What do you expect from a book entitled, A Philosophy of Emptiness? Nothing? Blank pages? While a blank page might well express emptiness, a philosophy of emptiness necessarily goes deeper, according to Gay Watson. It considers the blankness of the page, the loss of authoritative narratives to ground and structure identity; it attends to feelings of loss, resisting the desire to turn away, so as to discover “what there is in the emptiness, the reality, the process and potential that arises from the undistracted gaze” (166).

Gay Watson wants to draw our attention to emptiness, not for academic or theoretical reasons, but for therapeutic ones. In her view, a good deal of Western philosophical and religious thought can be understood as a reaction to the experience of emptiness–that anxious quest to understand what it’s all for. We hanker to fill the emptiness this question opens with solid, permanent answers that ground our origin, identity and end, but a philosophy of emptiness suggests a different path, namely, one that embraces this experience as a way of being. Philosophy, for Watson, is ultimately a way of living. As such, a philosophy of emptiness is a way of living informed by the experience of emptiness. Tracing both the idea and practice of emptiness from its origins in Buddhism through Taoism, Hellenistic thought, Christian mysticism, and post-modernism, Watson not only attempts to establish that a philosophy of emptiness has been continuously operating at the margins of the so-called philosophies of presence, but also that this alternative path is particularly relevant now, when science is revealing a physical and cognitive world more complex, fluid and indeterminate than we had supposed. A philosophy of emptiness accommodates the loss of foundations, substance and unquestionable metanarratives by opening a space for uncertainty that is not a vacuum of nihilism.

Experience is the source of a philosophy of emptiness. In Watson’s view, “A careful exploration of emptiness entails not only or even theory, but necessitates practice involving both mind and body; emotion, sensation and intellect. It is a path” (19).  The path, however, isn’t specifically spiritual or mystical; meditation is simply a practice of meta-attention that “provides rich, experiential lessons in impermanence, non-selfhood, and emptiness, as well as the richness of what is left when these are acknowledged and lived with” (25). Surprisingly, this practice of attention is not confined to Buddhist and Taoist approaches, Watson finds it operating in Hellenistic thought as well as in the processes of making and experiencing art.  She also cites intriguing neuroscience research suggesting that practices of attention may have salutary effects on mental health.

Having established that a philosophy of emptiness is rooted in practice, Watson explores the way the concept of emptiness or sunyata developed in Buddhist philosophy. Early Buddhism emphasized anatta or not-self, seeking to expose the illusion of a essential, stable, independent self, leaving in its place a self perpetually in process, so dependent upon and entangled with the wild world of causes and conditions as to render the statement ‘this is myself’ nonsense. This stress on self as process has the effect of evacuating the sense of a fixed, permanent and essential self. The point of this self-emptying for the early Buddhists was therapeutic and soteriological, it was a path aimed at liberation from suffering. The Mahayana or Greater Vehicle schools extend this emptiness of self to all phenomena. The idea is that everything is empty of an essential, independent identity. Like the self, all phenomena arise from a network of conditions and causes; reality is radically interdependent. As Watson puts it, “phenomena exist…in dependence on causes and conditions, on their own parts and on the designation we confer on them by language and usage. They are dependently originated and thus empty of inherent existence” (45). Later schools sought to correct for the potential nihilism and negativity such a radical extension of emptiness might have by suggesting that the mind’s nature is emptiness. These subtle distinctions, according to Watson, may answer to variations in personal dispositions as much as anything. What unifies these various schools is the desire to dispel the yearning for the certain, fixed, and stable. Living in accord with emptiness in this sense creates the space necessary for existence and growth. Emptiness is not the end but the means of existence.

Next, Watson turns to the way emptiness figures in Taoism. Though it shares significant affinities with Buddhism and influenced the later development of its philosophy of emptiness, Taoism’s philosophical account of emptiness is far less articulated. After all, Lao Tzu opens the Tao Te Ching, declaring the Tao ineffable. As Watson seems to argue, the Tao–the nameless way of things–is emptiness understood as source; it is the vessel in which all things come to be and pass away and the vital energy (chi) that accounts for the procession of things: being and nonbeing, presence and absence.

Having established the approaches to emptiness found in ancient Eastern philosophy, Watson turns to ancient Western philosophy. With Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu still ringing in your ears, Heraclitus sounds different; his fragments emphasize flux and tension as defining characteristics of the world: “We step into and do not step into the same rivers. We are and we are not.” The Atomists, Skeptics, Stoics and Epicureans seem more united when we understand them as responding to emptiness with a philosophy of life that finds tranquility–atarxia–as a central aim. Seeing these philosophers with Indian thought in mind, according to Watson, highlights a shared concern with emptiness both on the conceptual and existential level. 

