38   Prajñā Vihāra

AN EARLy HISTORy OF NOTHINGNESS IN 
PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Héctor Sevilla Godínez 
University of Guadalajara, Mexico

ABstrACt

The question of Nothingness was always asked in the 
history of philosophy at the sidelines of philosophical 
thought. Yet there is another tradition beginning with 
Plotinus and ending with Mainländer, where Nothingness 
is given priority or is instrumental in making other concepts 
like being, essence and God distinct. The intention of 
the text is to demonstrate that nothingness, through its 
denial or its affirmation, plays an important role in the 
conceptualization of being and occupies a central place, 
which is necessary to recover, in the philosophical tradition. 

Keywords: Nothingness, God, Being

introduction
One reason to revive the question of Nothingness is that we have 

forgotten that it has been an important question in the past. The question 
of nothingness has been concealed, feared, or denied throughout the 
history of human thought. Nothingness seems to show itself as the 
antithesis of our human desire to be and to have. But there are thinkers 

Prajñā Vihāra Vol. 19 No 2, July - December 2018, 37-55 
© 2000 by Assumption University Press



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 39

within the philosophical and theological tradition that see Nothingness 
as the source and sustainer of being and having. Nothingness is the space 
of potencies, of new beginnings, of the birth of new ideas, and human 
and cosmic creativity.  

In order to demonstrate the disparities and links between the 
different authors conceptions of nothingness, a brief journey regarding 
their lines of thinking will be undertaken. Initially, the attention travel from 
the concept of One of Plotinus to the ideas of nothingness in Eckhart. It 
will proceed to the metaphysical abandonment of Pascal, and its denial 
undertaken by Leibniz. Then, Jacobi’s, idea of the unreality of our 
knowledge and Schelling’s assertion that nothingness is, will be examined. 
Especially important and overlooked by the tradition is Leopardi’s belief 
that nothingness constitutes the beginning and source of all existence; 
and Schopenhauer’s approach which considers nothingness as outside 
of our will. Finally, the article will conclude with a consideration of two 
opposing positions: the theist position, where the anguish which derives 
from nothingness leads one to a belief in God, represented by Kierkegaard; 
and the non-theist position, which finds its main representatives in 
Mainländer and Nietzsche. 

1. one and nothingness in plotinus
Plotinus gave one of the first philosophical considerations of 

Nothingness, seeing it as the most profound thing which man can aspire 
to. Nothingness has a central place in relationship to the One.1 This is so 
particularly in relation to art. Givone observes that his system “reaches 
an irreducible esthetic value, the development of which leads not only 
to recognize that the truth-liberty nexus is founded on Nothingness, but 
that encourages the consideration of this foundation in the breast of art”.2

The One, like Nothingness, is a letting-be; more than a creative 
act, it empowers Being itself. The One is, then, an indirect creator and its 
creation is free, since “its act does not point toward a determined thing, 
but rather is identical to itself; not a duality, then, but a unity”.3 The One 
is preceded by nothingness, for he writes “to nothing it is bound and in no 



40   Prajñā Vihāra

sense is it contingent, which is why it can be said that it is Nothingness 
itself.4

Later, in the tradition beginning with Augustine of Hippo, passing 
through Bonaventure, and Saint Thomas, the topic of Nothingness was 
excluded from the center of infinite being which they called God. This 
dominated Christian thought until Eckhart.

2. meister eckhart and the divine nothingness
It is the Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) who develops 

something truly novel in contrast to the thousand years that preceded him. 
He contends that God is not something to be defined against Nothingness, 
but one and the same reality. This allows for a metaphorical or poetic 
consideration of God which is not limited by human categories.  

His heterodox vision brought him the criticism of ecclesiastic 
authorities of his time. But Eckhart knew how to negotiate these 
controversies which allowed him to die at peace with the church.  Eckhart’s 
thought clearly demonstrates an overcoming of Thomist metaphysics 
and assumes that the Deity can only be represented in silence; in such a 
manner that “God wants to have the temple empty, so that there can be 
nothing in there that is not Him”.5 The Deity contains itself, “expulses 
ignorance”,6 “shines splendidly”,7 and is a “generating potentiality”8 
that only fructifies when man is “as empty as when he was not yet,”9 
in other words, when man has managed to let go of the images and 
conceptualizations of God. This is because “he who searches for God 
according to a manner, takes the manner and forgets God, who hides in 
the manner”.10 If this is accomplished and man can enter Nothingness, it 
is there where he can comprehend that “everything that God does is one; 
that is why he engenders me in as much as his Son without any difference”, 
and it is there when one can “penetrate into God”,11 therefore, “behave 
as if one were dead” since no longer is anything more important in life  
than that union with God. That is how “death gives me a Being” since 
“that proper of God is Being”; and to achieve being in Him, “it is precise 
to die to the base, so that neither love nor suffering should affect us”.12



