Nothingness Meme: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Last updated: November 4, 2026

The nothingness meme stages a family drama in two panels: nothingness tenderly lifts up “Eastern philosophers”, then, as “Also nothingness”, beats “Western philosophers” bloody. The Western beating has a well-known starting point. In his Principles of Nature and Grace (1714), section 7, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asked “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and added that “nothing is simpler and easier than something” (Jonathan Bennett’s English version). If nothing is the default, every existing thing needs an explanation; Roy Sorensen’s SEP entry notes that Heidegger famously characterized it as the most fundamental issue of philosophy. The Eastern half of the meme is harder to pin down, because one widely discussed Buddhist “nothing”, śūnyatā or emptiness, turns out to mean something rather different from a void.

The meme uses two stills from an animated superhero series. On top, under blue sky and green trees, a broad-shouldered man with a dark moustache and greying hair, labelled “Nothingness”, swings a laughing small boy labelled “Eastern philosophers” up into the air. Below, the same man, now in a blood-spattered red and white costume with a cape, pins a battered young man in a yellow and blue suit against a rock face with his fist raised. The man is labelled “Also nothingness”, his victim “Western philosophers”.

Leibniz Asked the Question and Answered It in the Next Section

Leibniz’s answer to “why is there something rather than nothing?” is God, and he gets there through the principle of sufficient reason.

Section 7 of the Principles of Nature and Grace turns on that principle: nothing comes about without a sufficient reason, a reason why it is so and not otherwise. Applied to the whole universe, it produces two questions: why anything exists at all, given that nothing would be simpler, and why things exist the way they do. Section 8 argues that no chain of contingent things can settle this, because every body and every motion only pushes the question back one step. The reason has to lie in “something that exists necessarily”, carrying the reason for its existence within itself, and Leibniz calls that being God. The Greeks had already made “nothing” hard to talk about: Parmenides warned against the road of “it is not”, and Sorensen’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on nothingness sums him up as holding that it is self-defeating to say something does not exist.

The step that does the work is the claim that nothing is “simpler and easier”. Sorensen’s entry shows how attractive it can look: an empty world is the one that requires the least effort to produce and sustain, in his words “Just do nothing!” The same entry notes that the doctrine of creation out of nothing presupposes that total nothingness is possible at all, which is exactly what Parmenides denied.

The Nothing Nothings: Heidegger’s Freiburg Lecture

Martin Heidegger turned the question around: for him the nothing is something we experience, in anxiety, before we ever think about it logically.

Heidegger gave “What Is Metaphysics?” as his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg on 24 July 1929. His claim was that the nothing reaches us before logic does, through a mood. In anxiety, beings as a whole slip away from us, we are left hovering with nothing to hold on to, and, in the English of the Pathmarks edition, “the nothing unveils itself in anxiety”. Then comes the sentence that made the lecture infamous: “The nothing itself nihilates.” Heidegger even rewrites the old maxim ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing, into ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit, “from the nothing all beings as beings come to be”. The lecture ends on Leibniz’s question, “Why are there beings at all”, and why not nothing.

Six years later, in the lecture course published as Introduction to Metaphysics (summer semester 1935), Heidegger opened with the same question, rendered by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” And he refused Leibniz’s exit. Quoting the opening of Genesis, he says, is no answer to the question at all, since a believer cannot really ask it without giving up being a believer: “What is really asked in our question is, for faith, foolishness.” He adds that a “Christian philosophy” is a round square.

Carnap’s Red Pen and the Physicist’s Vacuum

The strongest objections to all this come from logic and from physics, and both say the question may be badly formed.

Rudolf Carnap answered Heidegger in 1932 with “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, published in the journal Erkenntnis. His examples were snippets from Heidegger’s lecture, ending with the line rendered “The Nothing itself nothings”, and the SEP entry reports that the passage became notorious as a specimen of metaphysical nonsense. The philosopher Frederick Kroon, in a 2018 review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, sums up the analytic charge as “a failure to grasp the quantificational nature of ‘nothing’”: “nothing” says that there is no thing of some kind, and grammar tempts us to treat it as the name of a strange object. Heidegger had an answer ready, since he held that our logical “not” grows out of the experience of nothing. Sorensen also notes that some critics complain of the opposite problem, too many meanings in Heidegger’s sentences rather than too few.

