The Empty Chair

There is an empty chair beside the fireplace.

We can see that it is empty. We can sit in it, move it, or place a book upon it. But the emptiness is not quite so easy to handle.

If someone asks what is absent from the chair, we might answer that nobody is sitting in it. If we have been expecting a visitor, we might say that the visitor is missing. If the visitor has died, we might say that the chair reminds us of someone who is no longer here.

The chair has not changed. What changes is the significance of its emptiness.

An empty chair in an unoccupied room may mean very little. The same chair, left empty at a family gathering, may matter enormously. Its emptiness is understood in relation to someone who might have been there, someone expected, remembered, or missed.

Absence, it seems, is not always simply the lack of something. Sometimes it is a relation between what is present and what is expected, remembered, or desired.

But suppose we remove the expectation. Suppose nobody has ever sat in the chair, nobody is expected to sit in it, and nobody has any particular interest in whether it is occupied.

Is it still empty?

Of course. The chair has space available for someone to sit in it. Yet the absence no longer carries the same significance. We have distinguished the physical condition from what that condition means to someone.

Now suppose we remove the chair as well. We are left with no empty chair, no place where someone might have sat, no particular person who is missing.

Have we arrived at Nothing?

Not necessarily. We have merely removed one example of absence. The room may still exist, the world continues, and there may be innumerable things elsewhere.

To remove the chair is not to remove everything. To remove everything we can think of is not obviously the same as to conceive of the absence of everything.

The empty chair helps us understand absence because it gives us something against which to recognise it. We know what is absent, or at least what might have been present.

Absolute Nothingness, if that expression makes sense, offers no such assistance. There is no chair, no room, no expectation, and no standpoint from which to compare what is with what is not.

Perhaps that is why we find it so difficult to imagine.

We begin with an absence that makes sense because of what remains, and then attempt to extend that understanding to a condition in which nothing remains.

The empty chair is easy to understand.

It is the disappearance of the chair, the room, the world, and every possible standpoint from which their absence might be understood that leaves us wondering.