August 6, 2018

The Presence of Nothing in Time

Florge Paulo A. Sy

With my affinity to Martin Heidegger’s words and works, I will speak of the Nothing as
regards to his understanding of it; for it is in this way that I have come to look at a particular
angle within the relation between Being and Time, his major work, and What is Metaphysics?,
the work where he expounds on the Nothing.

The angle I am looking at consists of the missing correspondence between Nothing and
Time because, although Heidegger talks about the relation between Being and Time, he shied
away from including Time when he spoke about the Nothing, despite contending that Being and
Nothing are the same.1 But if both Being and Nothing are the same, then would it not be fruitless
to talk about a relation between Nothing and Time, for Nothing could only be substituted with
Being? Not necessarily, because Heidegger distinctly characterizes the nihilative behavior of the
Nothing, which is not found in his conception of Being. Thus, there is substantial, if not little,
value in composing a piece about the relation between Nothing and Time. My supposition is that,
due to the unwavering difficulty of understanding Heidegger’s conception of the Nothing,2 it,
and, therefore, also Being, can be grasped more clearly through Time, that is, particularly,
“primordial time”3 or the temporality of Dasein.

In Being and Time, Heidegger stresses that primordial time is not our ordinary
understanding of time as a series of now’s, in which there is a past that indicates “a former
occasion,” a future that indicates “then,” and a present that indicates “now.” These assignations
of ordinary time fall under what Heidegger calls “datability.”4 Datability, however, is derived
primordially from Dasein’s “[e]cstatico-horizonal temporality [that] temporalizes itself primarily
in terms of the future,”5 due to the projective character of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being. But in
spite of constituting the ordinary conception of time, datability, I wager, gives us a hint in
understanding the nihilative behavior of the Nothing.

1
See Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings from Being and Time to the Task of
Thinking, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 108.
2
See Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 19.
3
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row,
1962), 377.
4
Ibid., 459
5
Ibid., 479
 By assuming our position in the ordinary present or in the now, we are able to discover
things that are or what Heidegger calls beings “present-at-hand,”6 susceptible to re-presentation,
objectification, and calculation. But through the decay―the breaking down and withering
away―of things, it can also be observed that they are sometimes not. The change from what is to
what will-no-longer-be occurs within the arrangement of the ordinary conception of time:
whatever is at present could no-longer-be in the future, for when it is in the future, what it was
will already be taken as in the past. In other words, a thing that is can be what it is not either as
something that has already been or as something that could be. The present, therefore, is the
“hinge” of a being to be not-being. But how, at all, are we able to speak of this “not?”

According to Heidegger, the “not” is not a negation or an annihilation of being, such that
they are at one point and not anymore at another. Rather, and originarily, the “not” comes from
the Nothing that nihilates, by which Heidegger means that the Nothing “originally belongs to
their [to beings’] essential unfolding as such.”7 Unfolding here means “presencing.” For
Heidegger, the Nothing, therefore, resides along presence―presence, which is the Being of
beings. But would the ordinary conception of time not suggest that, because beings presence at
present, their “not-ness” conceived in the past and in the future―that is, the “not” that is derived
from the Nothing; would it not suggest that the Nothing is, therefore, the absence of what is at
present? Is it not contradictory for Nothing to be the absence of what is and, at the same time, its
very essential presencing? Thus, how do we resolve this tension between presence and absence?