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 41

This new life in God, which Eckhart proposes, supposes that one 
is God oneself, since “that which man loves, that is the man”;13 It is in 
silence that everything arises; a Nothingness, but a fertile Nothingness, 
impregnated with sense. In the eyes of the world, one is seen as poor, “to 
be who nothing wants, who nothing knows, and who nothing has;”14 but 
in the union with God, everything is possessed. God is unmentionable 
since, “if someone knows God and attributes a name to him, this is not 
God”, as God is “ineffable”.15 What we perceive are only his creations. 
The cosmos is, in this sense, a text that speaks of God but is not God. 
God should be seen by seeing nothing, like Saint Paul who “saw nothing 
and that Nothingness was God [for] there is no possible way towards 
Him […] God is a Nothingness and God is a something”.16 Therefore, it 
is also to be considered as “a way without a way and as much as being 
without being, for it does not have any way”.17

For Eckhart, we do not merely lose ourselves in this Nothingness-
Deity, but must return to our daily tasks, just as Christ did, for “there 
was no member of his body that did not exercise a particular virtue”,18 
in such a way that the contemplation does not exclude and, in fact is 
complemented, with the exercise of virtue.  

3. metaphysical impotence in pascal
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a brilliant mathematician, mystic, 

and writer of Christian polemics. In his Pensees [Pensamientos sobre la 
religión], Pascal focused on the problem of the individual existence of 
man, who is a rational being but fragile and impotent; a “thinking reed” 
that suffers, but that possesses an eminent dignity among the creatures 
because he is able to know God.19 For Pascal, not only does thought or 
knowledge exist, but also another type of knowledge, of spontaneous 
or intuitive characteristic. He man as caught in a struggle between two 
extremes, for man is both a great and miserable being at the same time. 
The fundamental preoccupation of Pascal was not the knowledge that man 
can acquire, but rather man himself as a creature who suffers in middle 
of the intellectual and metaphysical dereliction.



42   Prajñā Vihāra

4. Wilhelm leibniz and the negation of nothingness
In contrast to Eckhart, who unites the concepts of the Deity 

with Nothingness, Leibniz sets them up against each other. In reality, 
this author doesn’t really ask about the possibility of Nothingness but 
rather centers himself on the question about why things are as they are 
and are not in a different manner. But the otherness is not evidently the 
Nothingness of which we speak. For him, behind reality there is not, nor 
can be, Nothingness; since if it were, then in it would be the reason of 
being of the things which for Leibniz would be the same as discrediting 
God himself, as the origin of all existence. The contrast between God 
and Nothingness is resolved by Leibniz’s denial of Nothingness. But by 
doing this he indirectly affirms the power of Nothingness. This is because 
“to propose that behind reality there can be nothing, as an alternative 
to reality itself, means admitting that reality is abysmally unfounded, 
with everything that this implies. This is to say that, reality would not 
be over the ultimate reason and over the necessary being as over its own 
fundament, but rather over the abysm”.20

This situation is inadmissible according to Leibniz, but it is 
precisely what I would like to affirm in this study. The theistic posture of 
the German philosopher does not permit him to consider this possibility. 
As Givone suggests, the possibility of calling “God” the abysm21 before 
exorcizing such abysm, indirectly affirms it. 

In Leibniz, through the attempt to diminish Nothingness, the 
real possibility of Being is highlighted. Therefore, his philosophy is “an 
elevated bastion against such terrible threat; a vision of light against that 
which must have seemed a vision of gloom?”22 In the end, Leibniz’s, 
philosophy is about the Being of the One as the ultimate foundation but 
points to the source of Being in Nothingness

Naturally, such a recognition of the Absolute Nothingness would 
not be possible in the approach of Kitaro Nishida,23 for example, without 
the rupture of the beliefs of the idols; without the healthy fragmenting of 
such partial cosmo-visions of the Absolute.



