DISTINCTIONS OF “THE NOTHING”
Notes on the immanence/transcendence code and religion after Luhmann

I

It can plausibly be argued that “Nothing” is a product of human imagination, produced through a negation that need not know the result. This speculative voiding of the All heads in the direction of a trans-empirical X for which there is no evidence (as one must admit, lest one be speaking of something rather than nothing).

Now the irony is that the Nothing, as deriving from a negation and itself indeterminate, is capable of receiving many determinations. As many determinations as can be creatively juxtaposed to that which it negates. If one negates Everything, one could say that resulting “other side” is Nothing. But one could negate the “whole of beings” and get “Being as such” as a result, since Being (esse, the verb to-be) is also not any “thing” and is reached by abstracting away from beings.

Many have played on this paradoxical interchangeability of Be-ing and No-thing. In doing so they have produced richly suggestive communications. The void (where representations go to die) is a uniquely invariable resource for creative thought. It retunes thinking to a signifyingness beyond the signifiers: a desire to mean that no extant meaning can match. This introduces us to the idea of a meaning that cannot be observed. A meaning on the other side of all the meanings we can conceive. This meaning, elusive as it is by definition, can take on seemingly opposed aspects: now the source of all meaning, now the antithesis of all meaning. This meaning that is on or from the “other side” has been called “God”, among other names, and in general it is the function of religion to observe the world “from” this other side — rather than from the inner side, which is what all other social systems do.

Void-antics, religion: our deployment in the Nowhere for meaning, when all meaning on the inner side of society proves nugatory or, at least, needs a grounding Elsewhere.

At its pinnacle, it produces statements like Meher Baba’s: “God alone is Real and all else that you see and feel is nothing but a series of nothings.” The opposite of Everything seems to be nothing, but it is interpreted as God, the Real Everything. What seems Everything, is Nothing in comparison. The inner side is but a speck of sand in the ocean of the Godhead.  Whatever is approachable by cognition, language, perception, time, is nothing (“All impressions are of nothing”); only what lies on the ‘outer side’ is Real… (Notice that nihilism and positive religion appear, in this light, as two possible attitudes toward the same relativization or devaluation, only the one doubts there is any unobservable meaning at all, while the other undertakes to substantiate its form of belief in that claim.)

II

Following Niklas Luhmann in A System’s Theory of Religion, the code at play here is immanence/ transcendence.

Transcendence is distinguished from whatever-is, the temporal, the everything, the immanent: the opposite of where we make our operations in space and time. Depending on the observer, Transcendence can take on the flavor of Being, Nothing, Ab-solute, Pure Negativity, U-topia, the No-Where-Place, and so on. The flavor it takes depends on how the observer draws these distinctions. No one can say which way of drawing these distinctions is “right.” Rightness isn’t at issue, and couldn’t be, because what one is pointing to has no known or immanent signified to correspond to it. This is why for certain analytic and scientific philosophies, the questions raised by religion are absurd: they demand a form of communication that does not abide by the code true/untrue but by the code immanent/transcendent, which propagates communications differently than science.

In this light, negation cedes its place to a simpler operation: distinction. “Nothing” then is not some suprasensible essence or metaphysical operator. Rather it derives from the distinction we as observers make between everything (beings as a whole) and what is in no way anything (nothing whatsoever). This highlights how the distinction depends on observation — not on registering ontological status (is/is not).

Our imaginations of “nothing” (and its avatars) are derived through the distinction we ourselves draw between everything that is (immanence) and its negation or other side (transcendence). The outer Transcendence and the inner Immanence are, we could say, “made” by the distinction, in the manner of distinction. This is not the usual way of looking at it, since usually one begins with the reality of the distinguished as itself “dictating” the distinguishment. Here, instead, what we see is a distinction that can replay itself in countless variations on the code imm/trans. Each time, what one wishes to point to is something fundamentally unobservable, the no-thing or transcendent side. Paradoxically, however, by naming and referring to it, the unobservable is brought into the ambit of being observed — at least supposedly. (In any case, this obversity is interpreted as meaningful, albeit in a way that calls into question the meaning of the concept of meaning.)

