The role played by anticipation becomes apparent whether we are confronted with a scary moment of surprise, or a moment in which we chuckle, having been served a comedic line or interpretation we didn’t expect. It is at such a moment that we can appreciate how important anticipation is as we navigate through our life.
We need to be “right” about our anticipation most of the time. Life is not a joke and is not to be filled with frightening occurrences. These moments of surprise are acceptable at the movies or at a comedy club. But not in our home or at work. While King Arthur deeply needs the memory of Camelot to be remembered, we each need our anticipations to be confirmed.
Nothingness is unacceptable to King Arthur. And it is unacceptable to all of us as we seek to anticipate that which must emerge from the not yet known–the void, a state of nothingness. We might even suggest that memories are needed not only to savor the past, but also to effectively anticipate the immediate future: “Ah yes, this will be like what happened last week.” “I bet this will be the same as it has been repeatedly over the past three months.”
In this essay, I explore various aspects of nothingness by looking not only at conditions where a gaping void is present, but also conditions that lead up to and surround the conditions of nothingness. I approach this task by considering several different ways in which to consider (and construct) reality. I then turn to ways in which to frame reality from the perspective of triadic, dyadic, and monadic (unitary) perspectives.
My consideration of these frames leads into a consideration of perspectives regarding nothingness, and the presence of voids in our life. I push even further by considering negative realities and the presence, specifically, of negative utilities in our life. In the last essay in this series, I get “practical” and specifically consider the economics and politics of nothingness and both positive and negative utility.
Perspectives on Reality
I begin by exploring the various ways in which we perceive not just nothingness but also the world of “something” in which we live. Individually and collectively, we go through life constructing our reality (Berger and Luchmann, 1967), whether this be the reality of things and events we experience or the reality of that which we can’t quite comprehend or directly experience—this being the conditions of nothingness and the many voids we encounter in life.
The way in which we construct reality depends on specific frameworks that we either inherit from the society in which we live or (rarely) we create ourselves. These frameworks can be based on ways in which we think (epistemology), ways in which we use words (semantics), and ways in which we use images to portray what we observe (iconography).
The Epistemological Template
The most notable of these frameworks are what the scientific historian, Thomas Kuhn (2012), labeled Paradigms. At any one point in time, most scientists (and more generally most members of a society) view the world through a specific set of lenses related to specific theories, concepts, modes of verification, education and training programs, certifications and a host of other perspectives and practices that constitute a community.
For instance, for a lengthy period, most of us living in Western societies viewed the human body as a finely tuned machine. It was to be repaired by replacing damaged or worn-out parts. This mechanistic paradigm has been replaced in many contemporary settings by a systems-based framework in which the human body is considered a complex biological entity in which its parts are all intertwined and not individually replaceable.