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 43

5. Jacobi and the unreal Knowledge of What is
Friedrich Jacobi (1743-1819) is one of the counter-enlightenment 

thinkers who begin to reject the enlightenment conception of reason. For 
Jacobi what we know is not related to what is real, but only generated 
by human desire. In the same manner God cannot be known, since that 
which is known of Him – is by the very fact of knowing it – false.  He 
writes that  “to know something such as it is in its truth, it is necessary 
to conceptually grasp it; but doing this means to annihilate it, reduce to 
nothing its being in itself and, therefore, to invert the objective in the 
subjective”.24

If knowledge of what is, is a deformation of reality, then reality 
itself is Nothingness since it is never at the mercy of the conceptualizations 
which attempt to capture it.

Knowledge is the deceit that man assumes in order to suppose 
that once he has conceptually dominated reality. Truth, as such, is outside 
of the man who intends to conceive it, which is why such a man must 
desperately search for his own conceptual annihilation, since it is his own 
self which prevents him from reaching reality. Man, upon ceasing to be 
man integrates himself with Nothingness.

The self that is autonomously constituted, contrary to what could 
be expected, in reality is only:

A reactive function before the vertigo of nothing covering itself 
it becomes a prisoner of itself, a true curse. In change, if freedom from 
the self has its origin no longer in the capacity of self-determination 
but rather in the undetermined, in the absolute, then the experience we 
undergo here and now, each time we remit the other to the identical, will 
be a metaphysical figure of real transcendence.25

It can be concluded that Jacobi understands Nothingness as a 
constant companion, on the terrain of knowledge. However, there is still 
not in the conceptual union between God and Nothingness, such as is 
suggested with Meister Eckhart and in the school of Kyoto.  



44   Prajñā Vihāra

4. friedrich schelling and the nothingness that is
Schelling (1775-1854) greatly radicalizes the issue of Nothingness 

to include it on the plane of philosophy as a synonym of the Being, not 
as a counterpart, or a duality, but rather as part of Being.  

In this German philosopher we find an “authentic nostalgia of 
nothing[ness]”,26 The question about the possibility of Nothingness in 
Schelling must be understood as a question which summons; a question 
which Givone situates in the following context:

In the face of the desolating spectacle of human history 
and its relapse into mistake upon mistake, it culminates in 
a resonance that is like the anguished cry of one whom finds 
in Nothingness a relief to such absurdity, a detention that 
soothes the sentiment of the senselessness of everything, a 
bitter yet effective antidote to the desperate and frustrating 
condition in which we find ourselves.27

Unlike Leibniz, Schelling does not focus on the affirmation of 
the Being of divinity. Instead, he treats it indirectly as an unmentionable 
paternity, an impenetrable and nameless power. Hence a great part of 
liberation consists precisely in liberating oneself from the desire of liberty 
itself. Hence in Schelling, “liberty reaches a more originary level, where 
the unfounded foundation of reason is at play, the unfounded foundation 
of the being: in one word, Nothingness”.28 

The starting point of what is, is not the existent – as Leibniz 
supposed – but rather the pure potentiality of being: Nothingness. It is 
not a wanting to be, but only a potentiality of being.  Authentic liberty 
for Schelling is, then, in the ability to not be. Not in the not-being which 
will pass into the Being, for the not-being cannot be free since it does not 
yet exist. He writes that “if the potentiality of being remains in itself, the 
potentiality of being is maintained in relation to the Nothingness from 
which it comes from and it directs itself towards the not-being before, 
than to Being, so liberty is safe-kept”.29 For Schelling, the freedom of 
Nothingness is the foundation of Being.



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 45

It is for this same reason that, “Only the being that has in itself 
the not-being, shadow of the terrible thickness, allows that movement 
of liberty which, once and again (infinitely), converts the being into the 
not-being and the not-being into the being. Liberty is not, but rather this 
conversion kept safe by Nothingness”.30

In the end, Being and Nothingness are inseparably bound to the 
point that Nothingness is placed as a foundation of Being. And if this is 
so, it is also the foundation of any change and development of Being itself. 

