‘Nothing’ is the only real absolute in a world without God as foundation. Hence the absolute subject, as the new foundation of philosophy, claims its absolute status by spinning out its existence from nothing – indeed, its entire world from its own nothingness: subject and object.

The question for the early Romantics was how this absolute subject in its godlike sovereignty was going to fashion a world ex nihilo to ground itself in; without a coherent universe, subjectivity would simply flounder in a seemingly contingent and fragmented world. The subject, as ‘God’, needed an absolute that was not merely its own empty autonomy, but a totality in which the diverse and particular things of the world could settle within a system of the whole. But how could one remake God in the abstract from the innards of one's soul, unless there is some intimation of the divine waiting to be sifted out of the subject? What was required was a method of signification that could function as ‘God’, that is, as some kind of invisible sign prior to reality that would organise reality in harmony with the self. The solution? To signify nothing as totality. In fact, Friedrich Schlegel's shorthand for the absolute is 0.