Things and Nothing

 by Thomas Scarborough

As this year draws to a close, we soar beyond the turbulent things which have so exercised philosophical hearts and minds, to consider for a moment one of the very abstract and timeless questions of philosophy: ‘things’ and their opposites.

There are, in this world, ‘things’. Or so we suppose. These are also called objects, entities, items, existents, or beings—terms which, by and large, all mean the same thing. The philosopher William Rowe wrote that a ‘thing’ is any item whose existence is acknowledged by a system of ontology, whether that item be particular, universal, abstract, or concrete. The whole universe, even, may be called a ‘thing’. So far so good.

But what is the opposite of a thing? Or what is its contrast, or complement? Nothing, perhaps. But how could there be ‘nothing’? That would seem to be supreme philosophical nonsense. Or suppose that there is a thing which failed to exist? It never came into being. What should we say about that?

Somebody observed that all of our philosophical concepts may be grouped in pairs. Where we find ‘altruism’, we find ‘egoism’; where we find ‘theism’, ‘atheism’; where we find ‘realism’, ‘anti-realism’—and so on, from A to Z. Some do the same with ‘things’. Where there are things, we find nothing. The philosophers Bradley Rettler and Andrew Bailey comment,

‘It’s not clear whether anyone sincerely endorses the thesis that there is nothing, However, it has been defended several times over.’

One could contend that ‘things’ are things in space and time, while nothings are not—like numbers, for instance, or society, or force. Or one could say that things exist, but properties do not. Say, a house exists, but its karma does not. In that case, a great many things ‘do not exist’. Or one could say, as the existentialists do, that one may experience Nothing. But existentialists are afraid of Nothing, jokes the philosopher Simon Blackburn, where there is nothing to be afraid of.

There is one obvious way that we can try to solve the problem, and many have taken this course: namely, first define a ‘thing’. If what chiefly defines a ‘thing’ is that it is, then of course, its opposite must be a thing which is not—perhaps rather, nothing. But is that properly the way to define a thing?

I shall here accept the view, for the sake of argument, that all the things we call things are things: things which exist in space and time (objects), things which happen (events), and things which exist in the mind (concepts). Now suppose that, in order to create all of these things, we need to differentiate them from what the philosopher and psychologist William James called the ‘undifferentiated stream of experience’.

Things have contours. They have definition. But the opposite of things do not. When things lose their contours, they slip back into the undifferentiated stream. Another way of putting it is that, if nothing is not related to the rest of reality—not a word, not a motion, not an entity, not an event—then we artificially separate things when we call them ‘things’. Artificially, because we strip away from them their completeness.

To create a 'nut', we throw away the fruit, and the tree, and the soil, and the air, and the universe. If we included all these things which are essential to the nut's existence, we could never isolate a nut as a thing. Therefore it is simply 'an edible kernel', or something of the sort.  We strip away the interconnections or interdependencies, to create something which is self-contained.  

The philosopher of science Alan Chalmers describes our reality like this:

‘Many kinds of processes are at work in the world around us, and they are all superimposed on, and interact with, each other ...’

If this is true, then it stands to reason that any ‘thing’ which we cut out from this whole is not wholly itself. 'Nothing' is therefore that which gives birth to things. It is that which exists before we create the contours which create things. In his translation of Lao Tzu, Sam Hamill writes, ‘There was some undifferentiated something here, before heaven and earth.’

The opposite of things, therefore, is a world which is without them—because they have not emerged from it. Nothing was the plastic rattle, before the infant apprehended it. Nothing was the theory, before the scientist formulated it. Nothing was the environment, before it emerged in our minds and hearts. Nothing is all those things which could be, but are not, or are yet to come, because they have no contours.

The Thing-in-Itself

By Thomas Scarborough

Benjamin Lee Whorf, the American linguist, made a puzzling observation which, for no patent reason, has held our fascination for nearly eighty years. Whorf wrote it briefly, in simple language:

'Around a storage of what are called 'gasoline (petrol) drums', behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called 'empty gasoline drums' it will tend to be different-careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. Yet the 'empty' drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor.'

Whorf, I here suggest, had stumbled upon the core problem of the thing-in-itself, and with that, the core problem of the thinking of our entire Western civilisation. The interpretation of the thing-in-itself is not critical here.  It is sufficient to understand it most simply as any 'object of inquiry'. Let us begin at the beginning.

First, the Scottish philosopher David Hume observed that all knowledge may be subdivided into relations of ideas on the one hand, and matters of fact on the other. That is, one begins with a handful of facts (which includes objects), and these facts stand in a certain relation to one another.

This view has remained engraved on metaphysicians' minds ever since. Generations later, Bertrand Russell wrote that many philosophers, following Immanuel Kant, have maintained that relations are the work of the mind, and that things-in-themselves have no relations. While this is not to say exactly the same, the thought is not far from Hume's.

A marble is a thing. A house is a thing. Even gravity, ideology, taxonomy are things (we call them constructs), which may in turn be related to other things. In a sense, even a unicorn is a 'thing', although one is unlikely ever to find one. Of course, our 'things' may not be exactly the same as we perceive them – but the point will be clear.

