by Jim Holt
So, at least, Leslie claimed. Yet I wondered whether he wasn’t just projecting his own happy consciousness onto a harsh and uncaring cosmos. He struck me as a temperamentally sunny man, one whose capacity for skepticism and irony only enhanced the intellectual pleasure he took in the worldview he had so painstakingly elaborated. In fact, he struck me as a sort of latter-day Spinoza. Leslie’s own metaphysical scheme, as he cheerfully admitted, was Spinozistic in flavor (even if, with its infinite number of pantheistic minds, it was “far richer” than the one that Spinoza described). Like Spinoza, Leslie sees all individual things as ripples on the sea of a unified divine reality. By all accounts, Spinoza was endowed with a deep intellectual reverence for this reality. His gentle integrity made him, according to Bertrand Russell, “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.” Spinoza understood human suffering—of which he experienced his share, being ostracized as an infidel by his fellow Jews, and as a dangerous atheist by Christians—to be a minor discord in a larger cosmic harmony. Leslie seemed to have the same gift. And, like Spinoza, he lived as a sort of exile—in Canada.
It is tempting to join the sunny Spinoza-Leslie consensus. There is something to be said for cosmic optimism—especially when it not only helps us avoid despair in the face of evil, but also promises to explain why the world exists. But there is also something to be said for the contrary point of view. Schopenhauer said it in the nineteenth century: reality is overwhelmingly a theater of suffering, and nonexistence is better than existence. So did Byron, in his lines, “Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth. . . .” More recently, Camus declared that the only genuine philosophical problem is suicide, and E. M. Cioran epigrammatized endlessly about the “curse” of existence. Even Bertrand Russell, despite his professed admiration for Spinoza’s character, could not accept the Spinozist view that individual evils are neutralized by absorption into a larger whole. “Each act of cruelty,” Russell insisted, “is eternally a part of the universe.” Today, the most uncompromising opponent of cosmic optimism may be Woody Allen. In an interview he gave in 2010 (to a Catholic priest, curiously enough), Allen spoke of the “overwhelming bleakness” of the universe. “Human existence is a brutal experience to me,” he said. “It’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases.” There is no justice to it, Allen maintained, and no rationality either. Everyone does what one can to alleviate “the agony of the human condition.” Some distort it with religion; some chase money or love. Allen himself makes films—and whines. (“I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.”) Yet in the end “everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.”
A confirmed axiarchist might respond that Woody Allen takes too parochial a view of reality. There is more to heaven and earth than is encompassed in the morbid imagination of a Manhattan neurotic. But it could be argued that it is John Leslie, in his still hearth among the barren crags of Canada’s western coast, far from all centers of civilization, who is the cosmically parochial one. Leslie cites the causal orderliness of the universe and its fine-tuning for life as self-evidently good, as things that ought to be. But do they outweigh the sheer volume of agony inflicted on sentient beings, often by one another?
Maybe Leslie is right about one thing. Maybe the world really does owe its existence to some sort of abstract principle. But it seems unlikely that this principle should be intimately bound up with human concerns and judgments, the way goodness is. Leslie’s “creative value” looks too much like the ghost of a Judeo-Christian deity, a deity that we made in our own image and likeness. Could there be some other Platonic possibility, perhaps stranger and more alien to us, that might be behind the existence of the world, that might explain why there is Something rather than Nothing? To find a fitting resolution to the mystery of existence, I’d have to broaden the search. And, as it turned out, I’d have to get comfortable with a new and unfamiliar notion: “the Selector.”
Before taking leave of Leslie, though, I wanted to salute him for producing a play of ideas that was so consistently enlightening—and, not incidentally, entertaining.
“Of all the contemporary philosophers I’ve been reading,” I told him, “you’ve got to be the wittiest.”
“You’re very kind,” he said. Then he added, “But I’m not sure that’s much of a compliment.”