5. nothingness as a Beginning and source in leopardi
More radical is the work of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) who 

recognizes in Nothingness the origin and beginning of all things.  For 
him, Nothingness is that towards which everything tends; final abysm 
of all the existent. He considers that “the beginning of God himself is 
Nothingness”.31 The things emerge from the lap of Nothingness and come 
to the Being with the only intention of returning to Nothingness, which 
is why “to emerge from Nothingness and to submerge oneself there is 
the primary evidence of the things”.32  

There isn’t any reason either for something that is not to be such 
as it is, or not to be absolutely. The absolute is an abyss, capable of 
annihilating everything, which is why the Nothingness of the end is the 
same as the Nothingness of the beginning. That is why “Nothingness 
makes things to be as they are: fragile, ephemeral, mortal, but exactly 
because to it, worthy of being loved in their reality, suspended over a 
double denial.”33 Even what we understand as truth coincides with the 
non-truth and is converted one into the other. Being and Nothingness 
coincide with one another.

Very appreciable is the following text, extracted from his piece 
Dialogo de Tristano e di un Amico [Dialogue between Tristan and a 
friend]:



46   Prajñā Vihāra

The human gender will never believe to not know anything, 
to be nothing, to not be able to come to reach anything. No 
philosopher that teaches one of these three things would 
make a fortune nor make a sect, especially amongst the 
people because, far from these three things being scarce 
for the purpose of who would want to live; the first two 
offend the haughtiness of men, the third, though after the 
others, requires courage and strength of spirit in order to 
be believed.34

We can only creatively interpret the world since we only know 
fantasies. We are Nothingness and we are headed towards Nothingness. 
The failure of  Western history of ideas to recognized Leopardi’s thought 
proves, paradoxically, the veracity of his words. 

After reading Leopardi’s ideas concerning Nothingness, the reader 
could remain dumbfounded. But I propose it has a value for an alternate 
way of approaching human development. Development begins with a 
radical Binding Nothingness with the fulfillment of the person allowing a 
new understanding of self. In fact, according to Givone, the disenchantment 
taken to its final consequences constitutes the only opportunity […] of 
the “ultra-philosophy that is the key of the ultra-Nihilism”.35

Ultra-philosophy is what Leopardi understands as the reconciliation 
with nature and with the intimacy of things; in other words, “knowing the 
Nothingness from which they come and into which they will be cast”,36 
in such a way that Nothingness is an opportunity to understand the world 
that surrounds us, to give a new sense to the life that summons us, to forge 
the way that we are to travel in our veiled existence.

6. the nothingness outside of the Will in schopenhauer
Naturally, I am to refer as well to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-

1860) who, once has considered the will of the individual as the beginning 
of the representations of the world, and recognizes that what we see 
does not constitute in reality, in any manner, what is. The world is, then, 
a representation which, in any case, is also the representation of each 



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 47

individual in a particular manner. The only reality is the will, the one 
which conditions our conception of the world.

Nothingness, from this perspective, is precisely that which remains 
once we have exiled the will. This is to say, outside of the world of 
representations, Nothingness is what remains – unbound, by it – of our 
same representation. The representation is “the reality which has been 
constructed from a determined cognitive system, with its own coordinates 
and limits”.37 Hence, if Nothingness is outside of the representation, it is 
because it is precisely previous to the representation and subsequent to 
the world of the representations. That is why the human will is limited, 
for the tendency or line in which the representations are to be constructed 
based on that same will, are always limited, in context, partial, human.  

The will is the metaphysical principle that identifies the self, which 
is why Schopenhauer assumes that every self has a will; even further, that 
the self is will. Therefore, it is to be understood that when it is affirmed 
that Nothingness is that which is further than the will, it is also assumed 
that that same Nothingness is beyond the self; and that the self, as will, 
is an obstacle to the comprehension of the Nothingness of which I speak.

In the same manner, since the world itself is a manifestation of 
the human wills and these are the obstacle to the Absolute Nothingness, 
it is understood that suicide could be considered as an escape from the 
world of the will. Contrary to it, Schopenhauer warns that by living, a 
salvation from the tedium and boredom of life can be found.  Amongst 
the things that the German philosopher proposes specifically for the 
eradication of the tedium towards life, is the uninterested contemplation 
of art, at the same time foundation of its esthetics. He also proposes the 
practice of compassion, support of his ethics. Furthermore, he suggests 
the overcoming of the self through an ascetic life centered on self-control.  
Therefore, if we speak of the consequences that the comprehension of 
Nothingness has for the contemporary man, we are then to refer to these 
contributions.



