Emptiness is not zero: negation, misunderstanding of nothingness, and entropy 1900-2025
Bergson pointed out that there is a fundamental error in the treatment of the concepts of "negation" and "nothingness" that philosophy has long held. According to him, philosophy from ancient to modern times has framed its thinking as "nothingness is nothing" and "negation is reduction to zero," which has been the root of misunderstanding the nature of life, time, and the flow of reality.
For example, life is a branching, changing, and scattering entity. Evolution is the unfolding of possibilities, more akin to "spreading out" than to something being "lost." Important here is the concept of entropy. In physics, entropy is a measure of the clutter in a system; as it increases, order breaks down and energy moves in the direction of unavailability. However, Bergson saw this flow of entropy not as mere destruction or loss, but as a movement that "changes form and increases possibilities." In other words, negation or nothingness is not zero, but a transition or transformation into another form.
What philosophy has called "emptiness" is actually "a part cut out of the whole," and was not nothing from the beginning. For example, geometric space, mathematical zero, and logical negation are all founded on the assumption of some whole. For Bergson, the world is always in the "flow of time. This is why the very idea of "returning to nothingness" is alien to reality. Time is irreversible, and what happens once does not disappear, but accumulates, folds over, and remains in different forms.
This idea is also connected to information theory and the world of complex systems. As information increases, entropy also increases, but this can be viewed not as a "collapse of meaning" but as an increase in diversity and relationships. Bergson's philosophy showed the possibility of reading nothingness and negation not as mere lack but as "margins for generation.
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