Interlude
An Hegelian in Paris
Pure Being makes the beginning . . .
I read these words while sitting—yet again—at a table at the Café de Flore. This time I am on the terrace of the café, facing the busy Boulevard Saint-Germain and, across the street, the Brasserie Lipp, with its promise of choucroute garnie. It is one of those rare early-spring days when the delicate oyster-shell gray of the Parisian sky gives way to an access of brilliant sunshine and cobalt blue. Distracted by the lovely weather, I look up from the page for a moment, hoping that I might spot an acquaintance, or at least a recognizable face, among the parade of people passing to and fro along the broad sidewalk in front of me. Pas de veine. So I sip the last bit of the café express I ordered—my fourth since I’ve been here—and return to my book, which happens to be Hegel’s Science of Logic.
That may seem an odd, not to say pretentious, choice of reading material for an idle afternoon in a fashionable (and overpriced) Left Bank café. But it isn’t odd, really. I am, after all, in a place that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made their daily headquarters some decades ago. It was here, in the winter of 1941–42, during the German occupation of Paris, that Sartre began composing his most imposing philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness. That winter was a brutally cold one, but the proprietor of the café, Monsieur Boubal, was adept at procuring enough black-market coal to keep the interior at least minimally heated, and enough tobacco to supply the wants of its smoking patrons. Sartre and de Beauvoir would typically show up first thing in the morning and install themselves at the warmest table, next to the stove pipe. Sartre would ask for a cup of tea with milk, his sole order for the entire day. Then, still bundled up in his fake-fur coat of bright orange, and wearing his round horn-rim glasses, he would scribble away for hours at a stretch, barely looking up from the paper—except (as Beauvoir recalled in her memoirs) to retrieve from the floor and stuff into his briar pipe the occasional cigarette butt discarded by another customer.
And how did Sartre begin his epic inquiry into the relationship between l’être et le néant? With a description of this very café as “a fullness of being”—followed by a lengthy riff on the dialectic of being that Hegel set out in his Logic. So it is hardly incongruous that I should be striking a Hegelian pose here. As for pretentious . . . well, Café de Flore sets a very high bar for pretension.
My purpose, though, is a serious one. What I am struggling to do is to see the world in the most abstract way possible. That, it seems to me, is the best remaining hope for puzzling out why the world exists at all. All of the thinkers I had already spoken to fell short of complete ontological generality. They saw the world under some limited aspect. To Richard Swinburne, it was a manifestation of divine will. To Alex Vilenkin, it was a runaway fluctuation in a quantum vacuum. To Roger Penrose, it was the expression of a Platonic mathematical essence. To John Leslie, it was an outcropping of timeless value. Each of these ways of seeing the world purported to yield the answer to why it exists. But none of these answers struck me as satisfactory. They didn’t penetrate to the root of the existential mystery—to what Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, called “being qua being.” What does it mean to be? Is being a kind of property, one possessed by all existing things? Is it an activity, as the participial form of the word “be-ing” suggests? Clearly, one could not expect to understand why there is being without first having some grasp of what being really is.
And so, like Sartre before me, I find myself turning to Hegel. His doctrine of pure bein
g has been one of the most influential in the whole history of philosophy—that much I knew. And it is in his Logic that he reputedly laid out this doctrine in its most comprehensible form.
“Pure Being makes the beginning,” Hegel declares at the outset, “because it is on the one hand pure thought and on the other immediacy itself.”
So far, so good, I think. You can’t get really anywhere in your philosophizing without acknowledging that there is something.
But what can we say about this Pure Being? Well, at its very purest, Hegel observes, it is “simple and indeterminate.” It has no specific qualities, such as number, size, or color.
That too also makes sense. Pure being is not like an apple, or a golf ball, or a dozen eggs.
Very quickly, though, Hegel’s reasoning takes a peculiar turn. “This mere Being, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative,” he avers. In other words, since Pure Being is the absence of all qualities, it is equally the negation of all qualities.
