Fear of Nothingness
Nihilophobia
Nihilophobia is the name for a fear of nothingness, and the word is almost entirely unrecorded while its object has one of the longest histories in Western thought. Wikipedia has no article for it, Wiktionary has no entry, and the search redirect for the term lands on a list of phobias that does not carry it.
Why nothing was held to be impossible
The philosophical problem arrived long before the fear had a name. Parmenides, in the fifth century BCE, argued that nothing cannot exist at all: to speak of a thing is to speak of something that exists, so there can be no coming-into-being, no passing-out-of-being and no not-being. Socrates and Plato largely agreed. Aristotle did not, and answered that the opinions follow logically in a dialectical discussion but that believing them is next door to madness.
Leucippus took the other route and let the void back in, because motion needs somewhere to happen. Atoms move through a void that is not-being, and Cyril Bailey's observation about that move is the one worth keeping: it makes a thing real without making it a body, and it comes from a materialist.
Aristotle's escape was to distinguish matter from space, so that space became a receptacle rather than a nothing. Newton took that as far as absolute space. Descartes went back to Parmenides and denied that there was any room for nothing at all.
How a barometer settled the question
The doctrine that stood in the way had a name that sounds like the fear itself. Horror vacui, usually given as nature abhors a vacuum, was the position that empty space cannot occur, and Descartes declined to overturn it even when Blaise Pascal challenged his views.
It was settled by an instrument. Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer in 1643 and showed that an empty space appeared at the top of a mercury tube when it was inverted, a space now called the Torricelli vacuum, with the unit of vacuum pressure named after him. His own teacher, Galileo, had not been able to explain why a pump sucks.
The 1643 demonstration did not end the argument so much as move it. Modern physics does not treat a vacuum as nothing either: the vacuum of quantum field theory is full of virtual particles, and is sometimes described as a version of the old aether.
What Sartre made of nothingness
The existentialists put the word at the centre of a philosophy rather than at the edge of a physics. Sartre's Being and Nothingness, heavily influenced by Heidegger's Being and Time, distinguishes two kinds of being: être-en-soi, the brute existence of a thing such as a tree, and être-pour-soi, which is consciousness.
Sartre's claim is that the second kind is nothing, because consciousness cannot be an object of consciousness and can have no essence. He and, more insistently, Lacan build an atheist position on that: equating nothingness with being allows creation from nothing, and removes the need for a god for anything to exist. Heidegger later said Sartre had misunderstood him.
This is where the fear and the absurd get confused with one another. The absurd is a position about meaning being given rather than found, not a fear of the void, and nothing in the existentialist account describes a person frightened of nothingness. It describes a person who is nothing.
Where nothingness is the goal instead
The same object is pursued elsewhere. Sunyata, usually translated as emptiness, is in some forms of Buddhism a state of mind rather than an absence, and reaching nothing in that sense is what allows total focus on a single thought or act. The standing example is an archer clearing the mind to make the shot. The Kyoto School works the concept in the same direction, and some writers have drawn the parallel with Heidegger, though the philosophers themselves did not.
One tradition treats nothingness as what must be escaped and another as what must be attained. That is a large fact for a fear whose name nobody has written down.
What people report when they fear it
Where the fear does appear in the record, it is filed elsewhere. The existential form of death anxiety, described as the most powerful form of it, comes from the knowledge that a life must end, and Irvin Yalom's formulation is that existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that a person will grow, blossom and inevitably diminish and die.
That is the entry where the research lives, along with the scales and the theories. Nihilophobia has none of it: no case, no measure, no manual, and no dictionary willing to define the word.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Nothingness
- Existential DreadNihilophobia names the fear of nothingness directly. The absurd, as the existentialist tradition sets it out, is not a fear of nothingness but the position that meaning is given rather than found.
- Fear of DyingThe existential form of death anxiety is described as the most powerful form of it, and that is where the research on this territory is actually filed.
- Fear of InfinityBoth take a quantity nobody can meet: one the absence of everything, the other the absence of any limit. Neither has a case report under its own name.
Common questions
Questions about Nihilophobia
- Is nihilophobia a recognised word?
- Barely. Wiktionary has no entry for it, Wikipedia has no article, and searching the term produces a redirect to a list of phobias that does not contain it. Nothing has been published under the name, and no diagnostic manual carries it.
- What was horror vacui?
- The doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum, meaning that empty space cannot occur. Descartes declined to overturn it even after Blaise Pascal challenged his position, and it stood until Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer in 1643 and produced an empty space at the top of an inverted mercury tube.
- Does modern physics treat a vacuum as nothing?
- No. The vacuum of quantum field theory is described as filled with virtual particles and is sometimes called a modern version of the aether, so the empty space that settled the ancient argument turns out not to be empty either.
- Why is Sartre relevant to a fear of nothingness?
- Because he put nothingness inside the person rather than outside. Being and Nothingness distinguishes the brute existence of a thing from consciousness, and argues that consciousness is nothing, since it cannot be an object of itself and has no essence. That is an account of what somebody is, not of what they are afraid of.
- Is nothingness always feared?
- No, and that is the sharpest thing about the word. Sunyata, or emptiness, is treated in some forms of Buddhism as a state of mind worth reaching, on the grounds that it allows a level of focus otherwise unavailable, with the archer clearing the mind before the shot as the standing example.
Added 2026-08-26 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Existential DreadMarcel coined existentialism and later abandoned it, Sartre rejected it before adopting it in 1945, and the nineteenth-century figures died before the word existed.
- Fear of DyingSixty years of named death anxiety scales and not one prevalence figure. What the record holds on thanatophobia, and the places where it holds nothing.
- Fear of InfinityNo object can be brought into the room. What produces the panic is an intrusive thought, and one neuroscientist thinks the real subject is the future.
- CounterphobiaThe minority response to anxiety seeks the feared thing out. Fenichel's warning is the useful part: dismantling the defence is only the first step of treatment.
- Eco-AnxietyNot a diagnosis, and the researchers say so before anything else. Two people are credited with the name, and every figure in circulation is self-described.
- Fear of ChangeCommensal rodents are thought to have evolved higher neophobia because humans kept inventing new ways to kill them. Two thirds of the food form is genetic.