above the bare plate. This economical strategy of keeping one’s ontological commitment confined to positive things was also attempted by a school of practical realists in classical Indian philosophy, as we shall soon find out.

Russell himself was no less troubled by such logical specters as, for example, the fact that renders “Socrates is not alive” true in the twentieth century. He proudly reminisced in 1918 how, four years back while lecturing in Harvard, he “nearly produced a riot” by provocatively maintaining that negative facts are par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Conceptions of Nothingness in Asian Philosophy
• PART I Emptiness in Brāhmiṇical and Early Buddhist Traditions
• PART II Nothingness in Early and Modern East Asian Traditions
• Bibliography
• Index