And what follows from this? That Pure Being “is just Nothing.”
Did I hear a rim shot?
Hegel is aware of the apparent absurdity of this conclusion. “No great expenditure of wit is needed to make fun of the maxim that Being and Nothing are the same,” I read. Nevertheless, the two concepts, at this rarefied level of abstraction, are identically empty. Each thus harbors the other within itself. They are dialectical twins.
Yet, despite their conceptual twinhood, Being and Nothing remain mutually contradictory. They stand in opposition to each other. Therefore, Hegel observes, they have to be reconciled. They must be brought together into a unity, a unity that supersedes these two timeless categories without destroying their distinctness.
And what is it that heals the breach? Becoming!
Thus does the great Hegelian dialectic get under way. Thesis: Reality is Pure Being. Antithesis: Reality is Nothing. Synthesis: Reality is Becoming.
Pure Becoming would seem as empty as Pure Being or Pure Nothing. Still, says Hegel, it has an edge to it, a vibrancy, a sense of potential. It is “an unsteady unrest which sinks into a restful result.” (Here I am reminded of the “false vacuum” that, according to current cosmological theory, engendered the Big Bang—another sort of pure becoming.) With some additional teasing and prodding by Hegel, Becoming is made to yield all sorts of still more refined determinations: quantity, quality, and measure, nature and history, art, religion, and philosophy—the whole dialectical process culminating in what he considered to be the perfection of the Prussian State—or what I considered to be the perfection of the Faubourg Saint-Germain au beau soleil du printemps.
“So that’s how all this got here!” I think to myself as I look up from the book.
I may be forgiven for being facetious. Hegel had a gift for eliciting facetiousness in his readers. Wasn’t it Bertrand Russell who remarked of Hegel’s Logic, “The worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise”? And wasn’t it Schopenhauer who derisively credited Hegel with “an ontological proof of absolutely everything”?
What can make Hegel seem so preposterous is the way he equates thought with reality. The world, for him, is ultimately a play of concepts. It is the mind coming to know itself. But what could account for the existence of this mind? In what psychic arena, exactly, was Hegel’s dialectical orgy supposed to be taking place?
Flipping to the end of Logic, I begin to divine the answer. This mind bootstraps itself into existence by constituting its own consciousness. Like Aristotle’s God, it is self-thinking thought—only Hegel calls it not “God,” but “Absolute Idea.”
I come upon Hegel’s definition of Absolute Idea: “The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea—a notion whose object is the Idea as such, and for which the objective is Idea—an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity.”
Russell called this definition “very obscure.” I think he was being charitable. Hegel’s rhetorical fogginess did not deter French philosophers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. They reveled in the air of profundity it gave his dialectic, and emulated it in their own works. For them, Hegel was a model for how an intellectual could “possess the world,” as Sartre put it, by thinking alone.
Today, French thinkers still imbibe Hegel with their mother’s milk—or, at the very latest, as teenagers at the lycée. And here I am, an American weaned on logic of a drier sort, in a state of intellectual prostration after spending just a couple of hours wrestling with his dialectic. Maybe, I think to myself, it is time once again to leave the intellectually inspissate atmosphere of Paris for the clearer metaphysical air of the British Isles.
Or maybe I’m just suffering from the effects of excessive caffeine intake. As a restorative, I decide to order a nice tall glass of my favorite brand of Scotch whiskey—neat. After some minutes, I succeed in attracting the waiter’s attention.
“Un grand verre de Glenfiddich, s’il vous plaît,” I say. “Sans glace.”
“Glen-FEE-DEESH,” the waiter replies unsmilingly, presuming to correct my pronunciation.
It’s definitely time to leave Paris.
12
THE LAST WORD FROM
ALL SOULS
No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing.
