An Actual Taxonomy of Naught (AKA part 3, last part)

In my last two posts, I explored a number of experiences of something that is not a thing—call it naught, nothing, emptiness, space, or maybe just negativity. Here are terms for the experiences I described:

Utter mystery

Lack of God/Absolute

Boredom /Aimlessness

Personal Uncertainty/Anxiety

Personal Possibility

Loneliness

Incompleteness

Inauthenticity/Hollowness

Listening and Asking questions

Being open to influence/challenge/change

Collective uncertainty

Collective possibility

            In this last post, my task is to divide these up, so that in the future when I want to discuss emptiness, I can be more specific, since I have found that “space” sounds vague, and “emptiness” often sounds much more depressing than I want.

Two Ways to Typify an “Empty Space”

1)      It could be a lack of something desired.

2)     It could be a necessary condition for developing identity and connection.

1)      It could be a lack of something desired.

a.      A lack of knowledge = Utter mystery.

b.      A lack of grounding = lack of God/Absolute, also Boredom/Aimlessness

c.       A lack of relationship = loneliness, also inauthenticity/hollowness

d.      A lack of completion = personal uncertainty/anxiety, personal possibility

2)     It could be a necessary condition for developing identity and connection.

a.      Identity requires emptiness:

                                                              i.      Undetermined future – freedom, space for potential, and for change

                                                           ii.      Undetermined perspective – space for reflection, the ability to step out from our current beliefs and take a critical stance, to both choose and change our courses

b.      Connection requires emptiness:

                                                              i.      Listening/Questioning – making space for the other to fill

                                                           ii.      Collective uncertainty/possibility – engaging the social world with both our needs and desires, and also openness to the unexpected

Modes of Comportment towards Emptiness

Emptiness can also be divided up in terms of what one might do with it. While I think my categories are pretty solid, I expect that different people would populate them in their own way.

1)      Sit “in” it.

2)     Leave it empty.

3)     Fill it.

4)     Fill it, with the expectation of a new emptiness ahead.

5)     Create it.

1)      Sit “in” it.

Before trying to act in relation to emptiness, it’s valuable first simply to feel it. I like to talk paradoxically about sensing the “shape” and “heaviness” of emptiness. By shape, I mean: Is it just a part of me? Does it encompass all of me? Do I find that it encompasses my relationships, my culture, or even encompasses the whole realm of human activity? How big does it feel? By heaviness, I guess I mean: How bothered am I by this emptiness? Do I find it oppressive, or perhaps liberating? What are my instinctual feelings or reflexive actions when I feel it?

Once I have dwelt a little in this emptiness, I might be better able to decide what to do with it…

2)     Leave it empty.

A lack does not immediately mean that the space needs to be filled. In my understanding of secular spirituality, there is strength and growth in simply letting mystery and lack of God be. Sometimes when I’m lonely, I don’t need other people, but rather I need aim more intentionally at solitude.

3)     Fill it.

If I think I am languishing from this lack, then maybe it’s a sign that I shouldn’t be empty in this regard. For me, sometimes these are nothings like loneliness and inauthenticity/ hollowness.

4)     Fill it, with the expectation of a new emptiness ahead.

Aimlessness doesn’t feel good, but it also tends to emerge right after I accomplish a goal. So, when I’m feeling bored or aimless, it’s good to find a new goal, but I shouldn’t be too surprised or upset when I find myself in another empty space afterwards. This generally holds for personal uncertainty/anxiety, possibility, and that whole sense of incompleteness. I can pursue greater stability and I can develop my potential, but my future will continue to remain open. I can and should aim to fill my life with great things, while expecting it to remain incomplete.

5)     Create it.

This mode is different than the others, as it is not a response to emptiness, but rather a response to a lack of emptiness (ß Figure that one out!)—meaning, if things don’t seem right, sometimes the best question is: Do I need to make a space here? This would apply any time I experience an internal block, or a block between myself and other people. Actions like dwelling in silence, listening, asking questions, and remaining open to collective uncertainty and possibility would fit as ways of satisfying this need.

A Taxonomy of Naught, part two

            Following part one, this part is much more difficult to talk about, as it involves kinds of emptiness that I’ve only recently (the last 10 years) become aware of, and feel nowhere near resolving. These are the kinds of emptiness experienced when I consider my relation to other people.

            Again, some terms I expect to come up: space, silence, solitude, loneliness, opening, possibility, uncertainty, unpredictability, need, desire. This time I will present three observations and illustrate with some experiences.

