The Trouble with Being Afraid of Nothing

“I am afraid of nothing.”

It is a splendid declaration of courage. The speaker fears no danger, shrinks from no adversary, and faces the world without apprehension.

Until someone asks whether he is afraid of Nothing.

Suddenly, Nothing has acquired a rather alarming status. It appears to be something one might encounter, something that might lurk in a dark corner, something that might inspire fear.

The joke is simple, but it reveals an interesting property of language. The same word can participate in different meanings, and a change in how we interpret it can transform a declaration of fearlessness into evidence of a peculiar phobia.

In the original declaration, nothing denies that there is anything the speaker fears. In the teasing reinterpretation, Nothing becomes the apparent name of something to fear.

The speaker has not changed his meaning. His tormentors have changed theirs.

We can imagine his indignation. He has made a perfectly intelligible statement, only to find that his words have been turned against him. He is now expected to defend himself against a charge that would never have arisen if everyone had continued to understand his sentence in the same way.

Yet the joke depends on something more than a grammatical ambiguity. It depends on our readiness to imagine that whatever can be named can also be treated as a thing.

Once Nothing becomes the object of fear, we can ask where it lives, what it looks like, and how it might be defeated. We can even ask whether it is more frightening than something.

The questions are absurd, but the absurdity is instructive. The word has made an absence available for thought, and our imagination has supplied the rest.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the joke is that Nothing has not actually done anything. It has acquired no powers, made no threats, and appeared nowhere. Everything has happened in the way the words are interpreted.

And the man who declared himself afraid of nothing is left wondering how a statement that meant he feared nothing could possibly mean that he feared Nothing.

We might reassure him that he has nothing to fear.

But perhaps we should leave that until he has recovered.