—DEREK PARFIT
I always knew that my quest for a resolution to the mystery of Being would bring me back to Oxford. And here I was, standing on the threshold of its most ethereal redoubt, the College of All Souls. I felt a little like Dorothy at the doors to the Emerald City. Inside was a wizard who might well have the final word on the question Why is there something rather than nothing? I hoped he would vouchsafe that word to me. And so he did, after a fashion. What I hadn’t counted on was that I would get a free lunch in the bargain.
ON MY WAY from Paris back to Oxford, I had stopped for a couple of days in London—not for diversion, but to do some serious swotting up. I had made arrangements to stay at the Athenaeum Club, on Pall Mall. I arrived on a Saturday. The club was closed for the weekend. But when I rang the bell, a porter appeared at the door and let me in. He took me through the crepuscular entrance hall and past the grand staircase, above which hung a large clock. When I looked up to see the time, I noticed that the clock had two numerals for seven, but none for eight. Why, I wondered aloud, was that?
“No one really knows, sir,” the porter said, possibly with a wink.
Mystère.
At the rear of the entrance hall was an old and tiny elevator. We took it all the way up to the club’s attic floor. I was then conducted through a maze of narrow hallways to what would be my bedroom. It was on the small side, with a couple of little windows that looked out over the statue of Pallas Athene above the portico of the club onto Waterloo Place. Adjoined to the bedroom, happily, was a capacious bath, with a large old-fashioned tub in the middle.
The Athenaeum Club has an impressive library, but I had brought my own reading material to London. It consisted of a Trollope novel—several scenes of which, as it happens, took place on the Doric-columned portico of this very club—and an essay, clipped from an old issue of the London Review of Books, by an English philosopher named Derek Parfit. The essay’s title was “Why Anything? Why This?”
My familiarity with Parfit as a thinker of rare originality stretched back to my undergraduate days. One summer vacation, while backpacking across Europe, I happened to be carrying around with me a little paperback anthology on the philosophy of mind. The last paper in that anthology, titled “Personal Identity,” was by Parfit, and I’ll never forget how, when I finally got around to reading it on a long train ride from Salzburg to Venice, it shook up my own sense of self. (Nor will I ever forgot how the prodigious quantity of bread, cheese, and dried sausage I devoured over the course of that train ride fortified my sense of corporeality.) Through a brisk and brilliant series of thought experiments, involving the successive
fissioning and fusing of different selves, Parfit arrived at a conclusion that would have astonished even Proust: personal identity is not what matters. The permanent, identical “I” is a fiction, not a fact. There may be no determinate answer to whether, say, the callow JH who read Parfit’s essay as a student is the same self as the autumnal JH who is typing these words now.
That was how Parfit first came to my awareness. Some years later, in 1984 (by which time I was a philosophy grad student at Columbia University), he published a big book called Reasons and Persons. Here he meticulously drew out the implications of his theory of personal identity for morality and rationality, for our obligations to future generations and our attitude toward death. Many of Parfit’s conclusions—that we are not what we believe ourselves to be; that it is often rational to act against our self-interest; that our standard morality is logically self-defeating—were disquieting, to say the least. “The truth is very different from what we are inclined to believe,” the author coolly declared. But so lucid and powerful were Parfit’s arguments that the book gave rise to a veritable cottage industry of commentary in the English-speaking philosophical world. Now Parfit had turned his attention to the question that had engrossed me, the question that he himself considered to be the most “sublime” of all: why is there something rather than nothing? And he had managed to coax his thoughts on the matter into a spare, if sometimes gnomic, essay—one that I knew I had better master before meeting him.
And I was going to meet him. “I’m still very interested in ‘Why there is something rather than nothing,’ ” Parfit had responded when I wrote to him a few months earlier. As to the interview I proposed, he wrote, “I’m sure I’d enjoy it.” However, he added that since he was very slow in formulating his thoughts, he would prefer not to be quoted verbatim. Instead, he would try to answer any questions I had about his written work with a “yes” or “no” or some other brief response.