1. I am not enough.

My initial experience of this is usually boredom. While I am an avid consumer of media and have a nice variety of personal hobbies, there always comes a time when I’ve been alone too long and grown tired of entertaining myself. This sounds like a superficial kind of emptiness, and yet it comes up over and over.

A somewhat deeper experience has been my growing awareness of my need for acknowledgment—that I’m good, that I’m funny, that my creativity is valuable, and that my thoughts and feelings make sense. This is a fundamental human experience, and yet something I didn’t really understand until Hegel pointed it out. It turns out that it’s difficult/impossible to know myself unless I feel known.

So, this emptiness is not so much a space, as it an incompleteness (another appropriate word would be loneliness). In the last post I was calling this a lack, but it feels more correct here to call it a need. I am incomplete such that I am brought to greater fullness in connection with others.

   2.   Not all connections are fulfilling.

A social opportunity or interaction can feel empty in a lot of different ways:

A)   Sometimes it’s because I’m at a bar or a party, and the environment (loud, dark, shifting) leaves no space for the kind of interactions I enjoy.

  

B)   Sometimes it’s because I feel like I have nothing to say, or no interest in the topic of conversation (or the other person in general).

C)   Sometimes it’s because I feel like one or both of us (or all of us) are treating the other(s) as functions, as props for playing out personal desire or drama.

D)  And a lot of the times it’s because I feel like we are only making a connection to cultural interests, and not to each other. (I still love discussing cultural interests, and believe that a cultural interest can serve as a tool for making authentic connections.) 

How to typify these experiences as emptiness? In A and B, the failure to connect can feel like a shortcoming (my own, someone else’s, or of a social space). In C and D, I guess the best word is inauthentic—which I think is an emptiness best illustrated by the word hollow.

  3.   A fulfilling connection requires space—in so many ways.

Recognizing that I have a need to be filled by relationships is not enough; I also have to create an opening for those relationships. Confusing, right? I explained the need in #1; now I’ll talk about this opening. Authentic relationship requires me to effect a stance of openness:

A)    In conversation-- being silent in order to allow them to speak, creating a space in myself for their words by listening, inviting them to fill that space by asking questions.

B)    In activities— letting them decide what to do when and how.

C)    In being influenced, challenged, and changed—recognizing that what makes sense to me is not the last word in knowledge, opinion, priorities, and paths.

In all of these instances, the challenge is to remain open to another person in all their otherness—being more than my image/use of them, being unpredictable, and being divergent from me in so many ways. In all of this I strive to be open to the possibility for self-improvement (feedback) and, for lack of a better word, awesomeness—that awesomeness that emerges sometimes when two or more people come together to share and create in a graceful way. The uncertainty that awesomeness will occur (and with that, the possibility of its opposites—awkwardness and awfulness) makes this especially challenging.

And yet this responsibility to create space is not absolute, and thank goodness—sometimes this activity feels threatening, and very often exhausting. So, it has a limit:

In order for all of this to work, I also have to be a thing; I have to be solid, taking up space, sometimes even pushing back if necessary. While active emptiness is a key component in relationships, it’s not ultimate—I should never strive to make myself into a nothing or merely into a function. I have to empty myself in order to make space for others, and yet never do so completely. Balancing this tension feels like a life-long skill.

Now that I’ve laid out the varieties of emptiness in my life, I hope to write one more post pointing out some patterns and types, and maybe come up with some wisdom about comporting myself around each.

A Taxonomy of Naught

Not all nothing is the same. First, some terms: Nothing, Mystery, Lack, Absence, Finitude, Emptiness, Space, Hole, Void, Freedom, Possibility, Silence.

I think it would be best to develop these terms by reference to some personal experiences.

The first set of experiences all relate to the question: Is there God?

For a long time I believed in and had a personal relationship with God. In the middle of some solitary prayer one day, the thought occurred to me that I might just be alone in a room, talking to myself. While years of theological study shaped my conceptual journey to atheism, this experience was the seed and, to today, the stuff of my disbelief.

I began calling myself a non-believer about three years ago, and in those three years my experience of “not-God” has evolved.