48   Prajñā Vihāra

7. nothingness as a preamble to everything in Kierkegaard
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote, among 

others, a fundamental piece titled The Concept of Anxiety [El concepto 
de la angustia] in which he presents a peculiar anthropological concept: 
that of the man in anguish by his own loneliness. He recognizes that 
ethical theories are limited by their rationalism, which is why man cannot 
ultimately find spiritual fulfillment in them. From this perspective it is 
not the rational explanation of things which gives us tranquility in the 
face of existential anguish, but instead the relationship with God, which 
is something that flows from the interior of the soul.  

Religion does not imply laws or communities a personal 
communication or binding with the Supreme Being. This is even echoed 
in Bertrand Russell who writes that, “The existence of God, must be 
captured existentially because the demonstrations that move in the 
kingdom of the essence cannot establish that existence, no matter how 
abundant they may be”.38

In such a way, man finds himself alone before himself.  And from 
this solitude flows the anguish which presides his existence. Harald 
Höffding affirms that Kierkegaard’s most important contribution to 
ethics is his description of the so called “stages of life”.39 These stages 
are three: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The travel from one 
to the other is done “by a leap”; in other words, by virtue of an impulse 
“to think subjectively”, to think each time with greater force and as a 
function of existence.  

In his theory of knowledge, Kierkegaard affirms that knowledge 
can neither deplete nor span the whole of existence, and that because of 
this, new enterprises need to be continually undertaken in thought. In 
Philosophical Fragments [las Migajas filosóficas] we can read his critique 
that the rationalist attempt to explain the world, loses the most essential.  
This essential is bound to the divinity and to the saving message that is 
found in It.  

What we could call vital impregnation of thought is, then, one of 
the most characteristic theses of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. After having 



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 49

developed, in this way, that truth can only be captured and affirmed in 
a subjective and personal manner, that truth is subjectivity, Kierkegaard 
inverts the phrase and concludes: “Subjectivity is the truth because only 
that which is apprehended with subjective passion and energy can be 
true”.40

This thesis of Kierkegaard contains the existentialist affirmation 
that truth only has value when we appropriate it by affirming it, through 
personal impulse or passion. From this perspective, the personal value 
of truth is the decisive one. The criterion consists in the movement 
that is awaken within interior life. In this sense, the contemplation of 
Nothingness proposed here can only be lived as a subjective experience, 
intimately personal.   

In his piece Fear and Trembling [Temor y temblor] he writes:

All of humanity’s life rounds itself, then, and takes the 
form of a perfect sphere where morality is at the same 
time the limit and the content.  God is transformed into 
an invisible point and is dissipated like a thought without 
force; its power is only exercised in the morality that fills 
life. Therefore, if a man imagines himself loving God in a 
sense different to this one that has just been indicated, he 
would divert, he loves a ghost.41

The above supposes that Kierkegaard renounces a specific manner 
of a relationship with God through the practice of an ethics. From this 
earthly perspective, God is an invisible point.  In my perspective, man is 
the visible point in the invisibility of the Nothingness which possesses 
us. That Nothingness is only graspable in a state of contemplation.  
Such a state does not involve the elimination difficulties, which is why 
Kierkegaard emphasizes the difficulty of the path:

The gentleman of faith does not have any support other 
than himself; he suffers for not being able to make himself 
be understood, but he does not feel any vain necessity of 



50   Prajñā Vihāra

guiding others. His pain is his security; he ignores the 
vain desire, his soul is far too serious for that. The false 
gentleman betrays himself by that ability, acquired in an 
instant. He does not absolutely comprehend that if another 
individual must follow the same path, he should come to be 
an individual exactly in the same way, without consequently 
having the need for direction from anybody and, above all, 
from he who intends to impose himself.42

Here we are prepared for the next step taken by Nietzsche.

8. nothingness as power in nietzsche
In contrast to Kierkegaard, with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) 

we find ourselves with the man who confronts the presence of faith and 
assumes it as an obstacle to his own development. With Nietzsche, the 
influence of Schopenhauer continues to be demonstrated and is, perhaps, 
the most representative of the nihilistic thinkers, whose activity concluded 
in 1889 when he lost his reason.

