Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (3 page)

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PHILOSOPHICAL TOUR D’HORIZON

The riddle
does not exist.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

proposition
6.5

T
he crux of the mystery of existence, as I have said, is summed up in the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
William James called this question “
the darkest in all
philosophy.” The British astrophysicist Sir Bernard Lovell observed that pondering it could “
tear the individual’s
mind asunder.” (Indeed, psychiatric patients have been known to be obsessed by it.) Arthur Lovejoy, who founded the academic field known as the History of Ideas, observed that the attempt to answer it “
constitutes one of
the most grandiose enterprises of the human intellect.” Like all deep incomprehensibilities, it lends an opening to jocularity. Some decades ago, when I put the question to the American philosopher Arthur Danto, he replied, with mock irritability, “Who says there’s not nothing?” (As will soon become apparent, this response is not entirely a joke.) A still better answer was supplied by Sidney Morgenbesser, late Columbia University philosopher and legendary wag. “Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?” a student asked him one day. To which Morgenbesser replied, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied!”

But the question cannot be laughed away. Each of us, as Martin Heidegger observed, is “
grazed by its hidden power
”:

The question looms in moments of great despair when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time… . The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.

Ignoring this question is a symptom of mental deficiency—so, at least, claimed the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “
The lower a man
is in an intellectual respect, the less puzzling and mysterious existence itself is to him,” Schopenhauer wrote. What raises man above other creatures is that he is conscious of his finitude; the prospect of death brings with it the conceivability of nothingness, the shock of nonbeing. If my own self, the microcosm, is ontologically precarious, so perhaps is the macrocosm, the universe as a whole. Conceptually, the question
Why does the world exist?
rhymes with the question
Why do I exist?
These are, as John Updike observed, the two great existential mysteries. And if you happen to be a solipsist—that is, if you believe, as did the early Wittgenstein, “I am my world”—the two mysteries fuse into one.

FOR A QUESTION
that is supposed to be timeless and universal, it is strange that nobody explicitly asked,
Why is there something rather than nothing?
until the modern era. Perhaps it’s the “nothing” part of the question that makes it truly modern. Premodern cultures have their creation myths to explain the origin of the universe, but such myths never start from sheer nothingness. They always presuppose some primordial beings or stuff out of which reality arose. In a Norse myth current around 1200 CE, for instance, the world began when a primeval region of fire melted a primeval region of frost, giving rise to liquid drops that quickened into life and took the form of a wise giant called Ymer and a cow called Audhumla—whence eventually sprang the rest of existence as the Vikings knew it. According to a somewhat more economical creation myth, that of the African Bantus, the entire contents of the universe—sun, stars, land, sea, animals, fish, mankind—are literally vomited out of the mouth of a nauseated being called Bumba. Cultures that have no creation myth to explain how the world came into being are rare, but not unknown. One such is the Pirahã, an amusingly perverse Amazon tribe. When anthropologists ask Pirahã tribespeople what preceded the world, they invariably reply, “
It has always
been this way.”

A theory about the birth of the universe is called a cosmogony, from the Greek
kosmos
, meaning “universe,” and
gonos
, meaning “produce” (the same as the root for “gonad”). The ancient Greeks were the pioneers of rational cosmogony, as opposed to the mythopoetic variety exemplified by creation myths. Yet the Greeks never raised the question of why there is a world rather than
nothing at all
. Their cosmogonies always involved some sort of starting material, usually rather messy. The natural world, they held, came into existence when order was imposed on this primal mess: when Chaos became Cosmos. (It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.”) As to what this original Chaos might have been, the Greek philosophers had various guesses. For Thales, it was watery, a kind of ur-Ocean. For Heraclitus, it was fire. For Anaximander, it was something more abstract, an indeterminate material called “the Boundless.” For Plato and Aristotle, it was a formless substrate that might be taken as a prescientific notion of space. The Greeks did not worry too much about where this ur-matter came from. It was simply assumed to be eternal. Whatever it was, it was certainly not
nothing
—the very idea of which was inconceivable to the Greeks.