1. Actually, for a long time before I lost faith I was captivated by the experience of mystery. After reading Kant in Div School, I recognized that there was no way to know if the furthest reaches of my metaphysical knowledge constituted a boundary (implying something beyond) or a limit (implying an absolute end).  While Rabbi Heschel tells us that the experience of ineffable mystery implies a transcendent presence, I feel like we can only honestly say that this mystery calls attention to our ultimate ignorance. There may be “something” “in” the mystery, but I can go no further than mystery. Related term: Finitude.
2. At first upon becoming a nonbeliever, I experienced a lack. This is the kind of naught I experience when I actually wish there were something there. I yearned for that personal relationship with God, and instead felt that my yearning was reaching out into… nothing. I felt a space, a space created by my need, left empty by the lack of something to fill that need. Related term: Absence – implies the failure of a need for presence.
3. Eventually the yearning for a personal relationship dissipated, but a feeling of emptiness remained, and this involves in some part the emptythrone. I don’t feel this emptiness all the time, but rather only when my philosophy or other passions seem to require an absolute. I seek for meaning in life, and am reminded that meanings exist, but no single absolute or inherent meaning. I seek for value and purpose in my life, and am reminded that value and purpose are human pursuits, not cosmic installations. So, empty doesn’t mean bad or depressing, it just means… well, I think that will get developed more in the next section.

Related terms: Space, Possibility, Freedom.

The second set of experiences all relate to the question: Who am I and what should I do?

These experiences are much more personal than the ones related to God, and thus harder to analyze. I’ll present all of them first, and then throw in some terms.

1. I don’t remember the exact experience, but I know I was about 11 or 12, and one day I was bored, and emotionally overwhelmed by the internal demand to fill time. I became depressed—was life going to be this unending desperation, this nagging need to fill time and mind, in order to stave off worthlessness?
2. I really enjoyed college and graduate school, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t make the most of my time there—I know this because of the inordinate amount of time I spent recreationally. I loved my studies and did my work passionately, but I never had a clear idea what I wanted to make of it as a profession.
3. Now that I am somewhat on a career path, I don’t know exactly what or how much I want to make of myself professionally. I’m thinking about this in two different ways: (A) It’s almost impossible to be a full time heath teacher, so I need to expand my options—the most available (but unsuitable for me) option is teaching gym, and the most desirable (although not yet comprehensible) option is teaching English; and (B) How ambitious should I be? I see people “climb the ladder” from teacher to administrator, etc. I daydream about publishing a book and appearing on TV. How far should I go?

I think space, possibility, and freedom are functional in all of these stories. In my God-stories, there was a kind of void that could not ultimately be filled, whereas in my personal narrative, the emptiness is invested with possibility and freedom, and so experienced as a demand to be filled. The lack, in almost every case, is one of purpose or meaning. Something like ignorance or cluelessness is present to, as the question “What am I for, and what is my time worth?” hangs over every story.

During #1 and #2, these experiences were depressing. Now that I am living out #3, I take a more accepting and hopeful attitude. My future, even when I have a vision of it, is still a blank space that I slowly fill. It’s just the nature of becoming to have a “nothing” of space, possibility, and freedom before me.

I’ll stop here for now. Do check out parts two and three.

I almost called this post “God is empty, just like me” but it turns out that those appear to be pretty different kinds of emptiness.

God as Everything or Nothing

**Wrote this recently in response to a student's final assignment at Prozdor:


"Ein Sof," which literally means "without end" is used differently in different Jewish contexts. 


In Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), Ein Sof signifies God's utter infinitude, but within this infinitiude is the more traditional (Creator, Revealer, Redeemer) image of God in Judaism. 


In Richard Rubinstein "death-of-God" theology, he uses Ein Sof somewhat in the way you describe-- that we live in an infinite space/void that provides the stage for all reality, while not participating or directing the course of anything.

So, for some Ein Sof means "God is everything, and then some" and for others Ein Sof means "God is the void."  

What is nothing?

In order to have a positive relationship with "nothing," it's key to understand what "nothing" means. As the classical philosophers were fond of saying, "nothing" doesn't exist. That is, we should not reify "nothing." To say that an empty set contains nothing is not to say that it has a population of 1-- if that were the case, it would not be an empty set. There is no such thing out in the world that we rightly call "nothing."

"Nothing" is useful to me primarily as a placeholder word, to point at my experience of emptiness, lacking, absence. None of these words-- nothing, emptiness, lacking, absence-- refer to actual existing things. They always point to the space in which I might have otherwise expected or hoped for something. These words stand in that space and represent it without filling it; they represent the very emptiness of that space. To feel an emptiness is to feel oneself defined (and some might add, tormented) by absences. I consider the word "nothing" important because it expresses the presence of absence as a recurring aspect of human experience.

