THE WORLD, LANGUAGE, AND THEIR LIMITS 207
What we see, then, is that for any system of representations there will be preconditions of it functioning as a system of representations which are not expressible in the system itself.
We are now in a position to establish our paradox. Given any family of systems of representations, we can form what we might call the union of all the members of the family. This is itself a system of representations. Something is an element of the union if it is an element of some member of the family; and it means something in the union if it means that in the member of the family from which it comes. (This may make elements of the union ambiguous. But no matter: ambiguity is rife in many systems of representation.) Now consider the union of all systems of representation, 𝕽.27 Since this is itself a system of representations, it follows by the considerations of the previous section that there will be things about how it can function as a system of representations that cannot be expressed in it. Since we are dealing with the totality of all representations, these must be absolutely ineffable.
In truth, there is already a paradox here.There is something that is absolutely ineffable. This is something that makes it possible for 𝕽 to act as a system of representations. But this is to describe it in a certain way. Hence it is not ineffable.28
But what is this contradictory object? One candidate naturally suggests itself: nothing. For a start, one can talk about nothing: I am doing so now. But one cannot talk about nothing for the following reason (whatever one says about the ineffability of gluons in general). Nothing is the absence of all things. So there is literally nothing there to talk about! To pin a predicate on it is like trying to grasp thin air. Heidegger was here before us:29
What is the nothing? Our very first approach to the question has something unusual about it. In our asking, we posit the nothing in advance as something that ‘is’ such and such; we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing—asking what, and how, the nothing is—turns what is interrogated into its opposite.The question deprives itself of its own object.
Accordingly, every answer to the question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing ‘is’ this or that.With regard to the nothing, question and answer alike are inherently absurd.
27 It might be suggested that there is no such totality, since it is indefinitely extensible.This does not follow at all. See Priest (2013b).
28 See Priest (1995b), p. 223. The argument given there is piecemeal. The argument here is the general argument which I did not know how to give there. See also Priest (1997).
29 Heidegger (1977), p. 98f.