Kant and the Problem of Nothingness. A Latin American Study and Critique is Addison Ellis’s translation of Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla’s main work on Kant’s philosophy. This book is extraordinary on many levels: first, the problem of nothingness has been much neglected by Kantian scholars; secondly, it is not usual to translate a book that has not been published recently (but rather in 1965); third, it is not common to see a translation of a Kantian book written by a Latin American scholar. As was evident in this 300th anniversary of Kant’s birth, the Latin American Kantian community is lively and numerous: the number of congresses and workshops organized in Latin American institutions is almost endless and articles and books on Kant are published every week.
However, most of this research is still unknown to the English-speaking Kantian public. For this reason, I am grateful to Addison Ellis for his generosity in devoting his time and resources to complete this translation. This has value beyond the contribution made by the content of the book itself and may motivate other authors to translate valuable books not available in English.
The book opens with the translator’s introduction, in which Ellis emphasizes the importance of this book (the only one devoted exclusively to the discussion of the notion of nothingness in the Critique of Pure Reason) and makes it clear that nothingness has a place within the system. By emphasizing its role and applying Heidegger’s conception of time to it, in a kind of new schematism, Mayz Vallenilla argues that nothingness is not a derivative of being, as Kant seems to presuppose. This book, therefore, is not only an interpretation of Kant’s table of nothingness but also a critique and a proposal on how nothingness should be understood.
Mayz Vallenilla’s introduction begins by addressing two difficulties in dealing with this topic. Firstly, the problem of language: language, from a Heideggerian point of view, assumed by the author, obscures the ontological difference because words can only refer to entities (or particular nothingnesses) and not to being (or nothingness). However, this does not imply that language cannot somehow reveal this ontological difference precisely because it cannot express being or, to put it differently, the limits of language reveal what transcends them exactly because they are limits between two different domains. Secondly, there is an ontological problem: if nothingness, according to Kant, is the mere negation of being, then it is derivative and not original. The author, however, is not satisfied with Kant’s position and argues that, just as the categories must be schematized to be conditions of the objects of possible experience, so must the four classes of nothingness. Time, then, is not only the horizon of being but also of nothingness, which, in this perspective, is not just an empty name, but rather has its own meaning and manifestations. It is from this interpretation of time as the horizon of both being and nothingness that Mayz Vallenilla wants to read and reform Kant’s table of nothingness.
In the first chapter, the author focuses on the Kantian determination of nothingness as ens rationis, i.e. an empty concept without an object, such as the noumenon. For Kant, applying this category of ‘none’ (which is opposed to the categories of quantity) to appearances would leave nothing but an empty concept, a mere intellectual structure. However, it is not entirely clear why Kant equates the result of this application of the category of none with the noumenon, because the latter also has a positive meaning. Moreover, the author sees this determination of nothingness as similar to what happens with negative magnitudes: just as they express a real opposition, so the application of the concept of nothing produces a negative reality in time, which numerically is defined as zero (as opposed to the positive schema of a number). But in what sense is it possible to address here the issue of time? For Kant, all appearances must, at least, be given in the inner sense, whereas apperception has a timeless condition that guarantees its permanence and immutability. However, Mayz Vallenilla emphasizes, if apperception is the function of uniting and connecting multiplicity, it must take place in time to perform this activity. This does not mean that its time is empirical: rather, it should be considered as a transcendental and absolute presence. However, Kant did not or did not want to consider this option.
The second chapter is devoted to nothingness as nihil privatum, described by Kant as an empty object of a concept. This type of nothingness, which corresponds to the categories of quality, should not be considered as absolute privation, but rather as something lacking certain positive qualities. For Kant, Mayz Vallenilla emphasizes, an absolute nothingness would not fit into the phenomenal sphere, and this is where the challenge arises: to conceive of nothingness not as a mere consequence of the negation of being, but in an original sense. Examples of this emptiness that is not merely a negation of something are the cases of deep sleep and the Heideggerian situation of anguish: both of these cases are characterized by an emptiness of real sensations and the presence of certain qualities of nothingness itself. Time, here, is not experienced as merely phenomenological-ontological, which is instrumental and serves to calculate and order the events of the world, but rather as confused and muddled, which does not correspond to phenomenal, positive time.
The third chapter deals with the ens imaginarium, i.e. empty, objectless intuitions such as space and time. But how is it possible to consider these entities, which are not actual objects but rather conditions of possibility of experience, as a kind of nothingness? For Mayz Vallenilla, Kant regards them as mere deprivations of substance, that is, a mere negative residue that is left once the patterns of relation cease to operate. However, the author is not fully satisfied with this merely privative understanding of time and argues that if what is lost is the apprehension of something permanent, then all that remains is mere succession, deprived of all meaning and reference, i.e., once again, a kind of nothingness that manifests itself in phenomena such as annihilation or anguish and deep sleep.
The fourth and final chapter focuses on nihil negativum, which Kant defines as an empty object without a concept, i.e. as the object of a concept that contradicts itself (e.g. a rectilinear figure with two sides). Whereas the ens rationis cannot be an object of experience, the nihil negativum opposes all possibility. Here it seems that, insofar as the possibility of thinking depends on the principle of noncontradiction, once this is denied, what remains, i.e. nothingness, is the annihilation of thought. But, the author asks, can impossibility be reduced to the violation of the principle of noncontradiction alone? It seems that the example given by Kant (a triangle with two sides) is not impossible because of the supreme logical principle, but because of its impossibility of being constructed in space. That is, for Kant, something is impossible insofar as it does not conform to the formal conditions of experience, i.e. when it cannot be schematized. If possibility is to be understood as temporal-schematic, then impossibility would be empty time or phenomenal timelessness, i.e. the dissolution of the world. The impossible, therefore, is characterized as a dimension outside possible experience.
For Mayz Vallenilla, this dimension, which in the phenomenal perspective is conceived as impossible, is an extramundane, transcendent possibility: the nihil negativum expresses a positive negativity of reason, which goes beyond the limits of possible experience and has its own temporality in a realm of absolute absence of being. Thus, the author concludes, nothingness is not a mere negation of being, but rather an otherness essentially opposed to being.
Surely Kant would not have been able to accept the negative schematism proposed by Mayz Vallenilla: for Kant, it would not make sense to speak of a time outside possible experience, because of the transcendental ideality and empirical reality of time (and space), according to which time is ‘nothing at all if one abstracts from the subjective conditions of sensible intuition, and cannot be counted as either subsisting or inhering in the objects in themselves (without their relation to our intuition)’ (A36/B52).
However, the book clearly shows a little-studied theme of Kant-Forschung, which needs to be further clarified and which opens up new questions, such as: should the nihil negativum be understood, as Mayz Vallenilla does, as a realm of reason or, as an interpreter such as Gloy (Reference Gloy1983) does, as the impossible example of an object without relation to apperception? If we understand nihil negativum in this strong sense of Gloy, can it still be included in the object in general or rather must it be regarded as an absolute negativity opposed and complementary to the object in general? Would this position undermine critical idealism? These and other questions could open up discussion on this issue that has been much ignored in Kantian studies.
