Everything is Empty
Relations, prime matter, emptiness, and the strange foundation of reality
In today's post, I want to investigate the nature of ‘Being’. What does it mean for a thing to exist? What lies at the foundation of reality? Do things exist entirely relative to other things, or is there some underlying ‘thing-in-itself’?
If the Sun stopped shining
To approach this, let's begin with an example. We’ll use the Sun. The Sun exists up there in the sky/out there in space. If, hypothetically, the Earth suddenly disappeared, the Sun would go on shining unaffected. The same is true for the other planets. We can therefore say that the Sun's existence is independent and not a matter of relation to things such as planets, right?
Not quite. Rather than subtracting a handful of other entities, let's begin with its relations and attempt to subtract them, and then see what's left at the end.
The first thing we'll note is that it shines down on us, our solar system, and out onto the rest of the universe. Let's imagine we can shut that off, plunging Earth and the Solar system into a cold darkness.
OK, what relations remain? It would still exert its gravitational pull, warping space-time around itself and keeping the Solar system in orbit. Let's switch that off too, disbanding the Solar system like kids flying off a roundabout. What remains of the Sun now? Well, it's still there, a giant inertial mass waiting for anything that might dare to bump into it, and blocking or distorting light from other stars. If anything collides with it, it will know about it. Let's switch that off too, so now everything can pass directly through it without even noticing.
Does the Sun still exist? It cannot be seen, cannot be touched, cannot be detected, does not distort space-time, and does not affect the rest of the universe in any way. No scientist could ever discover it with any tools, current or future. It is perfectly unknowable, undetectable, and irrelevant. Can anything even be positively said about the it? It has no mass, no brightness, no colour, no texture, no density.
Can it be said to have a location? Perhaps... But wait! Isn't location another relation? If it has a location, other entities relate to it by being closer or farther from it. Can we remove this and retain some kind of absolute location? No. Firstly, because having an absolute location would imply relative locations to everything else in the universe, due to the geometrical nature of location. And secondly, because Einstein's relativity dispelled any remaining notion of absolute location. Space and time are relative.
Nor would it be able to affect or be affected by anything. These are both relations. If we accept the ‘Eleatic principle’, that to exist is to affect and or be affected, then the Sun minus its relations would not exist at all. Once the relations are removed, nothing is left.
You might argue that the Sun would still be fusing its Hydrogen atoms into Helium atoms and acting upon itself. That is a fair point, but these are just internal relations. They are still relations. If we were to remove its internal relations also, what would be left?
Prime Matter
This discussion reminds me of the Aristotelian notion of 'prime matter'. For Aristotle, all things are a combination of their matter (e.g. Lego bricks) and the form that its matter is arranged into (e.g. a Lego house). Crucially, it is the matter that provides the potential for the form to be actualised, e.g. if you have a big pile of Lego bricks, you have the potential to create a Lego house or a Lego car or a Lego man, or whatever else. Once you have built the Lego house, you then have an actual Lego house. The matter provides the potentiality, and then the form is the actuality.
But the bricks are not the end of the story. It is helpful to consider them as the matter, but they too are a particular form (e.g. Plate 2 x 3) made out of a lower-level matter (plastic). Then the plastic molecules in turn are a particular form of their underlying matter (atoms), and so on.
Supposing we continue this investigation until we can go no further, we would eventually come to a bedrock of 'prime matter' - matter that is entirely formless, without any shape, properties, or characteristics, and incapable of being broken down further. A stuff of pure potentiality. The trouble is, pure potentiality has no actuality and therefore cannot actually exist. Everything that exists must exist in some particular form.
Entities as Potential for Relations
Just as Aristotelian matter offers the potentiality for form, we can view entities as offering the potential for relations. And as the matter at each stage of analysis can be further broken down into its own matter and form, so too, entities can be further broken down into their component entities and the relations between them. If we take these analyses to their conclusions, we find in both cases that we end up with something that is pure potentiality, no actuality, with no shape, no form, no properties, no location, and no power to affect or to be affected. We have found something that cannot actually exist.
If we were digging down to find the bedrock of reality, we have come up empty-handed. Reality is relational, it is holistic. There is no static, independent, immutable substrate upon which reality is founded. We might say that there is no being, only interbeing (borrowing a word from Thich Nhat Hanh1). All things are empty of intrinsic self-existence.
Can pure potentiality exist?
As noted above, pure potentiality cannot actually exist. It cannot exist in any determinate form, nor as a thing. But does that mean it does not exist in any sense? Not necessarily…
We might consider prime matter to exist, not as a substance or thing of its own, but as the sheer possibility for transformation. It is the fact that underlying every determinate form is the potentiality to take on all other forms. Nothing is truly fixed. All things are impermanent and interdependent.
We might even see it as a kind of ‘divine mind’, a pure potentiality containing within itself every possibility of form, every “idea” that might ever be realised. Just as infinite statues are implicitly present within the uncarved block, so every form is present in the pure potentiality at the base of reality.2 As the Mahayana Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna said, 'Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible.'
