Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

by Jim Holt

  It is not the prospect of unending nothingness as such that makes death terrifying; it is the prospect of losing all the goods of life, and losing them permanently. “If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad,” Thomas Nagel has written, “it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss.” And just because you don’t experience the loss once you’ve ceased to exist doesn’t mean the loss is not bad for you. Suppose, Nagel says, an intelligent person has a brain injury that reduces him to the mental condition of a contented baby. Certainly this would be a grave misfortune for the person, even though it would not be experienced as such. Then is not the same true for death, where the loss is still more severe?

  But what if your life contains no goods? What if it’s a life of unremitting agony or unendurable tedium? Isn’t nonexistence then preferable?

  I tend to have conflicting intuitions on this question. But I am impressed by the reasoning of the late British philosopher Richard Wollheim, who maintained that death is a misfortune even when life is utterly devoid of enjoyments. “It is not that death deprives us of some particular pleasure, or even of pleasure,” Wollheim wrote. “What it deprives us of is something more fundamental than pleasure: it deprives us of that thing which we gain access to when, as persisting creatures, we enter into our present mental states. . . . It deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up: not even when the desire for cessation of pain, for extinction, grows stronger.”

  And I am even more impressed with the testimony that Miguel de Unamuno gave in the Tragic Sense of Life:

  I must confess, painful as the confession may be, that even in the days of my youth’s simple faith, I never was made to tremble by descriptions of hellfire, no matter how terrible, for I felt, always, that the idea of nothingness was much more terrifying than Hell. Whoever suffers lives, and whoever lives in suffering still loves and hopes, even though over the portal of his abode is written “Abandon all Hope!” And it is better to live in pain than peacefully cease to be at all. The truth is that I could not believe in this atrocious Hell, an eternity of punishment, nor could I imagine a more authentic Hell than that of nothingness and the prospect of it.

  THE DREAD OF death goes beyond the thought that the rush of life will continue without us. For even the solipsist, who thinks the world depends on him for its existence, fears death. Nor would my own fear of death be lessened if I thought that I was going to die as the result of some general disaster that wiped out all life on Earth, or even one that obliterated the entire cosmos. In fact, that would make me dread my death all the more keenly.

  No, it is the prospect of nothingness that induces in me a certain queasiness—if not, as it did with Unamuno, outright terror. How to envisage this nothingness? From the objective standpoint, my death, like my birth, is an unremarkable biological event, one that has happened billions of times to members of my species. But from the inside it is unfathomable—the vanishing of my conscious world and all that it contains, the end of subjective time. This is my “ownmost death,” as the American philosopher Mark Johnston terms it, the snuffing out of my very self, the “end of this arena of presence and action.” The prospect of one’s ownmost death is perplexing and terrifying, Johnston submits, because it reveals that we are not, as we supposed, the fountainhead of the reality we inhabit, the center of the world.

  Nagel makes a similar point. From the inside, he writes, “my existence seems to be a universe of possibilities that stands by itself, and therefore stands in need of nothing else to continue. It comes as a rude shock, then, when this partly buried self-conception collides with the plain fact that TN will die and I with him. This is a very strong form of nothingness. . . . It turns out that I am not the sort of thing I was unconsciously tempted to think I was: a set of ungrounded possibilities as opposed to a set of possibilities grounded in a contingent actuality.”

  Not all philosophers regard the inexorable return to nothingness in such a depressing light. Take Derek Parfit, whose theorizing about the insubstantial nature of the self liberated him from the belief that his own continued existence was an all-or-nothing affair. His death, he believes, will merely break some psychological and physical continuities, while leaving others intact. “That is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me,” Parfit writes. “Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.”

  Less bad—well, that’s some progress. But is there nothing positive that can be said for nothingness? What about the ideal of Nirvana, the blowing out of the flame of the self, the cessation of desire? Could the personal extinction that death holds out to us be a state of perpetual peace, as Buddhist philosophy maintains? But how can you enjoy something if you do not exist? Hence the wag’s definition of Nirvana: having just enough life to enjoy being dead.

  Schopenhauer, influenced by Buddhist thought, proclaimed that all will is suffering. Therefore, the ultimate goal of the self should be annihilation—a return to the unconscious eternity whence it emerged: “Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness.”

  Schopenhauer’s quasi-Buddhist view of life may seem a needlessly jaundiced one. Still, the idea of annihilation as a return to a lost state of peace can have a powerful emotional resonance, one that harkens back to our childhood. We come into existence in the womb—a warm sea of unconsciousness—and then find ourselves at our mother’s breast, in a consummate state of satisfied desire. As our sense of self gradually emerges, it is in an atmosphere of total dependence on our parents—a dependence that is more prolonged in the human species than in any other. As adolescents, we must shed this dependence by rebelling against our parents, repudiating the comforts of home, and striking out into the world. There we compete to reproduce ourselves, beginning the cycle anew. But the world is a dangerous place, full of strangers; and our rebellion against our parents leaves us with a sense of alienation, a sense of having ruptured a primal bond. Only by returning home can we expiate our crime of existence, achieve reconciliation, and restore oneness.