In our everyday understanding, absence is taken as what is not-present or unpresent. We

can, therefore, say that, by still assuming our position in the now, absence is when “what was
intended to be here and now as being is not-being or nothing.” And that is because that being,
which is nothing for now, either was present only in the past or will still be present in the future.
Thus, the present, again, is, so to speak, the “hinge” between the past and the future in order to
determine the not-ness of what is at present. But if the Nothing is found only in either the past or
the future, then how could the Nothing nihilate or presence beings in the present? How can the
Nothing, taken as absence in time, presence? Or would it be the case that, instead of assigning
the present as the hinge that determines the possibility of absence through the presencing of
beings at present, it is the not-ness of the past and the of future discerned at present that beckons
the possibility of presence? Is that, perhaps, why Heidegger contends that the temporality of
Dasein “temporalizes primarily in terms of the future?”8 Such a supposition, however, dissipates
the Nothing’s nihilative behavior because it is not found in the present. Does the Nothing
necessarily have to be found in the present for it to nihilate beings? Yes and no; for the Nothing
is not any particular being that presences itself at present, but is rather a “happening”―the play

6
See Ibid., 48
7
Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 104.
8
Heidegger, Being and Time, 479.
in a play, so to speak―where beings presence at present. How? The Nothing allows beings to
realize in their presencing that they are and that they are not not-being.

The Nothing, therefore, is grasped only in the present presencing of beings, and yet is not
located in-among beings, but is present as absence―an absence not of beings, for that would
relegate the Nothing as a mere negation, but more accurately the absence of absence in order for
there to be presence. What is, then, the Nothing of the past, which is what no-longer-is, and the
Nothing of the future, which is what is not-yet, are ultimately discerned in the present; for only in
the present can the Nothing ever be spoken of, not because the Nothing of the past and of the
future produce the presencing of beings in the present, but more precisely because there is the
absence of the past and of the future in the present. That is, the nihilative function of the Nothing
is that it allows us to speak of it but only ever in its presence as absence.

We cannot ever really speak of nothing about the Nothing because, in doing so, we
always affirm the presencing of beings and use their presence to demonstrate the seriousness of
Nothing at present. It is also in this gesture of being able to talk about the Nothing through the
Being of beings that we come to realize that the possibility of the presence of Nothing is not
primarily due to the negation of beings, but is due to the hiddenness of itself in plain sight. The
Nothing, therefore, happens in a twofold manner: (a) the nihilation of beings, and (b) the
annihilation of itself. In other words, although Heidegger says that our capability of negation or
annihilation is derived from the Nothing, the Nothing happens as the original annihilation, which
is the annihilation of itself to pave way for the nihilation of beings. Thus, whatever is present is
only because of whatever is absent. What is that which is absent? Discerned in the present, it the
absence supposedly found in the past and in the future as what is not-present.

In an essay entitled Anaximander’s Saying, Heidegger speaks of this play between

presence and absence. He writes:

What is past and future are also present, present, that is to say, outside the region
of unconcealment. The unpresently present is the absent. As such, it remains
essentially related to the presently present, insofar as it either comes forth into the
region of unconcealment or withdraws from it. The absent is also present and, as
absent from it, presences in unconcealment… everything present and absent is
gathered and preserved in one presencing… Presencing preserves that which
presences in unconcealment, both what is present now and what is not.9

Thus, the Nothing can only be referenced in both the past and the future because it is
absent in the present presencing of beings. But because we cannot ever really locate when the
past and the future are, for they are-not, then we can only speak of the Nothing in terms of the
present as present in its “presently-absent-happening” or nihilation of beings. The Nothing

9
Martin Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth
Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 261-2.
cancels out the datability of primordial time because the Nothing is not located either in the past
or in the future, but is located as the happening of presence (presencing) in the present as the
absence of absence. To speak about the Nothing as its own absencing is also, therefore, the
affirmation of the Being of beings. Situated within time, one cannot be without the other. Does
the employment of temporality, then, give us a hint to answering the question “Why is there
something rather than nothing?”
References

Heidegger, Martin. “A Dialogue on Language.” In On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter

D. Hertz, 1-56. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
________. “Anaximander’s Saying.” In Off the Beaten Track. Edited by Julian Young and
Kenneth Haynes, 242-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
________. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper
& Row, 1962.
________. “What is Metaphysics?” In Basic Writings from Being and Time to the Task of
Thinking. Edited by David Farrell Krell, 89-110. New York: HarperCollins, 1977.