"The presence of absence"-- I can make you understand this first of all as a sad phrase, although I hope later to also show you the positivity and power in it. But for now-- "the presence of absence" is surely understood by anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the loss of a treasured possession, or the inability to know the right words or actions in a difficult moment. Absence can be palpable in our experienecs, even if "absence" is not an actual, palpable thing.

My examples in the paragraph above show up in every life, and so I believe that anyone can understand why I make such a big deal out of "nothing." Humans, as beings of both limit and potential, are greatly defined by what is not. And so "nothing" (and its family-- emptiness, lack, absence) is a word/concept that each individual would do well to face directly and ponder intimately.

The Spirituality of Utter Silence

Atheists like me need to have a positive relationship with the concept of "nothingness." The Humanist movement intelligently turns attention away from the fantastical 'other-world' of God and heaven, and towards the very real 'this-world' where life actually happens. Meaning and redemption have to happen in this life, because everything beyond this life is "nothingness." (Ecclesiastes 9:10) But I think that this nothingness still deserves our attention.

As someone who loves words, I often equate human life with speech. When I imagine the world before humans evolved, I always imagine it as 'silent'-- anyone who's spent any time in nature knows I do not mean this literally. But still-- can you imagine the world without its current cacophony of inner monologues, all that thinking and feeling and scheming-- doesn't it seem quieter? An ego-less world-- seems quiet. Outside the realm of human thoughts, a deafening silence.

These thoughts about silence come to me when I think of the expanse of time in which my very short life occurs. There is a noise that's been going on for the last 27 years, and hopefully for another 100, and I call that noise "me"-- in fact "me" is the sound it usually makes. But before and after my life, there's a silence where this "me" will be and will once have been. I emerge from and return to nothingness, in between briefly participating in physical and conscious life. But, in either direction in time, a vast nothingness surrounds me.

I attempt to find peace in this experience of silence. It takes some of the burden off my existence, as I remember once again that non-existence is my more common state. I find it sobering and strengthening-- sobering because all of my cares and concerns are seen in its light (or rather, darkness), and strengthening because my time, and the ideals I might promote in that time, becomes that much more precious. In little silences during my day, and in the middle of the night, I am reminded of that greater silence, and I take comfort in its constancy. I am here for now, and that is enough, because it must be enough.

The Empty Throne

Atheists like me need to have a positive relationship with the concept of "nothingness." The rising Humanist movement bemoans mere atheist identity as one formed around a lack, an absence-- but, while I appreciate the core values of reason and dignity offered by the humanists, I am still inspired to say that there are positive lessons and values to be gleaned from the "nothing" at the core of atheism.

My previous religious commitments were always hierarchical. As a young boy, I found security and direction in a generally pyramidal structure of reality-- God at the top, my ancestors and their experience of miracles and revelation in the middle, and me and all my fellow humans at the bottom. Within this structure, the chain of command was established and clear.

My loss of faith, beginning with an introduction to biblical criticism (which troubled the middle layer), ultimately removed the top of my reality pyramid. As a former believer, I cannot simply 'get over' the fact that there is no One presiding over reality. Apropos to Nietszche's madman prophesy, the "breath of empty space" is a daily experience, reminding me that humans as conscious/conscientious beings are alone in the world.

But the potential hubris in humanism lies in the name itself-- human-ism, as if to say that we worship humans. I think there can be an assumption, in a purely secular world, that humans are "in charge." And perhaps we are more "in charge" than anything else around, but I think it's vital to realize that the lesson of atheism is that no one is absolutely "in charge." Removing God from the top of the pyramid should not be the precursor to placing humanity at the top. Dethroning God, only to enthrone ourselves-- that is the idolatrous temptation lingering in the shadows of atheism. I won't say that atheists need to cultivate "humility"-- that word hits too many people as the beating stick of sanctimonious, abusive power. How about "modesty"? For me, "modesty" speaks to our smallness, our recognition of natural limitations. "Modesty" is the virtue of someone who knows they are neither the lowest nor the highest.

Let's leave the throne empty. The image of the empty throne should inspire modesty. There is a holiness to this empty space at the top-- a position of great power and privilege, from which no one should feel capable of speaking. A reminder of our finitude, regardless of the presence or absence of an infinite being. We don't need to make "absolute" claims in order to claim dignity. The power of reason in science is the ability to test our claims, and reject disproven ideas. Thus, dignity and reason already include the notion of modesty. But let's keep listing modesty next to dignity and reason-- in order to deflate the apparent hubris in humanism.