Newton’s God was no longer located in the void beyond the material world. The great idea of the Scholastics, that God was inextricably linked to the nature of space and to its infinite extent, lived long enough to influence Newton’s great conception of the world and the laws of motion and gravity that governed it, but by the end of the eighteenth century the theological complexion of the problem of space had been eroded. The proposals for explaining God’s omnipresence in space had lost credibility and played no further role in understanding the things that were seen. The Almighty could then be removed without reverberations spreading into the theological domain. Gradually, it was God’s transcendence rather than His omnipresence that would become the centrepiece of the theologian’s discussion of God. Once this transformation was complete, God needed no place in the infinite void of space that the astronomers took as the backdrop for the finite world of matter and motion. It was an arena that finally allowed mathematical deductions to be made without the need for a theological conscience. The vacuum was at last safe for scientists to explore.
WRITERS AND READERS
“Now is the discount of our winter tents.”
Advertisement in Stratford-upon-Avon camping shop44
Not everyone spoke so seriously. In order to sidestep the risk of being accused of blasphemously toying with the demonic concept of empty space, writers and philosophers cloaked their thoughts in more playful deliberations, inventing and pursuing paradoxes and puns in a way that could always be defended as undermining the coherence of the concept of empty space regardless of the true intent. The paradox that would bring the argument to an end could always be defended as a reductio ad absurdum. The American commentator Rosalie Colie concludes her study of the poems and paradoxes of Nothing that were all the rage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the opinion that the writers of these paradoxes
“were engaged in an operation at once imitative and blasphemous, at once sacred and profane, since the formal paradox, conventionally regarded as low, parodies at the same time as it imitates the divine act of Creation. And yet, who can accuse the paradoxist of blasphemy, really? Since his subject is nothing, he cannot be said to be impious in taking the Creator’s prerogative as his own – for nothing, as all men know, can come of nothing. Nor indeed is he directing men to dangerous speculation, since at the very most he beguiles them into – nothing. And most important of all … if the paradoxist lies, he does not lie, since he lies about nothing.”45
The two most common trends of this sort are to be found in the ‘all or nothing’ paradoxes and the amusing penchant for double entendres about Nothing displayed by writers and playwrights. Poets joined in the game as well, with works like The Prayse of Nothing:46
“Nothing was first, and shall be last
for nothing holds for ever,
And nothing ever yet scap’t death
so can’t the longest liver:
Nothing’s so Immortall, nothing can,
From crosses ever keepe a man,
Nothing can live, when the world is gone,
for all shall come to nothing.”
and On the Letter O,
“But O enough, I have done my reader wrong
Mine O was round, and I have made it long.”47
or Jean Passerat’s Nihil, informing us that
“Nothing is richer than precious stones and than gold; nothing is finer than adamant, nothing nobler than the blood of kings; nothing is sacred in wars; nothing is greater than Socrates’ wisdom – indeed, by his own affirmation, nothing is Socrates’ wisdom. Nothing is the subject of the speculations of the great Zeno; nothing is higher than heaven; nothing is beyond the walls of the world; nothing is lower than hell, or more glorious than virtue.”48
and so on, and on, and on.
These word games soon become a little tedious to our ears. They had the goal of generating lots of words from nothing by means of talking about Nothing. For a time, the genre was a fashionable form of philosophical nonsense verse. Several paradoxical juxtapositions occur again and again. There is the picture of the circle representing, on one hand zero, and, on the other, the encompass of everything. There is the egg, shaped like zero but promising to become the generator of new life. It was pregnant with creativity just like the mathematicians’ zero, waiting to be added to other figures to create larger numbers. And in the background there is the sexual allusion to the circle which represents the female genitalia. This is a running joke in Elizabethan comedies although much of the humour is lost on us. Fortunately, there is a famous example of this genre that is widely known and appreciated. It is intriguing because it shows that the paradoxes and puns of Nothing attracted the interest of the greatest of all wielders of words.
SHAKESPEAREAN NOTHINGS
“Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing;
My wife is nothing: nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.”
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale49
Shakespeare was much taken with all the linguistic and logical paradoxes of Nothing. For good measure he entwined them with the double entendres of the day to add yet another dimension to the many-layered works that are his hallmark. The comedy Much Ado About Nothing is a wonderful example50 of the deftness with which games could be played with words that others had struggled to enliven. First appearing in print in 1600, and probably written during the preceding two years, the title of this play immediately illustrates the general fascination with the ambiguities of Nothing that were in vogue in Shakespeare’s time.51 In the fourth act, the prospective lovers Beatrice and Benedick use the ambiguities of Nothing as a subtle smokescreen so that each hearer can choose to interpret Nothing in a positive or a negative way:
“Benedick: I do love nothing in the world so well as you.
