Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (33 page)

Yet the astonishment I feel at my improbable existence has a curious counterpoint: the difficulty I have in imagining my sheer
nonexistence
. Why is it so hard to conceive of a world without me, a world in which I never put in an appearance? I know, after all, that I am hardly a necessary feature of reality. Still, like Wittgenstein, I can’t think about the world without thinking of it as
my
world. Although I am part of reality, reality feels like a part of me. I am its hub, its epicenter, the sun that illumines it, the baby to its bathwater. To imagine that I never existed would be like imagining that the
world
never existed—that there was Nothing rather than Something.

The feeling that the “something-ness” of reality depends on my existence is, I know, a solipsistic illusion. Yet even when it is recognized as such, it retains a considerable grip. How can I loosen its grip? Perhaps by holding steadily before me the thought that the world got on quite happily for many eons prior to that unlikely moment when I was abruptly awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, and that it will get on quite happily after the inevitable moment to come when I return to that night.

15

RETURN TO NOTHINGNESS

A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands of years of non-existence; he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.

—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER,
“The Vanity of Existence
”

A
lthough my birth was contingent, my death is necessary. Of that I am reasonably sure. Yet I find my death difficult to imagine. And here I am in impressive company. Freud said he could not conceive of his own death. So did Goethe before him. “
It is entirely impossible
for a thinking being to think of its own non-existence, of the termination of its thinking and life,” Goethe said, adding that “to this extent, everybody carries within himself, and quite involuntarily at that, the proof of his own immortality.”

Such a “proof” of immortality is, alas, quite worthless. It is another instance of what has been called the
philosopher’s fallacy
: mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into reality. Not everyone, moreover, finds his own death inconceivable. Lucretius argued, in the stately verse of
De Rerum Natura
, that it is no harder to imagine not existing after one’s death than it is to imagine not existing prior to one’s birth. David Hume evidently felt the same way. Indeed, he claimed to find posthumous nonexistence no more frightening than prenatal nonexistence. When asked by James Boswell whether the thought of annihilation terrified him, Hume calmly replied, “
Not the least
.”

To exhibit such sangfroid in the face of death is said to be “philosophical.” To philosophize, Cicero declared, is to learn how to die. Here Socrates is held to be the model. Sentenced to die by an Athenian court on the charge of impiety, Socrates serenely and willingly drank the fatal cup of hemlock. Death, he told his friends, might be annihilation, in which case it is like a long, dreamless slumber; or it might be a migration of the soul from one place to another. Either way, it is nothing to be feared.

Why should the prospect of annihilation disturb me, if it did not disturb Socrates or Hume? I have already said that I cannot easily imagine my own death. That might make death seem a mysterious and therefore fearful thing. But I cannot imagine my being totally unconscious either, yet I enter that state every night, and quite fearlessly.

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 hospice.

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.