Nothing: A Philosophical History

From Laozi to Bertrand Russell via Nagarjuna, Lucretius, the nonexistent Saint Katherine of Alexandria, and many more, each of Sorensen's twenty-two chapters pairs a philosopher with an expression of nothing. It may be the nonexistence of the planet Vulcan, which never did exist; of Socrates, who is no more; or the discombobulating, semi-nonexistence of shadows, reflections, vanishing points, borders, and holes. Infinite void surrounds the Stoic cosmos, and infinite void separates the atoms of Epicurus. Sartre found enough in nothingness to write a whole book about it, or at least half of one (L’être et le néant). Parisians queued at the Louvre to see the dusty space where Mona Lisa once existed. The painting was stolen in 1911. Even Franz Kafka made a visit to see what was not there, or to see its absence. Sorensen recounts how a nonexistent scientific article, unpublished in a nonexistent journal, has been cited over one thousand times. So it may be his private joke that this book contains a discomfiting quantity of letters that do not exist where they should—otherwise known as typos—one every eighteen pages on average. The first one that I noticed makes looking for others fun. Here is a line exactly as printed on page 104: “In 1440 Lorenzo Valla proved that the Donation of Constantine could have been written in the fourth century.” The missing word is “not.” Nobody's perfect.