ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a view which has been dismissed by many philosophers as scandalous nonsense and as being based on the grossest of mistakes. It examines this view soberly and dispassionately and tries to see what it comes to and discovers whether it is based on the gross mistake some people think it is based on. The chapter also examines sentences like the following: 'Anxiety reveals the nothing'; 'We know the nothing'; 'The nothing exists'. By grammatically minimizing the difference between negative and positive terms, ordinary language creates in some thinkers the temptation to conceal the difference even more, to play the same game with negative terms that the existentialist metaphysician plays with the word 'nothing'. The case of the metaphysician who gives the impression of believing that 'nothing' is the name of a thing is entirely different.
