by Jim Holt
INSPIRED, PERHAPS, BY this scientific ferment, philosophers have been showing more ontological boldness. Logical positivism, which had dismissed the question Why is there something rather than nothing? as nonsensical, was defunct by the 1960s, a victim of its own inability to arrive at a workable distinction between sense and nonsense. In its wake, metaphysics—the project of characterizing reality as a whole—has seen a revival. Even in the Anglo-Saxon world, “analytical” philosophers are no longer embarrassed to grapple with metaphysical issues. The most audacious of the many professional philosophers who have confronted the mystery of existence in the last few decades was Robert Nozick of Harvard University, who died at the age of sixty-three in 2002. Although best known as the author of the libertarian classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick was obsessed with the question Why is there something rather than nothing?, devoting a fifty-page section of his later book Philosophical Explanations to the various possibilities for answering it—some of them quite wild. He invited the reader to imagine nothingness as a force “sucking things into non-existence.” He posited a “principle of fecundity” that sanctions the simultaneous existence of all possible worlds. He talked of having some kind of mystical insight into reality’s foundation. As for his colleagues who might have found his attempts to answer the ultimate question a little strange, Nozick was unapologetic: “Someone who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn’t understand the question.”
TODAY, THINKERS REMAIN divided into three camps by the question Why is there something rather than nothing? The “optimists” hold that there has to be a reason for the world’s existence, and that we may well discover it. The “pessimists” believe that there might be a reason for the world’s existence, but that we’ll never know for sure—perhaps because we see too little of reality to be aware of the reason behind it, or because any such reason must lie beyond the intellectual limits of humans, which were tooled by nature for survival, not for penetrating the inner nature of the cosmos. Finally, the “rejectionists” persist in believing that there can’t be a reason for the world’s existence, and hence that the very question is meaningless.
You don’t have to be a philosopher or a scientist to join one of these camps. Everyone is entitled. Marcel Proust, for instance, seems to have placed himself among the pessimists. The narrator of his novel Remembrance of Things Past, musing on how the Dreyfus affair had split French society into warring factions, observes that political wisdom may be powerless to end the civil strife, just as “in philosophy, pure logic is powerless to tackle the problem of existence.”
But suppose you’re an optimist. What is the most promising approach to the mystery of existence? Is it the traditional theistic approach, which looks to a God-like entity as the necessary cause and sustainer of all being? Is it the scientific approach, which draws on ideas from quantum cosmology to explain why a universe was bound to leap into existence out of the void? Is it a purely philosophical approach, which seeks to deduce a reason for the world’s existence from abstract considerations of value, or from the sheer impossibility of nothingness? Is it some sort of mystical approach, which aims to satisfy the craving for a cosmic rationale through direct illumination?
All of these approaches have their contemporary proponents. All of them, at first blush, seem worth pursuing. Indeed, it is only by thinking of the mystery of existence from every available angle that we have any hope of resolving it. To those who consider the question Why is there something rather than nothing? hopelessly elusive or downright incoherent, it might be pointed out that intellectual progress often consists in the refinement of precisely such questions, in ways unforeseeable to those who first ask them. Take another question, posed twenty-five hundred years ago by Thales and his fellow pre-Socratics: What are things made of? Asking a question of such all-encompassing generality might sound naive, even childish. But, as the Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson observed, the pre-Socratic philosophers “were asking one of the best questions ever to have been asked, a question that has painfully led to much of modern science.” To have dismissed it from the outset as unanswerable would have been “a feeble and unnecessary surrender to despair, philistinism, cowardice or indolence.”
The mystery of existence, however, might seem uniquely futile among such questions. For, as William James put it, “from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.” But can this be known before any attempt is made to construct such a bridge? Other seemingly impossible bridges have been successfully built: from nonlife to life (thanks to molecular biology), from finite to infinite (thanks to the mathematical theory of sets). Today, those working on the problem of consciousness are trying to bridge mind and matter, and those trying to unify physics are trying to bridge matter and mathematics. With such conceptual linkages taking form, one can perhaps begin to see the faint outlines of a bridge between Nothing and Something (or perhaps a tunnel, if the quantum theorists are right). One can only hope it doesn’t turn out to be a bridge of asses.
THE MOTIVES FOR pursuing the mystery of existence are not just intellectual ones. They are also emotional. Our emotions typically have objects; they are about something. I am sad about the death of my dog. You are overjoyed that the Yankees are in the World Series. Othello is enraged at Desdemona’s infidelity. But some emotional states seem to be “free-floating,” without any determinate objects. Kierkegaard’s dread, for instance, was directed at nothing, or at everything. Moods like depression and exhilaration, if they have any object at all, seem to be about existence itself. Heidegger maintained that at the deepest level this is true of all emotions.
