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Nothingness is a touchstone for genuine philosophy: only a thinking that can deal with nothingness integrates the finiteness of existence into its own philosophy and does not try to reflect itself out of the world with the idea of supertemporal laws and entities. As I discuss using Heidegger, Cassirer, Nishida, and Aristotle as examples, nothingness overcomes the basic ontotheological structure of Western metaphysics. Where the West sets the One Being as the origin, the not-so-distant East sets nothingness as the origin of everything. It is itself a principle of thought and arises from the basic question of all metaphysics: Is there rather nothing than something? Or both at the same time? The sense of nothingness is manifold; it means chaos, chance, indetermination, diversity, the untrue, possibility and otherness. There is a mood of nothingness (the fear), a place of nothingness (the absurd) and an event of nothingness (the world). Nothingness is the condition of the possibility of being at all.
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This page is a summary of: Hineingehalten in das Nichts: Die Metaphysik und das Andere des Seins, December 2023, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004680173_021.
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