Different kinds of emptiness/negation = different kinds of nothingness? Re: the Kyoto School

Question

The SEP entry on the Kyoto School was updated the other day, and I decided to read through at least some of it. Here's part of a discussion of the "nothingness" that is central to their reflections:

We've had a few ill-received nothingness-related questions here of late, regarding e.g. using the definite article with the word "nothing" or a lack of "anything" as inclusive of a lack of "nothing". But so I wonder if the presuppositional intuition behind those questions pertains to the intuitions of the Kyoto School or predecessors thereof, like Heidegger (though he was also a contemporary) or Eckhart. And then I wonder if there is a deeper logico-mathematical basis for such confusion and seemingly hapless attempts at clarification. Does differentiating between different kinds of negation, or between things like a graph with no nodes or edges at all vs. a graph with no edges but at least one node (or at least one edge but no nodes at all), help rehabilitate inquiry into "nothingness" as meaningful inquiry, despite the inherent mysteriousness of the act of referring to the (in)act(ion) of not referring to anything? As if some concepts of nothingness, as based on one or another kind of negation, are meaningless, but other such concepts, based on other such kinds, are not so meaningless, despite appearances?

Or consider the various semantic approaches to category mistakes: might these be interpolated into roughly three grades of "nothingness," where a question about "nothingness" can lack one of the three semantic grounds (either meaning, content, or truth-value), or such a question can lack any two of those grounds, with "absolute nothingness" being the "object of inquiry" which is fully lost in mystification insofar as such inquiry lacks all three such grounds? For often enough, the spectacle of mystified queries about "nothingness" looks like a category mistake par excellence.

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Historical caveat: while going over the above, it occurred to me that Heidegger's place in the philosophy of Nazi Germany might've been reflected by the Kyoto School's place in the philosophy of Hirohito's Japan, i.e. the preoccupation with seemingly reifiable nothingness was a dangerous vortex in Heidegger and the school's minds, something that mirrored the practical drive towards mass annihilation that the two background regimes engaged in. Perhaps Nietzsche foresaw this danger himself, and expressed his foreknowledge in his little poesy about looking into the "abyss." (Nietzsche too has been seen as a prelude to Nazism to some extent, fair or unfair as this perception is, and at any rate he is mentioned in the same section of the SEP article about the Kyoto School that I blockquoted above.) So perhaps there is also a concept of moral (deontic) nothingness in play, here.

Answer 1

Heidegger names two types of nothing in his 1949 preface to On the Essence of Ground in Pathmarks, p. 97:

The nothing is the "not" of beings, and is thus being, experienced from the perspective of beings. The ontological difference is the "not" between beings and being. Yet just as being, as the "not" in relation to beings, is by no means a nothing in the sense of a nihil negativum, so too the difference, as the "not" between beings and being, is in no way merely the figment of a distinction made by our understanding (ens rationis).

That nihilative "not" of the nothing and this nihilative "not" of the difference are indeed not identical, yet they are the Same in the sense of belonging together in the essential prevailing of the being of beings.

There seems to be an interesting analogy in Eugene Thacker's Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer, p. 11. I.e. Being = Life; both are noumenal, therefore we can know nothing of them. They have the absence of thingness (phenomenality), hence privative: nihil privativum. (Maybe not Schopenhauer's meaning.) The nihil negativum seems to be rather more sketchy in both quotes. Perhaps it is absence of consciousness, or even the unconscious.

In response to the Kantian split between Life and the living, and in contrast to the post-Kantian ontology of generosity, Schopenhauer opts for a negative ontology of life.

However, that life is “nothing” can mean several things. The enigmatic last section of WWR I bears out some of these meanings. Here Schopenhauer makes use of Kant’s distinction between two kinds of nothing: the nihil privativum or privative nothing, and the nihil negativum or negative nothing. The former is nothing defined as the absence of something (e.g. shadow as absence of light, death as absence of life). For Schopenhauer the world is nothing in this privative sense as this interplay between Representation and Will; the world, with all its subject-object relations, as well as its ongoing suffering and boredom, is transitory and ephemeral. By contrast, the indifferent Will-to-Life courses through and cuts across it all, all the while remaining in itself inaccessible, and “nothing.”