This is a thesis that asks for nothing less than Nothing itself. It is a thesis on how to be in the world enough for it to appear — at once a philosophical and existential exercise that, through ascetic, aesthetic, and ecstatic practices, seeks to inhibit habitual modes of metaphysical habits. Habits the human do not have, but are. This means that the overcoming of perceptual and imaginative habits, demands the overcoming of the self that practices them. To approach the fecund barrenness and inaccessible intimacy of existence, I draw my main conceptual impetus from the non-dualist philosophies of Nishida Kitaro and Nishitani Keiji, for whom Nothingness is not a metaphysical structure but a lived praxis. Building on Nishida’s linchpin concept the Place of Absolute Nothingness (PAN), and gesturing toward the collapse of subject-object distinction, I introduce what I call Aporetic Aesthetic Events (AAE). Approached as a fugacious, unitary sense awareness that actualises the cosmogenesis of Nothingness into particularised events of aporia, AAE operates as an ante-methodological, co-compositional field of progressively attuned activities. Mapping AAE and PAN across a fractal topology of Self, Place, and Universe, spanning postwar art, radical dance, and sacred architecture encountered in Asia, North America and Europe, the aim is to offer a much-needed non-dual and aporetic framework for geophilosophical research — one I call the un- und undiziplinert — that grounds itself in the generative force of Nothing rather than an ontology of Being, with the hope to provide deeply philosophical and existential tools capable of disrupting entrenched metaphysical assumptions.
Geophilosophical Inquiries into Nothingness
Hansson, W. W. (Author). 9 Dec 2025
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)