Nature and Nothingness : An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology

This book explores four types of nothingness as found in nature: holes in nature, totalizing nothingness in horror, naturing nothingness, and encompassing nothingness. Robert S. Corrington argues that though nothingness takes many forms, they are all guises of the same vast Nothingness.

In this book, an ordinal phenomenological description of four modes of nothingness in nature is made that becomes sharply open to Spinoza’s great divide between nature naturing and nature natured. The former term refers to nature’s unconscious dimension, while the latter term denotes the innumerable orders of the world. Four types of nothingness are described as they interact with the human process. An important theme is the correlation between certain kinds of religion and their built-in tendency toward extreme forms of violence. Analyses of the psychoanalytic elements that make this connection almost inevitable are made using the work of C.G. Jung, and Wilhelm Reich. Otto Rank’s work is used to describe the phenomenon of genius as it creatively works with the community of interpreters. A case study of Beethoven and his manic-depressive disorder completes the analysis of Genius. Finally, the works of Karl Jaspers and Nāgārjuna are utilized to shed light on the deepest form of nothingness.