Nothingness was alien to the Abrahamic tradition too. The book of Genesis has God creating the world not out of nothing, but out of a chaos of earth and water “without form and void”—
tohu bohu
, in the original Hebrew. Early in the Christian era, however, a new way of thinking began to take hold. The notion that God needed some sort of stuff to fashion a world seemed to put a limit on his presumably infinite creative powers. So, around the second or third century CE, the church fathers adduced a radical new cosmogony. The world, they proclaimed, was summoned into existence by God’s creative word alone, without any preexisting material to make it out of. This doctrine of creation
ex nihilo
later became part of Islamic theology, figuring in the kalām argument for the existence of God. It also entered medieval Jewish thought. In his reading of the opening passage of Genesis, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides affirmed that God created the world out of nothing.

To say God created the world “out of nothing” is not to elevate nothingness into an entity, on par with the divine. It merely means that God didn’t create the world out of
anything
. So insisted Saint Thomas Aquinas, among other Christian theologians. Still, the doctrine of creation
ex nihilo
appeared to sanction the idea of nothingness as a genuine ontological possibility. It made it conceptually possible to ask why there is a world rather than
nothing at all
.

And a few centuries later, someone finally did—a foppish and conniving German courtier who also ranks among the greatest intellects of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The year was 1714. Leibniz, then sixty-eight, was nearing the end of a long and absurdly productive career. He had, at the same time as Newton and quite independently, invented the calculus. He had single-handedly revolutionized the science of logic. He had created a fantastic metaphysics based on an infinity of soul-like units called “monads,” and on the axiom—later cruelly mocked by Voltaire in
Candide
—that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” Despite his fame as a philosopher-scientist, Leibniz was left behind in Hanover when his royal employer, the elector Georg Ludwig, went to Britain to become the newly crowned King George I. Leibniz was in declining health; within two years he would be dead, expiring (according to his secretary) with the release from his body of a great cloud of noxious gas.

It was in these gloomy circumstances that Leibniz produced his final philosophical writings, among them an essay titled “Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason.” In this essay, he put forth what he called the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” which says, in essence, that there is an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. “
This principle having
been stated,” Leibniz wrote, “the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ”

For Leibniz, the ostensible answer was easy. For reasons of career advancement, he had always pretended to hew to religious orthodoxy. The reason for the world’s existence, he accordingly claimed, was God, who created it through his own free choice, motivated by his infinite goodness.

But what was the explanation for God’s own existence? Leibniz had an answer to this question too. Unlike the universe, which exists contingently, God is a
necessary
being. He contains within Himself the reason for His own existence. His nonexistence is logically impossible.

Thus, no sooner was the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
raised than it was dispatched. The universe exists because of God. And God exists because of God. The Godhead alone, Leibniz declared, can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery of existence.

But the Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence did not prevail for long. In the eighteenth century, both David Hume and Immanuel Kant—philosophers who were at loggerheads on most issues—attacked the notion of “necessary being” as an ontological cheat. There are, to be sure, entities whose existence is logically
impossible
—a square circle, for instance. But no entity’s existence, Hume and Kant agreed, is guaranteed as a matter of pure logic. “
Whatever we can
conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent,” Hume wrote. “There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction”—including God.

But if God does not exist necessarily, then a wholly novel metaphysical possibility presents itself: the possibility of
absolute nothingness
—no world, no God, no anything. Oddly, however, neither Hume nor Kant took the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
seriously. For Hume, any proposed answer to this question would be “mere sophistry and illusion,” since it could never be grounded in our experience. For Kant, attempting to explain the whole of being would perforce involve an illegitimate extension of the concepts that we use to structure the world of our experience—concepts like
causality
and
time
—to a reality transcending this world, the reality of “things in themselves.” The result, Kant held, could be only error and inconsistency.