The Book of Chuang Tzu similarly says,
‘There is something which exists, though it emerges from no roots, it returns through no opening. It exists but has no place; it survives yet has no beginning nor end. Though it emerges through no opening, there is something which tells us it is real. It is real but it has no permanent place: this tells us it is a dimension of space. It survives, but has no beginning nor end: this tells us it has dimensions of time. It is born, it dies, it emerges, it returns, though in its emergence and return there is no form to be seen. This is what we call the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is non-existence, and all forms of life emerge from non-existence. That which exists cannot cause things to exist. They all arise from non-existence. Non-existence is the oneness of non-existence. This is the hidden knowledge of the sages.’3
Looking at the issue another way, we might consider this pure potentiality as existing negatively. It is not a thing at all, but the absence of any thing. It is ultimate formlessness. It is this absence, this non-existence, which allows all things to come into being and to endlessly transform.
Does this mean that there may be a thing-in-itself after all? Not quite. Firstly, because this pure potentiality is not a thing, since it is entirely indeterminate, and more of a lack of things. And secondly, because it is not "in-itself". Pure potentiality, qua potentiality, is potentiality for something. It is relational. It exists in relation to all possible forms. We might say that it is relationality itself.
In that case, does nothing exist at all? No, it is only intrinsic self-existence that is rejected. We can say that entities truly exist, but they exist in and as their interrelations, much as matter exists in and as its form. They are fully real, but fully interdependent. There are myriad things, but no things-in-themselves. All things are interdependent, all things are in flux, and nothing is static.
I don’t know about you, but I find this vision of reality terrifically beautiful and exciting.
What do you think?
Do you find this idea beautiful or exciting?
Did I make a logical leap or error in my reasoning?
Is this all absurd for some reason I’ve overlooked?
Are there any interesting implications to this idea?
Please let me know in the comments :)
cf. ‘The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries’:
The insight of interbeing is that nothing can exist by itself alone, that each thing exists only in relation to everything else. The insight of impermanence is that nothing is static, nothing stays the same. Interbeing means emptiness of a separate self, however impermanence also means emptiness of a separate self. Looking from the perspective of space we call emptiness “interbeing”; looking from the perspective of time we call it “impermanence.” (p 44)
This would make for an interesting inversion of the Platonist conception of the One as the top of the chain of being and the Mind/Nous emanating from it (later adjusted and adopted by Christianity). This is somewhat similar to Whitehead’s inversion of Platonism in seeing the ‘Creativity’ (his counterpart to the One) and his ‘eternal objects’ (forms) as potentialities rather than the higher reality.
I also think this idea of ‘mind’ as potentiality/emptiness sounds very promising. But this will require some further thought.
cf. ‘The Book of Chuang Tzu’, ch 23, p 205, Penguin Classics (kindle version)
It does not follow from your reasoning about matter and form that _everything_ is empty of intrinsic self-existence. All it shows is that the actuality of things cannot arise from either their matter nor their form, and that all finite, contingent things are all empty of intrinsic self-existence. This does not only not rule out the existence of something that is neither matter nor form, but necessitates it.
This is because interdependence cannot account for the actuality of any object. If neither A nor B in themselves have actual existence, rather they only have the potential for existence, the unity of A and B cannot be actual either, unless this unity is more than the sum of its parts. But then, since nothing can produce that which is "more" than itself, this unity itself must be given by something other than A and B. And this is the One, which is the principle of the unity of the various interdependent entities comprising the universe.
You ask if there are any logical errors or leaps in your reasoning. I noticed that you began by asking what if the Earth or planets disappeared, and then proceeded, bit by bit, to make the Sun disappear instead. This might trouble some readers. I think your point is that once you remove the properties of a thing, the effects of those properties are also removed. This is more dramatic in the case of the Sun.
Would it have worked to begin by asking what if the Sun disappeared? It would have been easier for the reader to jump ahead and realize, at least, that the planets would go spinning off. Unfortunately it would also suggest that you can't have the properties or effects of a thing without having the thing. This is certainly not what you want to suggest.
(Here I want to stop and object to the word "properties," which is a confusing reification of "effects" -- as if properties existed as "things" of some kind. I've never liked that word. I'm just going to talk about effects.)
On the other hand, do you want to suggest that you can't have a thing without having the effects -- and therefore, that there are no "things" as such, only effects? I think this may be the same misunderstanding, turned on its head. "Things" and "effects" seem to be two sides of the same coin.
Likewise when we consider finer and finer articulations of "matter" until we come to a "prime matter" which is really "no-matter," but only "effects," some sort of leap across that coin seems to be required. That may be the wrong way of looking at it -- not that there's any right way, necessarily, so kudos for trying!
I see potentiality, not as a sort of basis for being and becoming , as if it were a building-block for more of the same, but as a possibility for being and becoming, as if it were an opportunity for being to happen. I'm not sure that's any clearer. Your account at least has the benefit of offering a glimmer of what needs to be said.
Byung-Chul Han, a German-South Korean philosopher who is enjoying something of a moment, once wrote a book called _Absence_. About a year ago I read it, but I found it hard to understand. I must read it again.