Is not that strange?
Beatrice: As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you. But believe me not; and yet I lie not. I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing.”52
Shakespeare plays upon other dimensions of Nothing as well. In the tragedies Hamlet and Macbeth we find the philosophical and psychological paradoxes of Nothing deeply interwoven with human experience. Macbeth is repeatedly confronted with the paradoxes of Nothing and the horrors of non-Being: he despairs that
“Nothing is
But what is not.”53
Hamlet explores how Nothing can have paradoxical meaning and content. In contrast to Macbeth, who rails that
“Life’s …a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing”,54
the Prince of Denmark finds consolation in death and convoluted speculation about Nothing. They stand in stark contrast about what it means to be and not to be, for
“where Macbeth discovers that death is oblivion, Hamlet discovers that it is not. Macbeth discovers that, when death is oblivion, life is insignificant. Hamlet discovers that when one does not fear death, life with all its painful responsibilities can be borne and even borne nobly. In the end Hamlet knows for himself the relation between ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’ by which even his own death can affirm life.”55
Yet even Hamlet makes full use of the double entendres associated with Nothing and the female form in this exchange with Ophelia:56
“Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.”
In King Lear, Shakespeare tells of the destruction of Lear by all that emanates from Nothing. The play has a recurrent theme of quantification, numbering and reduction. Two of Lear’s daught
ers make pretentious statements of love and respect for him in return for parts of his kingdom, but the third, Cordelia, will not play this cynical game or just remain silent. Her encounter with her father introduces a typical play on Nothing:57
“Lear: … what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters’? Speak!
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.”
From this ominous beginning many are reduced to Nothing. Cordelia is hanged. Lear’s Fool asks him ‘Can you make use of nothing?’ and Lear repeats his admonition to Cordelia, ‘Why, no, boy. Nothing can be made out of nothing.’ But the Fool responds by reducing Lear to Nothing:
“Thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing.”
Lear’s other daughters, Goneril and Regan, reduce Lear to zero in more practical ways, demanding that he reduce the size of his entourage, halving and halving it until there is only one left and then Regan asks, ‘What need one?’ Lear shows Shakespeare58 grappling with the double meanings of Nothing, the metaphysical void and the end result of taking away what one has, bit by bit, if one exports the arithmetic of buying and selling into the human realms of love, loyalty and duty. Things then don’t always add up. Madness is not far away. On that you can count.
Shakespeare explored all the meanings of Nothing: from the simplicity of zero, the nonentity of the cipher, the emptiness of the void, and the absence of everything it witnessed, to the contrast between the whole and the hole that was zero, the circle and the egg, hell, oblivion and the necromancer’s circle. His explorations can be roughly divided into those that pursue the negative aspect of Nothing and those that pursue the positive. On the negative side we see the focus on the absence of things, on denial, apathy and silence. These invariably bring bad consequences and reveal some of the awful results of meaninglessness. By contrast, the positive side of Nothing lays stress on the power of Nothing to generate something. Just as zero lay at the beginning of an ever-increasing sequence of numbers, so the sexual connotations of Nothing and the pregnant power of the egg symbolised fruitfulness and multiplication, the growing of something out of nothing. Indeed, it was just this multidimensional proliferation that Shakespeare’s own work displayed.59
One should not think that the linguistic gymnastics of nihil paradoxes are a thing of the past. While it is not common for these word games to be played by modern writers, they can still be found if you know where to look. Here is Jean-Paul Sartre trying to convey information about the origin of negation:
“Nothingness is not, Nothingness is ‘made-to-be’, Nothingness does not nihilate itself; Nothingness ‘is nihilated’ … It would be inconceivable that a Being which is full positivity should maintain and create outside itself a Nothingness or transcendent being, for there would be nothing in Being by which Being could surpass itself towards Non-Being. The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world must nihilate Nothingness in its Being, and even so it still runs the risk of establishing Nothingness as a transcendent in the very heart of immanence unless it nihilates Nothingness in connection with its own being. The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world is a being such that in its Being, the Nothingness of its Being is in question. The being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness …”60
and so on, for more than 600 pages.
PARADOX LOST
“What did the mystic say to the hot-dog vendor?
Make me one with everything.”
