Try to think of Nothing. When you do, you find that you are thrown back into the thought of particular things. But are those things the same, or have they been transformed by the attempt to think away their existence, by the encounter with Nothingness? The classic account of the role of Nothing in consciousness was given by Martin Heidegger in “What is Metaphysics.” He held that when we lose all our focus on things around us, Nothing looms just over the horizon of our consciousness. When we try to approach it we are thrown back into our thought of things.

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