A vulgar variant of
concept stealing, prevalent among avowed
mystics and
irrationalists, is a fallacy I call the
Rectification of the Zero. It consists of regarding "
nothing" as a "
thing", as a special, different kind of
existent. This
fallacy breeds such symptoms as the notion that presence and absence, or being and non-being, are metaphysical forces of equal power, and that being is the absence of non-being.
Ayn Rand
"Genuine utterances about the nothing must always remain unusual. It cannot be made common. It dissolves when it is placed in the cheap acid of mere logical acumen."
Heidegger