Howard (2025, p. 11) pushes further:
“Try to imagine not a black void, but the absence of void. Not silence, but the absence of the very conditions that make silence possible. Not emptiness, but no space in which emptiness could reside. No rules to suspend. No background to strip away. No logic to violate. No dimension in which anything might begin—or fail to begin.
You cannot do it. Neither can I. And this is not a personal limitation; it is a cognitive fact. No part of the human brain evolved to simulate non-being. Every tool we possess for thinking—every metaphor we devise, every abstraction we construct, every image we summon—assumes contrast. It assumes form. It assumes presence, even if only in negative space.”
Howard reframes this major challenge as an opportunity. It is an opportunity that is lost upon those who stick to an empirical perspective and to the belief that the researcher and observer of reality can be objective (Howard, 2025, p. 11):
“, , , this failure may itself be instructive. It tells us something—not yet about the world, but about ourselves. We are not neutral observers. We are participants in a reality that has already begun. We are made of being. We live inside time. We communicate through difference. So when we attempt to imagine nothingness—true nothingness—we are trying to simulate a condition from which we ourselves are excluded. A condition with no “we,” no space to occupy, no mind to imagine, no process to unfold.
In that sense, the attempt is doomed from the start, because imagining is already something.
And yet we try. Why?”
It is at this point that we move into the heart of this series of essays on the psychology of nothingness (Howard, 2025, p. 11):
“Because even if we cannot visualize it, we can gesture toward it. We can recognize what it would have to be, even if we cannot hold it in thought. We can subtract and subtract until nothing is left to take away. And when we reach that vanishing point, we can still ask: Why did it not remain that way?
If true nothingness is not only unimaginable but unstable–if it gives way, spontaneously, to being—then something remarkable has occurred. Something metaphysical. Something foundational.”
In the following three essays, I explore something more about the remarkable matter of nothingness.
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