Things-in-themselves are not, of course, facts. They first need to be involved in what we call truth conditions – which is, they need to be inserted into statements. Then one may affirm or deny such statements, which is an essential condition of facts. For example, we insert the thing 'marble' into a statement: 'A marble sinks' – or the thing 'unicorn': 'The Scots keep unicorns.'

On the surface of it, our world is filled with such facts: 'There's a car,' 'A bird has wings,' or 'The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.'

But there is a mistake. There are no things, there are no objects, and therefore there are no facts. Hume got it wrong, and so did every philosopher since. One finds only relations. The mind is incapable of comprehending anything else. No mind can ever settle on a 'thing' alone.

Someone might object: 'But this is a coffee cup, and that's a fact!' But is it really? Take away the table on which the coffee cup rests, and what does one have? One has a coffee cup which rests on nothing.  If we ever found such a thing, we would marvel that it exists.  One would have scientists queuing up at the door to see it.  Further, the table, on which the coffee cup rests, stands on the floor, and this in turn rests on the earth, and so on.

The same is true if we down-scale our thinking as it were. Supposing that we should say, 'This coffee cup has a handle.' The same applies. We have to have a mind for a whole world of relations to be able to speak of a handle.

We never worried about this much – before the publication of Samuel Johnson's great dictionary of 1755.  But since then, our 'things' have been defined, and they have been defined (if implicitly) as things-in-themselves. But this they are not, as we have seen.

This now promises to explain Benjamin Whorf's puzzlement over the dangerous way in which people went about with empty petrol drums, and our continuing fascination with the same today. We have come to see petrol drums today as things-in-themselves, without the obvious relations in which they are involved.

One might wonder at the possible significance of it all. Quite simply, when we speak of the world today, our language causes us to view it as people viewed Whorf's petrol drums, namely, as a profusion of things-in-themselves.  Yet we deal with things far more dangerous than petrol drums.

The Thing-in-Itself

By Thomas Scarborough

Benjamin Lee Whorf, the American linguist, made a puzzling observation which, for no patent reason, has held our fascination for nearly eighty years. Whorf wrote it in simple language, and briefly:

'Around a storage of what are called 'gasoline (petrol) drums', behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called 'empty gasoline drums' it will tend to be different-careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. Yet the 'empty' drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor.'

Whorf, I here suggest, had stumbled upon the core problem of the thing-in-itself, and with that, the core problem of the thinking of our entire Western civilisation. The interpretation of the thing-in-itself is not critical here.  It is sufficient to understand it most simply as any 'object of inquiry'. Let us begin at the beginning.

First, the Scottish philosopher David Hume observed that all knowledge may be subdivided into relations of ideas on the one hand, and matters of fact on the other. That is, one begins with a handful of facts (which includes objects), and these facts stand in a certain relation to one another.

This view has remained engraved on metaphysicians' minds ever since. Generations later, Bertrand Russell wrote that many philosophers, following Immanuel Kant, have maintained that relations are the work of the mind, and that things-in-themselves have no relations. While this is not to say exactly the same, the thought is not far from Hume's.

A marble is a thing. A house is a thing. Even gravity, ideology, taxonomy are things (we call them constructs), which may in turn be related to other things. In a sense, even a unicorn is a 'thing', although one is unlikely ever to find one. Of course, our 'things' may not be exactly the same as we perceive them – but the point will be clear.

Things-in-themselves are not, of course, facts. They first need to be involved in what we call truth conditions – which is, they need to be inserted into statements. Then one may affirm or deny such statements, which is an essential condition of facts. For example, we insert the thing 'marble' into a statement: 'A marble sinks' – or the thing 'unicorn': 'The Scots keep unicorns.'

On the surface of it, our world is filled with such facts: 'There's a car,' 'A bird has wings,' or 'The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.'

But there is a mistake. There are no things, there are no objects, and therefore there are no facts. Hume got it wrong, and so did every philosopher since. One finds only relations. The mind is incapable of comprehending anything else. No mind can ever settle on a 'thing' alone.

Someone might object: 'But this is a coffee cup, and that's a fact!' But is it really? Take away the table on which the coffee cup rests, and what does one have? One has a coffee cup which rests on nothing.  If we ever found such a thing, we would marvel that it exists.  One would have scientists queuing up at the door to see it.  Further, the table, on which the coffee cup rests, stands on the floor, and this in turn rests on the earth, and so on.

The same is true if we down-scale our thinking as it were. Supposing that we should say, 'This coffee cup has a handle.' The same applies. We have to have a mind for a whole world of relations to be able to speak of a handle.

We never worried about this much – before the publication of Samuel Johnson's great dictionary of 1755.  But since then, our 'things' have been defined, and they have been defined (if implicitly) as things-in-themselves. But this they are not, as we have seen.

This now promises to explain Benjamin Whorf's puzzlement over the dangerous way in which people went about with empty petrol drums, and our continuing fascination with the same today. We have come to see petrol drums today as things-in-themselves, without the obvious relations in which they are involved.

One might wonder at the possible significance of it all. Quite simply, when we speak of the world today, our language causes us to view it as people viewed Whorf's petrol drums, namely, as a profusion of things-in-themselves.  Yet we deal with things far more dangerous than petrol drums.