Chastened, perhaps, by such Humean and Kantian strictures, subsequent philosophers largely shied away from confronting the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
The great pessimist Schopenhauer, who declared the mystery of existence to be “
the balance wheel
which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics,” nevertheless called those who pretended to resolve it “
fools
,” “vain boasters,” and “charlatans.” The German romantic Friedrich Schelling stated that “
the main function
of all philosophy is the solution of the problem of the existence of the world.” Yet Schelling soon decided that it was impossible to give a rational account of existence; the most we could say, he felt, was that the world arose out of the abyss of eternal nothingness by an incomprehensible leap. Hegel wrote a good deal of obscure prose about “
the vanishing of being
into nothing and the vanishing of nothing into being,” but his dialectical maneuvers were dismissed by the ironic Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard as little better than “
spice-seller’s explanations
.”

The beginning of the twentieth century saw a modest revival of interest in the mystery of existence, mainly thanks to the French philosopher Henri Bergson. “
I want to know
why the universe exists,” Bergson declared in his 1907 book,
Creative Evolution
. All existence—matter, consciousness, God himself—was, it seemed to Bergson, a “conquest over nothingness.” But after much pondering, he concluded that this conquest was not really so miraculous. The whole something-versus-nothing question was based on an illusion, he came to believe: the illusion that it was possible for there to be nothing at all. By a series of dubious arguments, Bergson purported to prove that the idea of absolute nothingness was as self-contradictory as the idea of a round square. Since nothingness was a pseudo-idea, he concluded, the question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
was a pseudo-question.

This killjoy conclusion certainly made no impression on Martin Heidegger, for whom nothingness was all too real, a sort of negating force that menaced the realm of being with annihilation. At the very beginning of a series of lectures delivered in 1935 at the University of Freiburg—where he had been given the job of rector after proclaiming his allegiance to Hitler’s national socialism—Heidegger declared “Why is there being rather than nothing at all?” to be the “
deepest
,” “the most far-reaching,” and “the most fundamental of all questions.”

And what did Heidegger do with this question as the lectures progressed? Not a lot. He dilated on its existential pathos. He dabbled in amateur etymology, piling up Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit words related to
Sein
, the German word for “being.” He rhapsodized about the poetic virtues of the pre-Socratics and the Greek tragedians. At the conclusion of the final lecture, Heidegger observed that “
being able to ask
a question means being able to wait, even one’s whole life long”—which must have had those in the audience who had been hoping for a hint of an answer wearily nodding their heads.

Heidegger was, without question, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century in continental Europe. But in the English-speaking world, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who had the greatest philosophical sway. Wittgenstein and Heidegger were born in the same year (1889). They were pretty much opposites when it came to character: Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain. Yet they were equally seduced by the mystery of existence. “It is not
how
things are in the world that is mystical, but
that
it exists,” Wittgenstein averred in one of the lapidary numbered propositions—6.44, to be precise—in the sole work he published in his lifetime,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
. Some years earlier, in the notebooks he kept as a soldier in the Austrian army during the First World War, Wittgenstein wrote in the entry of October 26, 1916, “
Aesthetically, the miracle
is that the world exists.” (Later that day, he made the entry, “Life is serious, art is gay”—this while fighting on the Russian front.) Wonder and amazement at the existence of the world was, Wittgenstein said, one of the three experiences that enabled him to fix his mind on ethical value. (The other two were the feeling of being absolutely safe, and the experience of guilt.) Yet, as with all truly important matters—ethical value, the meaning of life and death—attempting to explain the “aesthetic miracle” of the world’s existence was futile; it took one beyond the limits of language, Wittgenstein held, into the realm of the unsayable. While he “deeply respected” the urge to ask
Why is there something rather than nothing?
he ultimately believed the question to be senseless. As he starkly put it in
Tractatus
proposition 6.5, “
The riddle
does not exist.”