Physics took a different shot. In A Universe from Nothing (2012) the physicist Lawrence Krauss argued that quantum physics can explain how a universe arises from nothing, and the SEP entry lists Frank Wilczek and Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow among physicists who claim this answers Leibniz’s question. Reviewing Krauss in the New York Times in March 2012, the Columbia philosophy professor David Albert replied that the quantum vacuum is no nothing at all: vacuum states are “particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff”, and on that point “Krauss is dead wrong”. Albert’s further point is that the laws of quantum field theory have nothing to say about where those fields came from in the first place.

Five Answers to “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”

Philosophers have given roughly five kinds of answer to Leibniz’s question: a necessary being, a brute fact, a probability argument, the claim that the question is meaningless, and the idea that nothingness cancels itself out.

Leibniz’s own answer, God, is only the first. The most famous refusal came on BBC radio in 1948, when Bertrand Russell debated the Jesuit historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston about the existence of God. Asked whether the universe was unintelligible, Russell answered, according to the published transcript: “I shouldn’t say unintelligible; I think it is without explanation.” On this view the existence of something is a brute fact, and demanding a reason for everything is a habit we have no right to extend to the whole.

Peter van Inwagen tried a cleverer route in 1996. Imagine every possible world as a ticket in a cosmic lottery. There are infinitely many ways for there to be something, and only one way for there to be nothing, so, as Roy Sorensen’s SEP entry summarises the reasoning, “the probability of a populated world is equal to 1.” The empty world is not impossible, it is just “as improbable as anything can be!” The entry immediately points out the catch: by the same reasoning, the actual world, with you in it, is equally improbable. Robert Nozick, in Philosophical Explanations (1981), took Heidegger seriously enough to play with a nothing so powerful that it nihilates itself, and leaves a world behind; the SEP compares the image to a scene in Yellow Submarine. Thomas Baldwin’s “subtraction argument”, meanwhile, defends the possibility of an empty world by imagining objects vanishing one by one, which is precisely what makes Leibniz’s question bite.

Laid side by side, the answers show why the question has never been closed. Each one buys an answer at a price somebody refuses to pay.

Śūnyatā (Sunyata): Nāgārjuna’s Emptiness Still Holds the Tea

In Nāgārjuna’s Buddhist philosophy, śūnyatā (emptiness) means that nothing has a fixed, independent essence; it describes how things exist and leaves their existence in place.

Nāgārjuna, who lived around 150 to 250 CE according to Jan Westerhoff’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry, set out his thought in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the “Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”, some 450 stanzas long. Emptiness is always emptiness of something, and that something is svabhāva: intrinsic nature, a thing’s being what it is entirely on its own. Westerhoff stresses that emptiness is “not some kind of primordial reality” behind the world. In Jay Garfield’s translation of verse 24.18, “Whatever is dependently co-arisen / That is explained to be emptiness”, and the next verse draws the conclusion that a nonempty thing does not exist. A cup is empty because it depends on clay, a potter, a shape and the word “cup”, and the cup still holds your tea.

That is why the charge of nihilism, which Westerhoff’s entry takes up, tends to miss. Westerhoff notes that the Mādhyamikas are very clear that their position avoids both extreme views: things having a fixed essence, and things not existing at all. Garfield calls the school “quite consciously antinihilistic”, because conventional things stay real while lacking inherent existence. Nihilism in the Western sense, the claim that nothing has value or meaning, is a different question altogether, and our long read on nihilism and the search for meaning deals with it.

Zero: When Nothing Became a Number

While philosophers argued about whether nothing can exist, mathematicians in India quietly turned it into a number, and the Sanskrit word for zero, śūnya, simply means “empty”: śūnyatā is the same word with an abstract ending.

The oldest known written zero is a dot. It appears throughout the Bakhshali manuscript, a birch-bark mathematical text that a farmer found buried in a field near Peshawar, in present-day Pakistan, in 1881. When the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries had it carbon dated in 2017, parts of it turned out to come from the third or fourth century, about five centuries older than scholars had assumed, according to the university’s announcement. That dot was still a placeholder, the mark that tells you 101 is not 11. The decisive step came in 628 CE, when the astronomer Brahmagupta wrote what the same announcement calls “the first document to discuss zero as a number”, with rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying it.

The philosophical contrast is striking. In Greece, Parmenides had warned that “it is not” cannot even be thought, and Greek mathematics, brilliant as it was, worked without a number for nothing. In India the same centuries produced a word for emptiness that served Buddhist metaphysics and arithmetic at once. Whether the shared word reflects a shared way of thinking, or just a shared dictionary, is a question historians still debate. But the meme’s cheerful Eastern nothing has at least one concrete achievement on its record: every spreadsheet and smartphone in the world runs on it. Europe took a while to agree. The Hindu-Arabic numerals, zero included, reached a wide Latin readership through Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci in 1202, centuries after Brahmagupta.