Before him, Schopenhauer formulated the theory of the will to 
live, affirming that such a will is an evil, something that damages man 
upon conditioning him. Nietzsche begins with this thesis, but deriving 
from it the opposite conclusion: that which is fundamental, the definitive 
value which man should look for is the intensification and elevation 
of his own existence. Nietzsche returns to Heraclitus’ idea concerning 
the eternal return of things and events, but without giving it a fatalistic 
content, since man can go about transforming the world he lives in just 
as he can transform himself. This final impulse would bring him close 
to the superman; in other words, to the man liberated from anguish, 
possessed with a powerful individuality, capable of overcoming himself 
and exceeding his own limitations. We move beyond the “morality of 
slaves” to an aristocratic morality. This involves a criticism of Christian 
ethics and everything that diminishes the world and the will to power.43

The will of the power is a path towards true knowledge. What does 
Nihilism mean? Nietzsche asks himself and answers: “It is a consequence 



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 51

of the way in which the values of existence have been interpreted until 
now […] the supreme values lose validity”.44 Radical Nihilism is the belief 
in an absolute devaluation of existence. While we believe in morality, 
we condemn life.

The conclusion of the principles that Nietzsche presents in the first 
part of The Will to Power [La voluntad de poder] is that:

All of the values by which we have attempted until now to 
make the world worthy of our appreciation, and by which 
we have precisely despised it when they were shown to be 
inapplicable; all of these values are, from the psychological 
point of view, the results of certain useful perspectives, 
established to maintain and increase the fields of human 
domain, but falsely projected in the essence of the things.45

Nietzsche affirms that knowledge is finally the consequence 
of searching for a justification before any determined morality. The 
explanations, even the most argued ones, are a way of bestowing 
correctness to our personal way of thinking.  

Little by little I have come to comprehend that all 
philosophy is no other thing than the profession of faith 
of he who creates it; a type of involuntary memories.  The 
moral [or immoral] end constitutes the true vital knot of all 
philosophy, from which every plant will later come forth.  
In reality, when one wants to explain to oneself how the 
most eccentric metaphysical affirmations of this or that 
philosopher originated, it is prudent to ask: what morality 
does it serve?”46

In this manner, the writer of Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Así hablaba 
Zaratustra] induces us to conclude that man is – in his intention to 
provide reason for his thoughts – the one who constructs knowledge, 
and that such knowledge is at the same time conditioned.  Later on, Paul 
Feyerabend based himself on similar elements to postulate his proposal 
of epistemological anarchism.



52   Prajñā Vihāra

Finally, Nietzsche maintains his nihilistic vision – which is why 
some leave him out of the existentialist category, in addition to being 
outside of the historical period – with which he pities the consequent 
human condition upon affirming that “from any philosophical point of 
view from which one would want to consider the world in which we 
believe to live, the most sure and most stable thing is its mistakenness; 
in confirmation of this, serve many reasons which incite us to conjecture 
that there exists a deceiving beginning in the essence of the things”.47  

This deceiving beginning that is the essence of the things is in 
reality the distortion that our interpretation makes of the things, and since 
these are in a constant relationship with Nothingness in a constant dialectic. 
The thought that Nietzsche leaves for us is an invitation to liberation; 
a total liberation, including our most intimate hopes and desires. Such 
liberation is only possible by the man who continues to evolve towards 
a being of greater will and power.

Nietzsche’s influence has a powerful impact on the history of 
philosophy. It has inspired rejection at the same time as recognition. And 
it is because Nietzsche: 

Has touched neuralgic points of our historical condition; 
the death of God and the vanishing of traditional values, 
the loss of the centre and the cutting to pieces of the 
ancient identities, the radical experience of the negative, 
and the impracticability of all dialectic synthesis; lastly, the 
impossibility of allocating a name to totality.48

The name of totality – at least the closest to such a notion – is, 
precisely, that of Nothingness.

