Rudolf Carnap, observed that the existentialists had been fooled by the grammar of “nothing”: since it behaves like a noun, they assumed, it must refer to an entity—a something. This is the same blunder that the Red King makes in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: if Nobody had passed the messenger on the road, the Red King reasoned, then Nobody must have arrived first. Treating “nothing” as the name of a thing allows one to generate endless paradoxical twaddle, as the opening paragraphs of this very chapter attest.
