Tradition
Emptiness
Overview
Emptiness as a human condition is a sense of generalized boredom, social alienation, nihilism, and apathy. Feelings of emptiness often accompany dysthymia, depression, loneliness, anhedonia,
despair, or other mental/emotional disorders, including schizoid personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. A sense of emptiness is also part of a natural process of grief, as resulting death of a loved one, or other significant changes. The particular meanings of "emptiness" vary with the particular context and the religious or cultural tradition in which it is used.
While Christianity and Western sociologists and psychologists view a state of emptiness as a negative, unwanted condition, in some Eastern philosophies such as Buddhist philosophy and Taoism, emptiness (Śūnyatā) represents seeing through the illusion of independent self-nature.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Even sensual pleasure itself is nothing but a continual striving, which ceases directly its aim is attained. As soon as we are not engaged in one of these two ways, but thrown back on existence itself, we are convinced of the emptiness and worthlessness of it; and this it is we call boredom. That innate and ineradicable craving for what is out of the common proves how glad we are to have the natural and tedious…
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer
The chapter “THE EMPTINESS OF EXISTENCE.” is titled for Emptiness; names Emptiness twice.
But whilst we are thus enjoying it, the stomach is filled and the body is otherwise disposed. If, therefore, when the body is thus otherwise disposed, the image of the food which is present be stimulated, and consequently the endeavour or desire to eat it be stimulated also, the new disposition of the body will feel repugnance to the desire or attempt, and consequently the presence of the food which we formerly…
Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics
States what Emptiness is.
As far as may be gathered from the text of Genesis a threefold beauty was wanting to corporeal creatures, for which reason they are said to be without form. For the beauty of light was wanting to all that transparent body which we call the heavens, whence it is said that "darkness was upon the fact of the deep." And the earth lacked beauty in two ways: first, that beauty which it acquired when its watery veil was…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Emptiness is.
Philosophers who discussed Emptiness
Related ideas
- Franz Kafka
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Human condition
- Social relation
- Meditation
- Śūnyatā
- Suffering
- Drama
- Nirvana
- Aesthetics
- Nihilism
- Grief
- Boredom
- Psychotherapy
- Religion
- Rudolf Steiner
- Spirituality
- T. S. Eliot
- Taoism
- Pratītyasamutpāda
- Tantra
- Visual arts
- Yoga
- György Lukács
Place in the tradition
Part of Buddhist philosophy.