Notice that zero does not settle Leibniz’s puzzle. A number for nothing is a tool for counting things that are absent from a particular place, Sartre’s missing Pierre written as a symbol. It says nothing about why there are any places, or any Pierres, at all.

The Hub of the Wheel and the Kyoto Detour

The meme’s split between a gentle Eastern nothing and a brutal Western one works as a joke, but the traditions behind it are less tidy, and Kyoto philosophers have studied and argued with Western ones for about a century. Sorensen even dates the turn to nothing to around the fifth century BCE, when “in China, India, and Greece, philosophers turned from what is, to what is not”.

Daoism is a good fit for the idea of nothing as fertile potential. Chapter 11 of the Daodejing, in James Legge’s translation, observes that thirty spokes meet in one hub, but the wheel works because of “the empty space (for the axle)”; the same goes for the hollow of a pot and the openings of a room. Chapter 40 says that existence “sprang from It as non-existent”. Even here caution helps: the SEP entry on nothingness cites the scholar JeeLoo Liu, who argues that Daoists and Confucians are speaking about formlessness rather than nothingness.

In twentieth-century Japan, the Kyoto School made the nothing a central idea. Nishida Kitarō (1870 to 1945) coined “absolute nothingness” (zettai mu), which Bret Davis’s SEP entry on the Kyoto School contrasts with relative nothingness, “a mere privation or simple negation of being”, roughly the nothing of the meme’s bottom panel. In the Mahāyāna background Davis sketches, true emptiness is meant to “dynamically negate the very opposition of being and (relative) nothingness” rather than take one side of it. The school talked directly with the West: Tanabe Hajime studied with Heidegger in the early 1920s, Nishitani Keiji from 1937 to 1939, and Nishitani described his task as overcoming nihilism “by way of passing through nihilism”.

Nishitani also turned the distinction on his teacher. As Davis quotes him, he found in Heidegger “traces of the representation of nothingness as some ‘thing’”, which he read as the residue of an ontological bias, a lingering preference for being over nothing.

Silence You Can Hear: Nothing in Art

Artists went looking for nothing in the twentieth century and found, much like Sartre in his café, that it is always full of something.

The most famous attempt is John Cage’s 4′33″. On 29 August 1952 the pianist David Tudor sat down at a piano in the Maverick Concert Hall, a wooden hall in the woods near Woodstock, New York, opened and closed the lid to mark three movements, and played nothing at all. As BBC Music Magazine recounts, Cage had visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard the year before, a room built to absorb every echo, and was surprised to hear two sounds, one high and one low. The engineer told him they were his nervous system and his blood circulation. Cage’s conclusion, “There’s no such thing as silence”, is a musician’s version of David Albert’s point about the quantum vacuum. Take everything away, and the audience’s coughs, the wind in the trees and your own pulse are still there.

Six years later the painter Yves Klein emptied a gallery instead of a score. For Le Vide, The Void, at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958, the walls were painted white and the exhibition consisted of the empty room; according to Tate Papers, “the empty gallery was itself the exhibit”, and the opening-night crowd was so dense that, in Klein’s words, one could not move anywhere. Both works turn the meme’s question into an experience. You walk in expecting nothing and discover how much you bring with you, which may be the most Western and the most Buddhist lesson of the whole debate at the same time.

What Nothing Looks Like, From a Café Table

If you want to see nothing, Jean-Paul Sartre suggests turning up late to a café: you will see an absence.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre arrives late for an appointment with Pierre at a café, scans the café, and finds him missing. Sorensen’s SEP entry puts it this way: Sartre “sees the absence of Pierre but not the absence of the Duke of Wellington”. Every room is empty of millions of things, but only the absence you were expecting jumps out. The nothing we perceive, on this view, grows out of a frustrated expectation. On Sartre’s account, then, nothing looks like a full café with Pierre missing from it.

The comforting side of nothingness has an ancient source too. Lucretius, Epicurus’ Roman disciple, argued in De Rerum Natura Book III that the endless time before our birth is a mirror of the time after death, and asked of that mirror, in the translation quoted by the SEP entry on death, “Is this so grim, so gloomy?” Philosophers still argue over this “symmetry argument”, since we tend to mind losing future years more than missing past ones. The Epicurean argument that death is nothing to us gets its own post, Epicurus on death.

If the whole question of being has you wondering what metaphysics even is, start with our beginner’s guide to metaphysics.