The tenuousness of the whole operation rests here. Religion, at a certain point of reflection on itself as a mental form, attempts to observe the observable (everything) “from” the standpoint of the unobservable (nothing/God), yet in so doing betrays the unobservable by quasi-inscribing it in the observed. Religions, obviously, take place on the inner side; they make statements, occupy spaces, conduct social relations, and so on. And so it cannot prevent running into the paradox of making statements about that which it says no statements can be made. This is why the statements tend to culminate in a “non-knowing,” abiding with the paradox, apophaticism, and so many other ways of disavowing the avowal of God, so that God can be God and our statement a (failed) indicator of the “other side” of statementing. And yet, this too gets inscribed in the ‘inner side’ idiom of the given religion, according to its own need to communicate and propagate itself.

In reality, we cannot observe anything that isn’t “something.” Even if that something is inherently empty, we can only carry out our operations on the immanent side, whereas the nothing/transcendence has nothing to do with the immanent side. (Unless of course God tells us otherwise, intervenes from the other side to the inner: that is the axiom of Revelation and the related concepts of Covenant, Avatarhood, Incarnation, Dispensation, etc. A locus classicus for me on this sentiment comes from Jacob Taubes: “the drawbridge comes from the other side. And whether you get fetched or not, as Kafka describes it, is not up to you. One can take the elevators up to the high-rises of spirituality—it won’t help…” (Political Theology of Paul, p. 76))

Yes, we can think about the Nothing through contradistinctions, we can write down words like “nonbeing.” But to observe these in an absolute form, as suggested by the earlier negative procedure, is an absurdity. It would imply the annihilation of being and of its observer, hence of the very possibility of observing the distinction between What-is and the Nothing. It is therefore senseless to ‘ontologize’ nothing/transcendence (which the futility of arguments for God’s existence show, too). What we really mean to say is that our operations never reach “there”. It cannot even be marked as there or not-there. And so we have no idea of Nothing, except when it plays into a distinction we intend to make — a distinction that allows us to reflect and act on the contingency of Being, including with a sense of Being’s own unprecedentedness (as Henri de Lubac did when defining the Holy Spirit as “Newness Itself”).

III

“Nothing” is a word designating the Beyond-the-Boundaries of what we can observe. It means transcendence: which means crossing into it even though we cannot cross into it.

We can then take “nothing” for the source of being or its negation, its animating umphf or its inglorious dissipation. Or again as the evil that attends creation by some flaw, yet in its disappearance lets perfection come to be. Or again as the reality of our existence, insofar as we observe that existence from the standpoint of the Beyond (via the analogy of being). Distinctions can also be multiplied with degrees of intensity or magnitude of Being in a hierarchy, reaching up to a maximum (the God-man) and down to a minimum (dust and stones). Or one can equalize everything into a kind of univocal being-nothingness (Zen), where the binaries or dualisms (I prefer to say binomes or dipoles) tend to get undone.

—But as for nothing’s “existence”? Well, it all depends upon what we observe it “existing” over and against, and what for.

‘Our ‘ontologizing’ and ‘cosmologizing’ dreams run up against the basic operational truth, which is that distinctions are observed or they are not observed. They are 100% contingent, both in their construction and in their continuance. When we look at paradoxes — like the “existence of nothing” — we have to look at the unity of the difference, here the unity of everything and nothing, and the interdependence of the distinguished sides, their contingency upon one another. In the case of religion, the operative coding is immanence/transcendence, where immanence is the side we can operate on, and transcendence the side of the unobservable. This doesn’t mean we cannot make statements about transcendence; but we do make them on the immanent side, where the everything/nothing binary is made graspable to our intelligence on the everything side — where nothing tends to now mean: something is changing or ready to change.

I am playing here for a reason, to show that it is the distinction we make that makes the difference — quite apart from the ‘judgment of existence’ we might make about ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’. The dipoles can be arranged in countless different ‘framings’. None of these framings can claim ultimacy: this means that no religion’s observance of its coding of this difference is “correct”. At the same time, we can observe that all these different framings converge, because they all come back to the same coding of immanence/transcendence and the endless variety of interpretations that can be put on that distinction (again suggesting the unity of mystical thinking). Various troubles in comparative religion over pluralism, syncretism, exclusivism, and so on, could be cleared up here. The difference-making lies in how the distinctions are observed. In other words, there is no truth to discover about the duality or non-duality of all these grandiose metaphysical concepts. What there is to observe is only this: how do observers observe their distinctions?

Because really, what evidence do we have of the “Nothing” outside of speculation and imagination, outside of the renewed observation of the difference? It being remembered that to observe a distinction is always to (re)make one…

—Oct 23, 2023, revised June 5, 2024