What sort of emotion is appropriate when the object of that emotion is the world as a whole?
This question divides people into two categories: those who smile on existence, and those who frown on it. For a notable frowner, consider Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism influenced such later thinkers as Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and Freud. If we are astonished at the existence of the world, Schopenhauer declared, our astonishment is one of dismay and distress. That is why “philosophy, like the overture to Don Juan, starts with a minor chord.” We live not in the best of all worlds, he went on, but in the worst. Nonexistence “is not only conceivable, but even preferable to its existence.” Why? Well, in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, the entire universe is a great manifestation of striving, one vast will. All of us, with our seemingly individual wills, are merely little bits of this cosmic will. Even inanimate nature—the attractive force of gravity, the impenetrability of matter—partakes in it. And will, for Schopenhauer, is essentially suffering: there is no end that, if achieved, would bring contentment; the will is either frustrated and miserable, or sated and bored. Schopenhauer was the first thinker to import this Buddhist strain into Western thought. The only way out of suffering, he taught, is to extinguish the will and thereby enter a state of nirvana—which is as close to nonexistence as we can get: “No will: no idea, no world. Before us there is certainly only nothingness.” It must be said that Schopenhauer himself hardly practiced the pessimistic ascetism he preached: he was fond of the pleasures of the table; enjoyed many sensual affairs; was quarrelsome, greedy, and obsessed with his fame. He also kept a poodle named Atma—Sanskrit for “world soul.”
In the last century, Schopenhauerian frowners have predominated, at least in the literary world. An especially heavy concentration of them could be found on the boulevards of Paris. Take E. M. Cioran, the Romanian writer who came to Paris and reinvented himself as an existential flâneur. Not even the charms of his adopted city could ease his nihilistic despair. “When you have understood that nothing is,” Cioran wrote, “that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.” Samuel Beckett, another expatriate in Paris, was similarly afflicted by the emptiness of being. Why, Beckett wanted to know, is the cosmos indifferent to us? Why are we such an insignificant part of it? Why is there a world at all?
Jean
-Paul Sartre, in his moods, could be similarly jaundiced about existence. Roquentin, the autobiographical hero of Sartre’s novel Nausea, finds himself “choked with rage” at the “monstrous lumps” of “gross, absurd being” that environ him as he sits under a chestnut tree in the fictional village of Bouville (French for “Mudville”). The sheer contingency of it all strikes him as not just absurd but downright obscene. “You couldn’t even wonder where all that sprang from, or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness,” Roquentin muses, whereupon he is moved to shout, “Filth!” at the “tons and tons of existence” and then lapses into an “immense weariness.”
American literary figures have tended to wear their ontological pessimism more cheerfully. The playwright Tennessee Williams, for example, simply observed that “a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with,” and then had another whiskey. John Updike channeled his ambivalence about Being into his fictional alter-ego, that blocked, priapic, and despair-prone Jewish novelist Henry Bech. In one Updike story, Bech is invited to give a reading at a Southern girls’ college, where he is regarded as a literary star. At a dinner in his honor after the reading, he “looked around the ring of munching females and saw their bodies as a Martian or a mollusc might see them, as pulpy stalks of bundled nerves oddly pinched to a bud of concentration in the head, a hairy bone knob holding some pounds of jelly in which a trillion circuits, mostly dead, kept records, coded motor operations, and generated an excess of electricity that pressed into the hairless side of the head and leaked through the orifices, in the form of pained, hopeful noises and a simian dance of wrinkles.” Bech has a nihilistic epiphany: “the void should have been left unvexed, should have been spared this trouble of matter, of life, and, worst, of consciousness.” All existence, he declares to himself, is but a “blot on nothingness.” Yet, in his sunnier humors—or when he is affecting sunniness during the taping of a literary interview—Updike’s Bech is capable of smiling upon Being: “He believed, if this tape recorder must know . . . in the dignity of the inanimate, the intricacy of the animate, the beauty of the average woman, and the common sense of the average man.” In short, Bech believed “in the goodness of something vs. nothing.” Bech’s spasm of ontological optimism puts one in mind of a famous nineteenth-century New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, who was fond of exclaiming, “I accept the universe!” (to which the acidulous Thomas Carlyle responded, “Gad, she’d better”).