  What I have just presented is a caricature of Hegel’s dialectic of the family. Crude as it is, it does give some psychological sense to the feeling that reality—the world outside the womb of the family, the world of becoming—is a place of alienation. “We are not at home in the world, and thus homelessness is a deep truth about our condition,” writes Roger Scruton, commenting on the idea of existential alienation. “Here, indeed, is the root of original sin: through consciousness, we ‘fall’ into a world where we are strangers.” Hence our deep-seated desire to return to “the primordial point of rest”: the landscape of childhood and the safety of the family hearth.

  And what is the endpoint of this longed-for journey of expiation, atonement, and restored unity? That warm maternal sea from which we emerged—that eternal home of contented unconsciousness. Nothingness.

  It was while I was in the midst of entertaining such seductively woolly notions that I got some news. My mother was about to die.

  THIS NEWS CAME somewhat abruptly, but it was not entirely unexpected. A month and a half earlier, my mother, who lived in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where I myself had been born, went to the hospital with what appeared to be a nastily persistent case of bronchitis. A tumor was found on her lung. Up to that point, she had enjoyed robust good health throughout the seven-plus decades of her life, even winning a local tennis tournament a few years ago. But with the diagnosis of cancer, her condition deteriorated with awful swiftness. Within a week, her legs began to grow numb and paralyzed. The tumor, it turned out, had metastasized to her spinal column. Daily radiation treatments proved useless. There was nothing else the doctors could do. So my mother was transferred to a hospi
ce.

  She was very happy in the hospice for the first couple of weeks. It was a small, homey place, lying in a secluded meadow, with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The people who took care of her were nice, she said, and the food was good—plenty of bacon for breakfast. My mother phoned me every day in New York. Dear friends were visiting her. She was following the French Open tennis tournament on TV. She wasn’t in much pain. (How much morphine were they giving her?) And she didn’t seem at all afraid of death. She had been a devout Catholic all her life, attending daily mass and saying the Rosary every morning, among other devotions. She had led a good life and kept all the commandments, so she was sure she would be going to heaven. There she would see my father, who had died quite suddenly in his sleep of a heart attack a decade earlier, after a vigorous day of tennis and swimming in the sea, and probably also my younger brother, who had died a few years ago at a party after taking too much cocaine.

  I thought my mother might be around for a while—the doctors had given her six months. But then, early one morning, a nurse called. My mother had suddenly taken a bad turn. She had stopped eating. She was unable to drink fluids, which she simply choked on. (She had given instructions that she did not wish to be hydrated intravenously.) There was a rattle in her throat when she slept. And she rarely awoke. It looked as if she would die within a few days.

  So I immediately borrowed a car and made the eight-hour drive down from New York to Virginia. When I got to the hospice that evening, a priest was in my mother’s room, a young, grinning Filipino who spoke bad English but seemed holy in his way. He had performed last rites for my mother and given her absolution for her sins. When I stood over her bed, her eyes opened, and she seemed to recognize me. Trying to think of something lighthearted to say, I told the priest that my mother had now received every sacrament except holy orders, which put her one sacrament ahead of him. My mother’s eyelids fluttered, and she smiled.

  The next day I spent sitting by her bedside, holding her hand, saying, “It’s Jim, I’m here with you, I love you,” over and over again. She drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point some people from her church came into the room and started chanting over her bed an annoyingly repetitive prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary. When they finally went away, I noticed that my mother’s mouth looked very dry. I put some cool water on a swab and dabbed it on her lips. Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked at me. “You have a handsome forehead,” she said, in a whispery voice. (“Thank you!” I replied.) Then her eyes closed again. After a few hours I left, doubting that she’d make it through the night.

  But when I got back early the following morning my mother was still alive. Her eyes were closed. She had not regained consciousness during the night, the nurse told me. She no longer reacted to the sound of my voice. I was alone with her. I put my hand on her brow. I gave her a kiss on the cheek. She was breathing steadily, and her facial muscles looked relaxed—no sign of pain. I sang a corny song called “True Love” that she and my father used to sing to each other in harmony, amid gales of laughter. I talked about trips we had taken together as a family many years ago. Not the slightest response. I looked out the french doors of her room at the summer flowers outside, the birds, the butterflies. Such a sweet scene. Around noon the nurse came in to shift my mother’s body in bed. Her legs were mottled, showing the circulation had stopped, and the mottling was advancing up her body. “She has maybe an hour to live,” the nurse told me, and left the room.

  My mother’s breathing was getting shallower. Her eyes remained closed. She still looked peaceful, although every once in a while she made a little gasping noise.

  Then, as I was standing directly over her, still holding her hand, my mother’s eyes opened wide, as if in alarm. It was the first time I had seen them that day. She seemed to be looking at me. She opened her mouth. I saw her tongue twitch two or three times. Was she trying to say something? Within a couple of seconds, her breathing stopped.

  I leaned down and whispered that I loved her. Then I went into the hall and said to the nurse, “I think she just died.”