Laurence Kushner
By the end of the seventeenth century the literary fascination with the paradoxes of Nothing had run its course.61 It ceased to be a mainspring of imaginative exploration in both literature and philosophy. Writers simply mined out the seam of possibilities and moved on to explore new ideas. Philosophers came to distrust these games with words and they were seen increasingly as mere puzzles to amuse. They were no longer considered to provide a route into deep truths about the nature of things. The increasing stress placed upon observation and experiment relegated the paradoxes of Nothing to a linguistic backwater from which they would not reappear until the beginning of the twentieth century. The sea change in attitudes is displayed in Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two World Systems,62 which includes a discussion of the dangers of treating the contemplation of ‘words’ as a superior route to truth than the study of ‘things’. Simplicio cautions that ‘everybody knows that you may prove whatever you will’ by means of linguistic paradoxes. Galileo equated ‘paradox’ with vague, unverifiable word games that had no place in the development of science, which was typified by the logic of testable chains of cause and effect. For example, the famous ‘Liar paradox’, credited to Epimenides, which St Paul repeats, that ‘all Cretans are liars, one of their own poets has said so’ was condemned as ‘nothing but a sophism … a forked argument … And thus, in such sophisms, a man may go round and round for ever and never come to any conclusion.’
Galileo had the highest regard for mathematical knowledge of the world. He recognised that our knowledge of most things was necessarily imperfect. We can only know as much as Nature reveals to us, but in the field of mathematics we have access to a part of the absolute truth at the heart of things. For
“the human intellect does understand some propositions perfectly, and thus in these it has as much absolute certainty as Nature itself has. Of such are the mathematical sciences alone; that is, geometry and arithmetic, in which the Divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more propositions, since it knows them all. But with regard to those few which the human intellect does understand, I believe that its knowledge equals the Divine in objective certainty.”63
This remarkable passage shows how mathematics and geometry came to support the belief that it is possible for humans to know some of the absolute truth of things. Because Euclid’s geometry was believed to be true – a precise description of reality – it provided important evidence that human thought could penetrate the nature of ultimate truth in at least one area. And, if it could do this in the realm of mathematics, then why not in theology too? Paradoxes were not part of this domain of ultimate reality. Ironically, in the twentieth century Kurt Gödel would turn these beliefs on their head in a striking way. Gödel showed that there are statements of arithmetic that can be made using the rules and symbols of arithmetic which it is impossible to show to be either true or false using those rules. The golden road to truth that Galileo loved must always give rise to statements that are unverifiable. Remarkably, Gödel established this extraordinary truth about the limits of mathematics by taking one of the linguistic paradoxes that Galileo rejected and transforming it into a statement about mathematics. But long before Gödel’s work, the absolute truth of mathematics had been undermined. Mathematicians of the nineteenth century had shown that Euclid’s classical geometry was but one amongst many. There were an infinite number of possible geometries, each obeying their own set of self-consistent axioms, different from Euclid’s. These new geometries described lines and figures drawn on curved surfaces rather than the flat ones that Euclid assumed. None of these systems was any ‘truer’ than any of the others. They were each logically consistent, but different, axiomatic systems. None of them had any special claim to be part of the absolute truth at the heart of things. Later, this ‘relativism’ would spread even to logic itself. The simple logic of Aristotle was revealed to be but one system of reasoning amongst an unlimited catalogue of possibilities.
The Galilean distinction between the quagmire of paradox and the sure path of science paved with conjectures and refutations was an important one. It moved science towards the modern era of experimental investigation. No longer were important questions solved by recourse to authorities like Aristotle.64 Human self-confidence was reawakened. It was possible to do better than the ancients. And one did not have to be more inspired to do so. A su
perior method was what was needed: look and see. If the question was whether or not there could be moons around the planet Jupiter the answer was not to be found by philosophical arguments about the appropriateness of this state of affairs or the natural places for moons to reside, it could be decided by just looking through a telescope.
In this chapter we have traced the fate of Nothing in the hands of philosophers and writers with very different aims. Medieval scholars inherited the world pictures of the Greeks and the mathematical systems of the Far East. Both had distinctive pictures of Nothingness etched into their fabrics. The need to handle the philosophical and theological implications of Nothing was in many ways fuelled by the acceptance of the idea in simple mathematics, where it proved uncontentious and useful. It replaced nothing and it could exist merely as a sign that signalled the divide between profit and loss, prosperity and ruin. It was a symbol with a prosaically positive message. The books balanced; nothing was missed out; all debts were repaid. These were the messages that the zero symbol sent throughout the world of business. Away from the world of numbers there were bigger issues at stake. Nothing was entwined with theological issues of the greatest consequence. Was it the realm from whence the world was made? And if it was, how could it not be something? We are content with the cogency of nothing at all, so long as we do not pursue the idea too closely. But there was an influential Greek view of the nature of things which made the whole concept of nothing at all quite incomprehensible. Plato’s explanation for things saw them as manifestations of the eternal forms behind the appearances. Even if there were no things, no expressions of those eternal forms, the blueprints themselves must always exist. If they didn’t then there would be no way in which the appearance of the world could be in-formed. The eternal forms were the source of the in-formation required to turn the potential into the actual. Nothing was no part of either.
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