THE QUESTION OF THE NOTHING AND METAPHYSICS

Abstract

Given the phenomenon of the nothing, some metaphysicians argue, everything/everybody is confined and boxed in, surrounded by obstacles that hardly allow any unfettered movement or change. Bounded and encircled by the nothing, from which creation must have come, the universe with its beginnings and endings akin to that of change in it becomes a transition from one kind of nothing to the other, allowing an interval of being in between. Thus metaphysians from Pythagoras to Blaise Paschal, and from Georg Hegel and Hegelians to Martin Heidegger, Paul Tillich, and Jean-Paul Sartre see a complementareity, an intertwining dialectics, and equality of status between that which is and that which is not (Heather, 1967, 524-525).