Spinoza: No-thing is Not Nothing
There is a distinct difference between non-existence and nothingness. These are two different things, and if you have ever read any of the Zohar or studied Jewish Kabbalah you know this difference well! "God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness." 1 The question of Kabbalah is: (What exists before both light and darkness?) If darkness is the absence of light, and light can only exist where darkness once was, what could possibly exist prior to both? This is what they call Ein Sof ("unending"). This distinction is incredibly interesting, as it's not addressed by many systems of metaphysics. The general assumption is that this difference doesn't make sense, and nothingness is simply what is not. Spinoza, for example argued everything that does exist is within God. Nothingness, for him could not exist. It does not have the causal power to exist. He uses the word vacuum instead of nothingness. "As then, there does not exist a vacuum in nature (a subject I discuss elsewhere), but all parts are bound to come together to prevent it, it follows from this also that the parts cannot be really distinguished, and that extended substance in so far as it is substance cannot be divided." 2
This is the question: we know about yin and yang, but what about the paper the two are drawn on? An existing and non-existing thing are reliant on each other. Within a hot coffee is a coffee that will soon grow cold. That cold coffee does not exist materially, but it exists in potentiality of what already exists. When I say the coffee is hot, I'm inadvertently saying the coffee is not cold. There’s a joke I heard from Zizek also about coffee. A man goes into the store and orders a coffee without milk. And the Barista says: "sorry, we’re out of milk. Can I get you some coffee without cream." He continues, "What you don't get is part of the identity of what you do get."3 This is what makes the distinction matter. Things are defined by what they are not. The coffee is still differentiated intensely by what it's not. The coffee is very easy to comprehend! Whereas something like nothingness, you cannot describe. There aren't words for it because our words do exist, our minds do exist. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," as Wittgenstein says.4 Both the existent and non-existent causally rely on each other, both also rely on nothingness. Even for a total materialist citing the big bang, existence comes from non-existence. I don't feel like writing a conclusion.