THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOTHING
It all started last night when I was watching the Tv. I do not pay much attention to the ads, but this one caught my eye as the word NOTHING flashed on the screen. I realized that it was an ad for a mobile phone which was called ‘NOTHING(R)’. I never knew such a phone existed (and I mean Nothing existed) till I googled and found that there is such a phone made by Nothing Technology Limited (stylized as NOTHING) a British consumer electronics manufacturer based in London.
“So what have you been doing all this while?” he asked since I was seeing him after a lapse of nearly three years.
“Nothing”, I said.
“What do you mean nothing?”
“Yes, it’s actually ‘Nothing’”, I replied.
“What do you mean? You told me you were writing a book”.
“Yes, I am writing a book. It’s nearly complete. The name of the book is ‘Nothing’.”
“My God!” he scratched his head in exasperation. “If it’s nothing, then what are you writing about?”
“Well, it’s about ‘Nothing’.
“Oh! I hope something comes out of your Nothing,” he said and walked away.
Nothing much has changed over the years. Only the travails have resurfaced. But I was reminded of the lines from ‘The Sound of Music’ song ‘Something Good’ -
Nothing comes from nothing,
Nothing ever could.
So Something should come out of something. That’s why I decided to write something about Nothing. Well, that’s assuming that Nothing is actually Something-
‘Pickles’ comic strip focussing on a retired couple in their seventies, Earl and Opal has been a favorite. I came across a strip which seemed to answer a part of my predicament-
The Philosopher Plato once said-
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing And that is that I know nothing”.
“How did he know that?”
“His wife told him.”
I wondered how one could write about Nothing. A project I knew was doomed to be a failure from the start. This was till I came across a book by Jenny Odell titled ‘How to Do Nothing’. It set me thinking. I searched for other books and I found another interesting one ‘The Lost Art of Doing Nothing: How the Dutch unwind with Niksen’. That was a new word and I looked up its meaning -
‘Niksen is a Dutch verb that means doing nothing which can be roughly translated as nixing. The noun Niksen is ‘The practice of doing nothing as a means of relieving stress, setting aside time to do absolutely nothing
As has been my habit nowadays, I referred the question to my grandson for his responses and this is what I got-
“Nothing and Perfection are two aspects, that people seek to define even when they know that they do not exist in reality,” (pardon me, but Perfection was a fallout of an earlier discussion with him).
Needless to say, I was perplexed, as usual. This happens after every conversation I have with him.
Long ago when I was on a binge reading Sartre’s books, I had consciously pushed back his magnum opus ‘Being and Nothingness’ to the last on the list. Not only because it was bulky, but because when I browsed through the first few pages I could not understand anything or rather I understood nothing. Though I was successful going through all his other works, this remained untouched and was adorning my bookshelf till a few years ago, If you ask me what happened to the book? I can only answer that it is no longer there. Now if you ask me why, I can say that as long as it was there, it was ‘Being’ there, and the minute I removed it from its place on the shelf there was ‘Nothing there’. That was when wisdom dawned on me. Now every time I look at the space in the shelf there is nothing. And that’s how I understood ‘Being and Nothingness’. Simple isn’t it? I decided I did not need to read the book, and so decided to pass it on to someone who had nothing better to do. So you see, after all, Nothing had a purpose to serve.
Now if you ask me what I have been doing for the last couple of months since my last blog posting, I can only reply nothing, and this time it is true, I am not writing a book about nothing as previously alluded to, but simply doing nothing and feeling happy about it. But then I realized that something happens even when you do nothing. Your beard grows, even some strands of hair have grown on my bald pate, the wrinkles on my face have multiplied, and my stomach protruded (I had a paunch). And when I looked in the mirror, I knew that there was no looking back. And that’s when I learned that if there is one reality, it is that ‘Nothing’ can stop this process of aging and if there is one thing that is eternally present it is ‘Nothing’.
Pardon me for this post. Of late when I talk to people my age and that is old, the common refrain when asked what they have been doing is, they have not been doing anything much. In simple words, it means they are doing nothing. But of course, doing nothing is also something. Well, if you are convinced that I have nothing better to do then you are spot on. Of late, it is true that I have been doing nothing and that is how this post originated. Well, if you feel you have nothing better to do, read on, and in the end, do nothing.
It’s not my intention here to turn this post into a philosophical discourse. But, of course, during my superficial forays into the realms of Indian Philosophy, I read that “Originally, there was nothing. In the beginning of things, what was there? Nothing was there”. I realized that the outcome of my efforts to understand philosophy ultimately amounted to Nothing, whether it be Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Existential Thought. But I ploughed on emboldened by the early Greek Philosophers who argued that it was impossible for nothing to exist. So nothing existed, confusing isn’t it? Well, that’s been happening to me very often now.
In all this there was a silver lining when I read a quote from Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ - “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
Well, I accept I know nothing and so………….
