Da-sein, Nothingness, and the Perspectives of the Natural Sciences
The following is an interdisciplinary reflection that attempts to hold together three registers: the existential-philosophical experience of Nothingness, the mathematician’s and logician’s zero, and the descriptions offered by the natural sciences—particularly quantum physics and relativity theory—when we try to think “nothing.” The text moves between Heidegger and Kierkegaard, seeks contact with contemporary physics, and concludes with some philosophical consequences for understanding Da‑sein as “held out into Nothingness.”
Heidegger describes Da‑sein as a mode of existence that is in a certain sense “held into” or “held toward” Nothingness: Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts. The relevance of Nothingness appears primarily within human existential experience—anxiety, wonder, mortality—where Nothingness is not a calculable magnitude but a structure that opens a space for questions about meaning and possibility. Kierkegaard, for his part, in The Concept of Anxiety, argues that anxiety’s object is Nothingness. Not a determinate object, but the indeterminate—the open. Anxiety reveals the possibility of freedom: it shows that there is a possibility that is not fixed by concrete objects, yet which nevertheless affects the subject as a real condition.
This philosophical experience of Nothingness differs clearly from the mathematical number zero. Zero is a formally defined value: a neutral element for addition, a boundary value, a symbol within a system. Zero plays an operational role and occupies a determinate position in a logical or arithmetic universe. Nothingness, as it appears in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, is not a value in a system but an existential horizon or a condition for the disclosure of the existent. Comparing zero and Nothingness can be a fruitful metaphorical move, but it becomes dangerous if it reduces existential experience to numerical absence.
Nevertheless, quantum physics offers an interesting bridge between these registers. In modern quantum theory the vacuum—that which in everyday speech might be called “empty space”—is not empty in the classical sense. Quantum field theory describes fundamental fields that pervade space; particles are understood as excitations of such fields. At the microscopic scale, persistent quantum fluctuations occur, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation for energy and time entails that “virtual” particle–antiparticle pairs can momentarily appear in the vacuum. An absolute nothingness therefore does not present itself as a stable physical state in the vocabulary of this theory; the vacuum is a potential field-scape of possibilities. To put it in Heideggerian terms: the “non‑be-ing” (Nothing) seems in the idiom of natural science to function as the potential or the enabling condition—the state that makes the manifestation of the existent possible.
General relativity provides a somewhat different image. It shows that spacetime geometry is dynamic and depends upon matter and energy. The notion of an empty space in the classical Newtonian sense collapses when spacetime itself is a dynamical actor capable of curvature, warping, and collapse. Classical ideas of a “neutral” nothing break down, yet relativity does admit solutions that contain comparatively little matter (for example, asymptotically empty regions or Schwarzschild solutions); these solutions are nevertheless still geometric structures, not metaphysical Nothingness.
Compared side by side, quantum theory and relativity offer two distinct scientific approaches to the question of “Nothing.” Quantum mechanics emphasizes fluctuation and potential—the vacuum as an active field—while relativity emphasizes geometrical structure—spacetime as an actor rather than a passive backdrop. Both undermines the intuitive notion of absolute nothingness, though by different routes: quantum physics by filling apparent emptiness with probabilistic events, and relativity by locating physical reality within a structured, dynamical spacetime.
Philosophically, these findings open several interpretive lines. For Heidegger, the role of Nothingness is primarily phenomenological: Nothing discloses itself within human experience as a limit that reveals Being. The quantum vacuum as potential resonates with this idea: what appears as non‑being is in fact a horizon of what may come to be. Relativity’s dynamic spacetime can be read as an alternative dimension of the same insight: the background of being is not passive but actively formative.
From this vantage, Da‑sein understood as “held out into Nothing” may be read in two parallel, mutually illuminating ways. First, as existential openness: the human being is confronted with a field of possibilities and indeterminacy that gives rise to anxiety, choice, and responsibility. Second, as presence within a physical universe where “emptiness” itself is charged with potential and structure. Both perspectives point to the conclusion that Nothing is not simply a state of absence but a kind of activity, potentiality, or threshold.
This conclusion has practical and pedagogical implications. When teaching, we can use the distinction between zero and Nothing to train conceptual precision: zero as a mathematical tool, Nothing as an existential phenomenon. Encounters with scientific descriptions of the vacuum and spacetime may make the idea of Nothing more accessible without diluting its existential gravity. A classroom exercise, for example, might ask students to compare popular-science accounts of the quantum vacuum with Kierkegaard’s descriptions of anxiety, thereby exploring what “possibility” means across these domains.
Finally, the question “Why is there something rather than Nothing?” remains a fundamental philosophical interrogation. Science can show that an absolute Nothing does not appear as a stable physical state and can provide models for how matter and structure might emerge from quantum states. Philosophy, however, preserves the depth of the question as an existential challenge and an interpretive task. Together they yield a richer understanding: Nothing, insofar as it is non‑being, functions in practice as a field of possibility, and Da‑sein’s experience of being “held out into Nothing” can be understood both as the opening created by anxiety and as a form of situatedness in a universe where the vacuum itself is meaning‑bearing.
To linger on this distinction by the fireside is not to solve the mystery of “why anything exists,” but to practice patience in the face of existential indeterminacy; it is an exercise in learning to live with and within the openings that Nothing provides.
References
• Carroll, S. (2019). Something deeply hidden: Quantum worlds and the emergence of spacetime. New York, NY: Dutton.
• Dirac, P. A. M. (1981). The principles of quantum mechanics (4th ed.). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
• Einstein, A. (1916). Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie. Annalen der Physik, 49, 769–822.
• Heisenberg, W. (1958). Physics and philosophy: The revolution in modern science. New York, NY: Harper.
• Heidegger, M. (1953/1962). Was ist Metaphysik? In I. Aarnes & V. Wyller (Eds.), Utvalgte skrifter (Vol. 9). Oslo, Norway: [translator].
• Kierkegaard, S. (1844/1985). Begrebet Angest [The concept of anxiety] (Vigilius Haufniensis). In S. Kierkegaard, Samlede verker (Vol. 6). Oslo, Norway: [translator].