Perhaps the most ringing endorsement of the goodness of the world is not literary or philosophical, but musical. It is offered by Haydn in his oratorio The Creation. At first, all is musical chaos, a mixture of eerie harmonics and fragmentary melodies. Then comes the creative moment, when God declares, “Let there be light!” As the singers respond, “And there was light,” both orchestra and chorus mark the miracle by bursting into a powerful and sustained C-major triad—the very opposite of the gloomy Schopenhauer’s “minor chord.”
The attitude one takes toward existence as a whole shouldn’t merely be a matter of temperament—of whether or not one is liverish, or of how well one slept the previous night. It should be subject to rational evaluation. And it is only by exploring the question Why is there something rather than nothing? that we might come to see the value of existence in a rational light.
Could it be, for instance, that the world exists precisely because it is, on the whole, better than nothing? There are indeed philosophers who believe such a thing. They call themselves “Axiarchists.” (The word comes from the Greek for “value rules!”) They think the cosmos may have exploded into being in answer to a need for goodness. If they are right, the world, and our existence within it, may be better than it appears to us. We should be on the lookout for its subtler virtues, like hidden harmonies and dappled things.
Others hold that the triumph of Being over Nothingness may well have been a matter of blind chance. There are, after all, lots of ways for there to be Something—worlds in which everything is blue, worlds made of cream cheese, and so on—but there is only one Nothing. Assuming that all possible realities were assigned equal chances in the cosmic lottery, it is overwhelmingly likely that one of the many Somethings would win, not the lonely Nothing. If this blind-chance view of reality turned out to be right, we would have to revise our attitude toward existence downward a bit. For if reality is the outcome of a cosmic lottery, it is probable that the winning world will be a mediocre one: neither very good nor very wicked, neither very neat nor very messy, neither very beautiful nor very ugly. That is because mediocre possibilities are common, and truly excellent or awful ones rare.
If, on the other hand, the answer to the puzzle of existence turns out to be a theistic or quasi-theistic one—that is, if it involves something like a creator—then the attitude one takes toward the world would depend on the nature of that creator. The major monotheistic religions hold that the world was created by a God that is all-good and all-powerful. If this is true, then one is more or less obliged to regard the world in a favorable light, notwithstanding physical imperfections like redundant elementary particles and imploding stars, and moral imperfections like cancer in children and the Holocaust. But some religions have entertained a different doctrine of creation. The Gnostics, a heretical movement that flourished in the early Christian era, held that the material world was created not by a benevolent deity, but by an evil demiurge. Thus they deemed themselves justified in loathing material reality. (A useful compromise between the Christians and the Gnostics might be my own position: that the universe was created by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective.)
Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence, perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself. This possibility was first raised by Spinoza, who boldly (if a little obscurely) reasoned that all reality consists of a single infinite substance. Individual things, both physical and mental, are merely temporary modifications of this substance, like waves on the surface of the sea. Spinoza referred to this infinite substance as Deus sive Natura: “God or Nature.” God could not possibly stand apart from nature, he reasoned, because then each would limit the other’s being. So the world itself is divine: eternal, infinite, and the cause of its own existence. Hence, it is worthy of our awe and reverence. Metaphysical understanding thus leads to “intellectual love” of reality—the highest end for humans, according to Spinoza, and the closest we can come to immortality.
Spinoza’s picture of the world as causa sui captivated Albert Einstein. In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” he answered, “who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” The idea that the world somehow holds the key to its own existence—and hence that it exists necessarily, not as an accident—jibes with the thinking of some metaphysically inclined physicists, such as Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term black hole). It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world. It’s a bit like Proust’s great work, which records the progress and the sufferings of its hero through thousands of pages until, at the end, he resolves to write the very novel we have been reading.
Such a Promethean fantasy—we are the world’s author as well as its plaything!—may seem too good to be true. Yet pursuing the question Why is there something rather than nothing? is bound to leave our feelings about the world and our own place within it transformed. The astonishment we feel at its sheer existence may evolve into a new kind of awe as we begin to descry, if only in
the faintest outlines, the reason behind that existence. Our mild anxiety about the precariousness of being may give way to confidence in a world that turns out to be coherent, luminous, and intellectually secure. Or it might yield to cosmic terror when we realize that the whole show is a mere ontological soap bubble that could pop into nothingness at any moment, without the slightest warning. And our present sense of the potential reach of human thought may give way to a newfound humility at its limits, or to a newfound wonder at its leaps and bounds—or a bit of both. We may feel like the mathematician Georg Cantor did when he made a profound new discovery about infinity. “I see it,” Cantor exclaimed, “but I don’t believe it.”
Before we start delving into the mystery of existence, it seems only fair to give nothingness its due. For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, “He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing.”