Watson continues her overview of philosophic emptiness, asserting that concern for it in the West fades significantly in the wake of Christianity and only comes to the fore again when its hegemony begins to ebb during the modern era. While Watson suggests Christianity stands as bulwark of permanence and presence against contingency, absence, and emptiness, she is quick to qualify, citing many voices of the apophatic path of negative theology, e.g. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scotus Erigena, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Jokob Böhme. As the metaphysical foundations of mainstream Western philosophy begin to crumble under the weight of scientific discovery and philosophical critique, Watson sees a new appreciation of emptiness emerge and with it a variety of responses that embrace uncertainty, impermanence, contingency, and process instead of evasively seeking new certainties. Watson’s thumbnail sketch of the roots of emptiness in modern and post-modern thought, gives attention to Wittgenstein, Heidegger (and his Kyoto-school student Keiji Nishitani) and Derrida. Noting a failure to adequately attend to our embodied experience among these philosophers, Watson turns to Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Philosophy of Flesh’ developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that seek to reorient our perception of the world in the body. The thread running through these thinkers is the recognition that speech, text, perception, and self are no longer the fixed entities once assumed, and the fundamental question of ontology ‘what is being?’ is no longer the central question. Philosophers of this era are ‘agents of uncertainty’ and as such open up space for a philosophy of emptiness.

From philosophy, Watson turns to science, in search of emptiness. Whether you consider the physics of the interstitial spaces of the subatomic or the dark matter and energy of the astronomic emptiness is ubiquitous. Whereas classical science took substance, particles, material stuff as basic, the new paradigms focus on dynamic processes, patterns of energy, interconnection, entanglement, emergence, participation and indeterminacy. The mind sciences too increasingly confirm Eastern conceptions of the self, or, more accurately, the ‘not self’. These ‘echoes of emptiness,’ as Watson terms them, are fundamentally descriptive, third-person accounts of emptiness, unlike the first-personal, experiential, subjective accounts found in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Here Watson implies that Western science might learn from Eastern practice. Watson points to the ongoing dialogue between Buddhist thought, psychology and psychotherapy as a promising example of the kind of fruitful cross-germination that might emerge if Western science takes into account Eastern thought and practice.

Finally, Watson considers resonances with emptiness found in contemporary art. While emptiness has long been central to many ancient Eastern art forms and practices, Watson focuses the relatively recent questioning and collapse of the mimetic, representational paradigm in Western art. She frames her discussion of literary, visual, musical and choreographic emptiness with the contemporary sense of the sublime as both a source and response to art. For the Romantics the sublime was the excessive, aesthetic experience of the transcendent, one that in outstripping conceptualization inspires both terror and awe. The contemporary sublime by contrast finds the source of this overwhelming experience in an encounter with immanence that dismantles the individual consciousness and deconstructs language. In this sense, the contemporary sublime might be understood as an encounter with emptiness. Citing Wallace Steven’s lines describing the American Sublime as “The empty spirit/ In vacant space,” Watson suggests that this vacancy is at play in much contemporary art practice, production and appreciation. Though a great deal of this art emphasizes the privative, nihilistic aspect of emptiness, Watson discerns traces of a positive, fecund understanding of emptiness at work as well. Her consideration of artists as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Anish Kapoor and John Cage seeks to highlight an emphasis in contemporary art on “a dialogue…between sound and silence, listening and talking, mark and erasure, stasis and movement, artist and audience” that is ultimately grounded in emptiness as a source, what Seamus Heaney, echoing Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, calls ‘a kind of luminous emptiness’ (164).

Where does this leave us? The sheer breadth of the fields of study Watson seeks to connect seems impossibly daunting for book of two-hundred pages, and Watson is well aware that she often skims the surface of deep and troubled waters in her quest to sound the bell of emptiness in the Western philosophical, scientific and aesthetic traditions. Her treatment of these areas is necessarily selective, eclectic, and cursory. You might wonder why there is only a glancing mention of the mystical traditions of Judaism and Islam, no reference to Rumi, Buber, Kierkegaard, Levinas, or the relational ontology of feminist care theorist, but Watson isn’t aiming at the sort of exhaustive academic analysis that would fully satisfy a professional philosopher, theologian, or scholar of Buddhist, Taoist, Hellenistic or post-modern thought. Her aim, in keeping with that of many of the thinkers reviewed, is more existential than intellectual. This is not to say that scholars won’t find a feast of provocative, if preliminary, connections to consider, only that Watson is after something more than conceptual clarity. A philosophy of emptiness is a reorientation, a central path meant to steer between the yawning nothingness that swallows everything and the being that seem to leave little room for change, growth and sanity. It is ‘a’ philosophy of emptiness, Watson’s, and it is only a beginning. She leaves it to the reader to determine whether and how it rings true to their own experience.

© 2015 Ian DeWeese-Boyd

Ian DeWeese-Boyd, Ph.D., Philosophy Dept, Gordon College, MA.