9. philipp mainländer and paul Bourget
The leading representatives of Nihilism in nineteenth century are 

Philipp Mainländer (1841-1876) and Paul Bourget (1852-1935). The 
first stands out for his piece Die Philosophie der Erlösung or Philosophy 
of Redemption in which, influenced by Schopenhauer, he assumes 



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 53

Nothingness beginning with the premise: “The not-being is preferable to 
the Being”. He concludes that the existent is called to death as a natural 
tendency, more than even one’s own life.  Few know, for example, that the 
affirmation about the death of God and the consequent life of the world is 
not originally Nietzsche’s, but was previously referred to by Mainländer 
who, in fact, decided to commit suicide once his piece was published.

Paul Bourget emphasized some of contemporary life’s fatal 
consequences, and illustrated with precision the decay of the social models 
of his time. He assumes that social decay consists in the independence of 
the individuals, and that this decay allows, however, aesthetic values and 
personal artistic productivity to stand out. The decaying artist extracts 
spiritual and aesthetic nourishment from the manifestations of social 
decay.  In some way, the loss of the world gives the artist contact with 
his imperturbable side which, at the same time, makes him sensitive to 
superior realities. Neither Mainländer nor Bourget have been given the 
recognition they deserve in Western philosophy.

Conclusion
The consideration of Nothingness implies a new perspective. 

Nothingness has been seen with different faces; always modeled by human 
subjectivity, by religious interests, or by topical fears. We have covered 
it with veils; and we fear the unveiling of Nothingness. This has made 
us understand it as contrary to Being; as the counterpart of that which is 
most laudable and dignified in the human being; as if with it there were no 
further motives to keep on living; when, in reality, it is from Nothingness 
that we can have the possibility of the re-enchantment of the world.



54   Prajñā Vihāra

endnotes

1 Vid. Plotino, Enéadas, III, 8, 10.
2 Givone, Historia de la Nada, p.79.
3 Plotino, op. cit., VI, 8, 20.
4 Ibíd., VI, 8, 21.
5 Eckhart, M., “El templo vacío” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, p.35.
6 Ibíd., p.36.
7 Ibíd., p.38.
8 Ibíd., p.40.
9 Eckhart, M., “La virginidad del alma” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, 

p.41.
10 Eckhart, M., “Vivir sin porque” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, p. 49.
11 Eckhart, M., “Dios y yo somos uno” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, 

pp.54-55.
12 Eckhart, M., “El anillo del ser” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, p.57-59.
13 Eckhart, M., “La imagen desnuda de Dios” en El fruto de la nada y otros 

escritos, p.69.
14 Eckhart, M., “Los pobres de espíritu” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, 

p.75.
15 Eckhart, M., “Dios es un verbo que se habla a sí mismo” en El fruto de la 

nada y otros escritos, p.84.
16 Eckhart, M., “El fruto de la nada” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, 

pp.87-90.
17 Ibídem, p.93.
18 Eckhart, M., “Martha y María” en El fruto de la nada y otros escritos, p.111.
19 Cfr. Montes de Oca, Historia de la Filosofía, p.190.
20 Givone, op. cit., p.243.
21 Idem.
22 Ibíd., p.245.
23 Vid. Nishida, Pensar desde la Nada, pp.43-100.
24 Givone, op. cit., p.219.
25 Ibídem, p.226.
26 Ibíd., p.247.
27 Idem.
28 Ibíd., p.252.
29 Ibíd., p.253.
30 Ibíd., p.104.
31 Cfr. Leopardi, Zibaldone de pensamientos, 1341.
32 Givone, op. cit., p.186.



Héctor Sevilla Godínez 55

33 Ibíd., p.196.
34 Leopardi, Dialogo de Tristano e di un Amico, 28-36.
35 Cfr. Givone, op. cit., p.207
36 Ibíd.
37 Sáez, Pensar desde la nada: Ensayos sobre filosofía y Nihilismo, p.39.
38 Russell, La sabiduría de Occidente, pp.254-255.
39 Vid. Hoffding, Soren Kierkegaard, 1930.
40 Ibíd., p.99.
41 Kierkegaard, Temor y Temblor, p.76.
42 Ibíd., p.90.
43 Vid. Russell, op. cit., p.259.
44 Nietzsche, La voluntad de poder, p.33.
45 Ibíd., pp.38-39.
46 Nietzsche, Más allá del bien y del mal, p.9.
47 Ibíd., p.38.
48 Volpi, El Nihilismo, p.86.

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56   Prajñā Vihāra

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Manasan Wongvarn and Sompong Amnuay-ngerntra  57