No Nothing

In some cosmological doctrines, Nothing is the fundamental principle, the true Reality. The main challenge for such doctrines is not to explain Nothingness, as many adherents seem to think and dismiss as irrelevant, but to explain how anything at all, even the Illusion of Somethingness, comes to be generated out of Nothing. Some believe that Genesis accomplishes that, with the account of God's creation of the world. However, Genesis does not express a Nothingness doctrine, not merely because the word 'nothing' appears nowhere in the account, but because something does pre-exist Creation, namely God, hardly a Nothing. Two philosophers have notably tried to counter the thesis of the primacy of Nothingness. Hegel shows how 'Nothing' is actually 'No-thing', a qualifier of the more primary Being, a characterization of the undifferentiatedness of the latter. Sartre derives Nothing from 'Being-for-Itself', i. e. Consciousness, which is a fold in Being in which 'Nothing' is what is between the folds. A further analysis in that direction is that Nothingness is derived from Difference--that 'Nothing' refers to the interstices of the items that are differentiated, and that, more generally, 'Nothing' simply means 'other than'. Perhaps more penetratingly, Nietzsche offers a psychological critique of Nothing-ists. He subscribes to a life-affirming doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which presents Reality as a plenum. With respect to that principle, all seekers or asserters of Nothingness, even when it is dressed up as 'Heaven', are life-hating escapists, or, to put it precisely, Nihilists. Some might complain that philosophers like Nietzsche take the mystery out of life, to which it can be responded that Existence, not Nothingness, is the biggest mystery of all.