Like the Buddhist concept of Emptiness sunyata.
The purpose of this lecture is to defend a reading of Nietzsche that attributes to him an ontology that reduces everything to relations of force against the charge that such an ontology is wildly implausible. Rather than rehearsing the textual evidence supporting such a view, the tactic employed in this chapter is to show that Nietzsche’s relational ontology of force can be understood as a proto-form of a view currently being given serious consideration in contemporary philosophy of science: Ontic Structural Realism. Ontic structural realism is a form of structural realism that eliminates things-in-themselves and inflates the ontological significance of relations vis-à-vis relata. Because Nietzsche appeals to the natural sciences to justify his rejection of things-in-themselves in favour of a relational ontology of force, it is argued that Nietzsche should be understood as offering a proto-version of ontic structural realism.