Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Nothing’ occupies a position of surprising philosophical density, functioning not as mere absence but as an active, generative ground. The term traverses at least four distinct registers. In the mystical-theological register — represented by Eckhart, Boehme, and the Gnostic Apocryphon of John as read through James, McGilchrist, and Meyer — Nothing names the apophatic ground of divinity: ineffable, prior to differentiation, paradoxically more real than any positive content. In the ontological register, Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet’ (Nothing noths) receives sustained attention from McGilchrist as evidence that Nothing is agentive rather than merely privative — a move that aligns structurally with Eckhart’s negatio negationis and the Taoist and Kabbalistic withdrawal-as-creation. In the Schopenhauerian-ascetic register, Nothing designates the terminus of will-negation: the apparent void into which the saint passes and which, Schopenhauer admits, only appears empty from within the perspective of will. Finally, in the Jungian analytic register, Jung’s seminar deploys Nothing as a logical counter — the ‘nothing in the unconscious’ whose opposite, ‘something,’ marks psychic integration. These positions share a common tension: is Nothing a destination to be sought, a logical limit, or the secret plenitude underlying all manifestation?
it may fitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any of them.
Boehme’s formulation, cited by James, establishes Nothing as the apophatic name for divine Primal Love — a ground surpassing all positive predication and therefore denominated by negation.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’). There is nothing to which
McGilchrist explicates Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet’ to argue that Nothing possesses active, agentive character rather than functioning as bare privation, aligning it with Being as a primal ontological category.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’). There is nothing to which
Parallel passage confirming McGilchrist’s argument that Heidegger’s Nothing is generative and active, not a logical zero — a position McGilchrist frames against the ‘limited thinking’ of analytic philosophers.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness… According to the Tao Te Ching, the tao is ‘the deep source of everything. It is nothing, and yet in everything’.
McGilchrist assembles a cross-traditional convergence — Eckhart, Boehme, Kabbalah, Taoism — showing that Nothing as negatio negationis is the structural correlate of supreme plenitude across mystical ontologies.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness… According to the Tao Te Ching, the tao is ‘the deep source of everything. It is nothing, and yet in everything’.
Parallel passage establishing the perennialist thesis that the ultimate ontological ground is identified as Nothing across Eckhartian, Kabbalistic, and Taoist frameworks.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
this will seem like a transition into an empty nothing… what ascetics negate for the sake of nothing, is precisely the world of representation, which is the mirror in which the will to life comes to know itself.
Schopenhauer’s ascetic nothing is disclosed as the negation of the world-as-representation: Nothing appears empty only from within the will’s own perspective, while marking the cessation of suffering.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis
this will seem like a transition into an empty nothing… what ascetics negate for the sake of nothing, is precisely the world of representation, which is the mirror in which the will to life comes to know itself.
Parallel passage from Sharpe and Ure presenting Schopenhauer’s account of Nothing as the ascetic’s destination — the dissolution of will and its representational world.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis
The One is illimitable, since there is nothing before it to limit it… invisible, since nothing has seen it… unnameable, since there is nothing before it to give it a name.
The Apocryphon of John deploys serial negations — nothing before, nothing limiting, nothing naming — to constitute the One as a transcendent ground accessible only through apophatic enumeration.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting
there is nothing in the unconscious. And you believe the opposite of that nothingness. Nothing has been left in the unconscious; nothing, of which he believes the opposite, exists any longer.
Jung employs Nothing as a logical counter in dream interpretation: the absence of residue in the unconscious — ‘nothing left there’ — signals successful psychic integration when its opposite, ‘something,’ is consciously held.
, Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014supporting
I own nothing, I grasp nothing, I know nothing, I want nothing, I can do nothing. However, the entire universe crosses through me, arriving to fill me with its whirlwinds before leaving again.
Jodorowsky’s Tarot meditant uses quintupled nothing-statements as the via negativa of ego-dissolution, after which the self becomes a transparent vessel for universal content.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting
if ‘nothing’ means the same as not existing in actuality, this ‘kind of being’ is certainly nothing, because it does not exist in actuality, and therefore it comes from nothing, that is, it comes from no cause.
Caterus’s objection to Descartes highlights the equivocation in ‘nothing’ between logical non-existence and the ‘ens rationis,’ anticipating the ontological ambiguity that depth-psychological appropriations of the term exploit.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
All-or-nothing thinking has its roots in the messages and actions of our parents.
The ACA recovery literature identifies ‘all-or-nothing’ cognition as a clinically relevant pattern rooted in dysfunctional family dynamics — a colloquial but psychologically pertinent use of the nothing-polarity.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012aside