Why Would Heidegger Need To Say “Nothing nothings?”

You can think of this as a Buddhist question that is directed at the validity of conceptual constructions like “nothing nothings” that are more koan-like, than meaningful.

The way I see this is that such ideas as the Buddhist conception of “emptiness,” which doesn’t mean “nothing,” but rather no thing — i.e., no substance and yet not nothing — is only meant to be an antidote to the poison of an understanding that things truly exist as substantive beings.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Gautama Buddha said:

Ananda, if in this world disciples practiced meditation assiduously, though they attained all the nine stages of calmness in Dhyana (meditation), yet do not accomplish the attainment of Arhats free from the intoxicants arising from worldly contaminations and attachments, it is wholly due to their grasping this deceiving conception of discriminative thinking that is based on unrealities and mistaking the delusion as being a reality.

and further:

The true Essence of the wonderful enlightening Mind is self-intuiting, perfectly accommodating, and pure. In its nature it has no such defilements as conceptions of deaths and rebirths, contaminations and taints, neither has it any such attribute as emptiness. All these are arbitrary conceptions that have arisen from prior false conceptions. But the original immaculate intuitive and enlightening Essence becomes defiled by the accumulating of these false conceptions and because of them manifests all the phenomena of the world. It is just like the insane Igratta who becoming ignorant of his true head was deceived by the shadow of a false head, which had no basis in fact and was wholly an hallucination. Upon this illusive conception he built up the causes and conditions that controlled him. So those who are ignorant of the real cause build up in their mind an imaginary cause. Even the nature of space which we think of as empty is an imaginary conception. So it is with every cause, condition and nature, it is always a mental illusion cherished by sentient beings.

So, two points: “emptiness” in Buddhism is an abstracted absence of any actual entity anywhere, and this is done in order to create the presence of an absence because our little minds need something positive to grasp hold off — I’ve written about this here on Medium — but as well, this doctrinal conception is only required because of our prior erroneous conceptualisations, and this perspective on the issue at hand is important in order to come to the correct understanding that all concepts — including the most basic and important ones in Buddhism or Philosophy MUST be abandoned at a certain point because they are all defective due to their origin as concepts.

“Space” reinforces and extends this point in the quote by highlighting that even our sensual experiences that inform our ideas — “space” in this example — are all defective because they are structured by similarly defective conceptualisations.

So to think of “Space” as what we perceive around us, or imagine to be around us, is totally misleading and incorrect ultimately, and therefore we must both abandon the conceptual understanding, and then remove its traces from our sense perceptions as well. A meditative experience of space as an open void is defective because it is still mired by our defective sense perceptions.

And this is a fundamental insight in esoteric Dzogchen.

I hope you take my words as in the spirit of discussion, Matt.