  I returned to the room to be alone with my mother’s body. Her eyes were still a little open, and her head was cocked to the right. I thought about what was going on in her brain, now that her heart had stopped and the blood had ceased to flow. Deprived of oxygen, the brain cells were frantically but vainly attempting to preserve their functioning until, with gathering speed, they chemically unraveled. Perhaps there had been a few seconds of guttering consciousness in my mother’s cortex before she vanished forever. I had just seen the infinitesimal transition from being to nothingness. The room had contained two selves; now it contained one.

  A half hour passed before the undertaker, a well-groomed young man in an unseasonable black wool suit, arrived. I gave him instructions and left my mother for the last time.

  That night, I treated myself to dinner at a stylish and ambitious new restaurant that a young chef from Manhattan had recently opened in my hometown. I hadn’t eaten all day. I drank champagne at the bar and announced to the bartender, rather glibly, that my mother had just died that afternoon. At the table I ordered monkfish and heritage pork and heirloom beets, and I drank a delicious bottle of a locally produced Cabernet Franc. I got a little drunk and bandied jokes with my waitress, who had a genial red face and husky Southern accent. I had something for dessert and a sweet wine to go with it. Then I left the restaurant and walked the deserted downtown streets for a while, admiring the well-preserved mix of pre–Civil War and Victorian architecture that, as a boy, I had taken for granted. My hometown, like Rome, was built on seven hills. I walked to the top of the highest of them and took in the twinkling lights of the surrounding Shenandoah Valley. Then I broke into convulsive sobs.

  When I woke the next morning in what had been my mother’s house—now weirdly empty, despite the profusion of old furniture and antiques and other debris that she had hoarded—the air outside was of an unusual sweetness. There had been heavy showers overnight, but now they had moved east, well out of the valley. I decided to go out for a run: a run with a purpose. I would reenact the Hegelian dialectic of the family, except I would do it backward. Like the title character in John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” I would return home. But whereas Cheever’s character made the journey homeward by breaststroking his way through an almost contiguous series of suburban swimming pools, I would do it by running past the landmarks of my early life, in reverse chronological order, until I ultimately arrived at the site of my conception. I would be The Jogger.

  It was a goofy conceit, but one is hardly at one’s subtlest in the immediate aftermath of a parent’s death. And what made it goofier was that I could not get the Rolling Stones’ song “This Will Be the Last Time” out of my head.

  As I headed out, the morning fog was beginning to lift. Before long, I could see the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, sharply etched and quite literally blue in the dawn light. I jogged past my old high school, where I had read Sartre and Heidegger in the library and taken up godless existentialism against the orthodox religion my parents thought they had permanently instilled in me, and where my bad companions had taught me to smoke. I jogged past the sprawling faux-Georgian house with the tennis court out back where we had lived during my adolescent years, and where, in a basement bedroom, my sexual awakening had clumsily commenced one night when my parents were out of town. I jogged past the Catholic church where I had received my first communion and where I had piously confessed my absurd childhood sins, and past the old schoolhouse where the nuns had taught me to emulate Saint Francis, the patron saint of the parish.

  By and by, I arrived at the foot of the hill on which, just over the top, stood the little white-brick bungalow where my mother and father had first set up housekeeping after they married. The hill was steeper than I remembered. I had to summon greater and greater effort as I made my ascent—just like, I thought to myself, a particle accelerator has to attain higher and higher ener
gies to re-create the very earliest state of the universe. Finally, I reached the top. There was the old house. I looked in the window of what had been my parents’ bedroom—the scene of the Big Bang (I forgave myself the execrable pun) that had produced me, or had produced, rather, the little symmetrical blob of protoplasm which, through a long and contingent series of symmetry-breaking events, issued in the messy reality that I was today. Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogony. Here was the ultimate home of my inchoate self. I felt moved, but only for a moment. My journey back was a cliché, a joke. The house had other occupants. Life had moved on. I would not be reunified with my parents until I, too, entered the nothingness that had already absorbed both of them. That was the real eternal home. And now I had a clear run to the Void.

  Epilogue

  OVER THE SEINE

  Paris, shortly before the turn of the millennium. I am invited, through the good graces of a mutual friend, to attend a small party at the Collège de France in celebration of the ninetieth birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

  On the appointed evening, I make my way from the sixteenth-century apartment house where I am staying, between Place Maubert and the Seine, and head up the Rue Saint-Jacques toward the Panthéon. I enter the courtyard of the Collège de France, pass by the statue of the now-forgotten Renaissance scholar Guillaume Budé, and go inside. After the stateliness of the courtyard, the interior rooms seem meanly proportioned and a bit shabby. There are a dozen or so distinguished academics at the party, plus a sprinkling of journalists, but no cameras or microphones. Fortified by a couple of glasses of the Burgundy that’s being served, I obtain an introduction to Lévi-Strauss himself, who rises with difficulty from his chair and shakes my hand tremulously. The conversation is awkward, owing both to my poor French and to my stunned amazement that I am actually having a vis-à-vis with the greatest French intellectual alive.