What is Emptiness Worth?
Earlier this week I was gearing up to write something about Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and Winnicott’s False Self. There was an idea I was wanting to play with about the revelations of the subject who gets pulled from the cave, the return to the other cave dwellers, and the way in which that represents an internal conflict the subject engages in with itself. However, as I was rereading the allegory, I was struck by some of the language Socrates uses with regards to “the lack” and his manner of questioning his own position, which raised in me a particular question which took shape as I was meeting with some clients that day: what is emptiness worth?
Ignore the quantitative nature of the language for a moment, and I think we will see that this is a question that derives its own worth from its rhetorical value. These days, so many struggle with feelings of loneliness, concerns about being an imposter, feeling unfulfilled, wanting to destroy what they have because they can’t get what they want. Fundamentally they are each in their own way wrestling with a deeply meaningful question at the center of so much of human existence. Why should nothing (at times) be preferrable to something?
In the allegory, the lack Socrates speaks of is a very specific lack: the lack of education of the masses. A kind of intellectual numbness brought on by an adherence to the illusions of the world as they are presented to us. Socrates is harping on a particular kind of awakening here, using his extended metaphor to talk about the awakening of “the good”, a concept of fundamental importance to the Greeks in their quest for universal truths in their philosophical explorations. Especially true for Socrates whose approach to philosophy ultimately became a challenge to a state he saw as corrupt and unjust in the ways it roused folks through demagoguery against their own best interests. It’s notable that Socrates here represents his suspicions as something that looks an awful lot like some form of entertainment, with those stuck in the cave distracted from their bondage by the images that get cast for them along the stone wall they are forced to look upon.
This brings us to our first predicament as it pertains to emptiness and worth, which is that there are different kinds of emptinesses of different kinds of value. The emptiness we speak of as a core component of the human experience is not to be confused with the “empty calories” of engaging in frivolous activities. The emptiness which is lack or nothingness is a kind of emptiness that exists within us. It is exactly the thing which we are hopelessly trying to fill up when we engage in things that otherwise feel shallow. This is not to say these are necessarily bad things. Watching trashy television, reading pulpy popular novels, or binging out on social media can each be a fun and stimulating thing, but only in the same way that eating a cupcake can be a nice compliment to finishing a nourishing and nutritious meal. Constantly gorging oneself on desserts does nothing to actually satisfy and satiate ones hunger, a physiological emptiness we must also concern ourselves with, in the same way that many young people venture into my office complaining of the gravitational force of technology and media in their lives, knowing how little it offers them, but struggling to pull away for fear that they might miss something. As we think about that experience, and before older generations get on those high horses, let us not forget that 20-30 years ago the data was suggesting that the average American was watching something like 4-6 hours of television a day. And I’m sure we could trace these kinds of social distractions even further back than that. When we are not called upon to be constantly working and supporting ourselves, avoidance of these facets of life seems to become a basic strategy. As with other things, as our technology becomes more sophisticated and efficient, so do our means of avoidance of those spaces that seem impossible to fill.
The kind of lack or emptiness Socrates is talking about in The Allegory of the Cave is fundamentally a present-at-hand lack, the lack of an education in right thinking as a specific type of thing-in-the-world. However, I think this present-at-hand lack can be better understood if we understand its basis in an existential lack, which brings us back to Heidegger. There is an extraordinary passage in the MacQuarrie & Robinson translation that begins on page 328 and goes to about page 332 depending on how far one wants to be carried by the tides of the text. It is located in paragraph 58, which is part of Division II Chapter 2, titled Understanding the Appeal, and Guilt. Here, Heidegger starts with exactly the kind of lack we are talking about above. The kind of lack that is a “not-present-at-hand” and is therefore still present-at-hand in its manner of its being an absence. After a lengthy chapter detailing what lack isn’t in the context of an existential guilt, Heidegger brings us barreling into the concept of Being as temporality.
