The Beatles said that Happiness is a warm gun. Now even if I knew what they meant, it doesn't satisfy me.

I mean, I know when I feel it and I know what it does to me. But what is it? Why do we feel it? Does everyone? How is that some people never seem to feel it? And is it the same as contentment? No, I don't think so. Is contentement just a different degree of happiness, a sort of lesser version? Or is contentment something different entirely?

So many questions about a feeling....

One thing that seems to be common to theists and atheists is nothing. Both sides hate it. Believers cannot accept the idea of nothing, since that would mean a situation where God is not present. Atheists have a similar problem with the idea of the universe being formed from nothing. For both, there was always something. For believers, it is God; for atheists/scientists it is energy, according to the First Law of Thermodynamics that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

John Cage (1912-1992), seminal figure of the American avant-garde, composed in 1952, a work that consists of 4'33" of silence.

Is silence “music”? Certainly not according to Victor Hugo, whose opinion was that “music expresses that which cannot be spoken and cannot be kept silent.”

Yet Cage's idea was not to produce silence, but the making of sounds coming from the audience themselves, who were suddenly aware of sounds from within themselves and from around them. It was, in today's terms, an early form of interactive art.

Can silent music be art? Is it music? Or is it, in fact, nothing?

Minimalism as an artform is the idea of reducing something to its most basic form including colour, shape, value, lines and texture - or lack of. Basically a reduction of form to only the essentials of geometric abstraction. Within this, no attempt is made at representation or to symbolize any other object or experience. Rather it is what it is and take it at that.

It seems to me that the ultimate aim of minimalism is nothing. The bare essentials - the essential of art itelf - is nothing. Unreachable though it is, it is what art strives for: an understanding of what nothing is, reflecting the urge of philsophers to understand nothingness in order to understand existence.

A sudden thought: Could there be a world without nothing?

The thought occured to me in the light of the noisy arguments against the whole concept of nothing. OK, so if nothing is so impossible, then it should be able to envisage the world without nothing.

Nothing is everything; if it is true, then nothing does not exist; if it is untrue then everything doesn’t exist.

This is a self-referential statement that cannot be proven true or false, such as that of Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying. Our statement about nothing and everything is a similar paradox. Or is it a different paradox?

Nothing is what came before us and what comes after us. Both are certain. 

If we were to ask what defines us humans, we can say nothing. It is humans' awareness of our own mortality that separate us from the other animals. It is our inevitable movement towards nothingness. We know that, even if we don't consciously think about it. But it is that awareness that shapes our actions.

It is nothingness that gives us existence, for it is only against nothingness that our existence is. There is night only because there is day; there is good only because there is evil. And so it is with existence. We are only here because of the alternative. We are we because we know that there is nothingness. This is not original: both Sartre and Heidegger dealt with nothingness, albeit in different ways.