Heidegger notes that we are thrownness, projection, and fallen; his modes of describing our being our past, future, and present respectively. The section is so dense and so critical, that I feel it would be a failure to whoever had made it this far to try to paraphrase, so I will excerpt it in chunks and hope we can make some use of it as we carry it forward:
“As being, Dasein is something that has been thrown; it has been brought into its ‘there’, but not of its own accord. As being, it has taken the definite form of a potentiality-for-Being which has heard itself and has devoted itself to itself, but not as itself. As existent, it never comes back behind its thrownness in such a way that it might first release it’s ‘that-it-is-and-has-to-be’ from its Being-its-Self and lead it into the ‘there’…[t]o this entity it has been delivered over, and as such it can exist solely as the entity which it is; and as this entity to which it has been thus delivered over, it is, in its existing, the basis of its potentiality-for-Being. Although it has not laid that basis itself, it reposes in the weight of it, which is made manifest to it as a burden by Dasein’s mood.”
Then we get Dasein as future:
“And how is Dasein this thrown basis? Only in that it projects itself upon possibilities into which it has been thrown. The Self…can never get that basis into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over Being-a-basis. To be its own thrown basis is that potentiality-for-Being which is the issue for care.”
Which gives us a foundation for understanding what this existential lack really is:
“In being a basis—that is in exiting as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis. Thus “Being-as-basis” means never to have power over one’s own most being from the ground up.”
This is how we are a nothing and is Heidegger’s major argument against the egoism of Descartes and other Enlightenment thinkers. Cognizing or making meaningful sense of our being or various aspects of our being-in-the-world come downstream of that being itself. And that being as a basis for being Dasein is temporal. We are, before we are anything else, thrown projection, but that thrownness is always a ‘there’ in as much as it is given over and disclosed to us, or better yet disclosed through us. If it is true that it is more of a ‘there’ than a ‘here-in-us’ than it is in someways not ours, and there for our basis for being is somehow also not ours, which means that before we even “are”, that is before we get the chance to be, we must be “a not”.
For Heidegger, we could passively (that is inauthentically) receive this, funneling any responses we might have as to how to manage this existence through society, the culture, language, customs, our own routine, all the things that are categorically not Dasein. Or we can “take it over” and in this way assert our being and authentically reckon with this nothingness which lends itself to a kind of thrown possibility of existence.
This is what emptiness is worth. Emptiness interpreted purely as a lack of lost or missing experience becomes the present-at-hand emptiness of a felt sense of privation. But emptiness understood as rooted in a lack which is the nothingness of our being becomes a space of profound possibility. In this we undermine the assumption that somehow nothing is less than something. Something is always only that which it already is. Nothingness always implies the possibility of moreness. Emptiness as a moreness is emptiness as potential space. It is our ability to turn ourselves over in relationship to that which is other than what already is, opening up the possibility for the expression of some otherness which is more than the is-ness of our already being what we are.
This is the remarkable truth which Socrates brought to the Greek philosophical tradition. It is not just skepticism or cynicism, but an embracing of negation, a turning towards the lack and discerning that in moments which we are not or have not yet seen can disclose to us the possibility of a more profound truth about the nature of our existence. You can read the entirety of Being and Time into the Allegory of the Cave; being-in-the-world, the They, befindlischkeit, existential guilt, anticipatory resoluteness, they are all there. With a conclusion that observes coming into Being as a kind of labor. That we must get into our emptiness, turn our bodies towards the things we cannot bear to see, blinding as they are, and discover their contents. Being Socrates, he only asks the question, but I think we can venture that the answer is that we must do philosophy to learn to bear this emptiness. Montaigne said it best “to philosophize is to learn to die”. It is the process of reckoning with the emptiness, with contending with the realization that we are right now, and some day will be no longer. That if we can bear the burdens of that, we might make the being of it all a bit more bearable, a bit richer, and a bit less caught up in the bondages of distraction.
