Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (5 page)

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.”

Let us, then, dip briefly into that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find.

Interlude

The Arithmetic of Nothingness

M
athematics has a name for nothing, and that is “zero.” It is notable that the root of zero is a Hindu word:
sunya
, meaning “void” or “emptiness.” For it was among Hindu mathematicians that our notion of zero arose.

To the Greeks and Romans, the very idea of zero was inconceivable—how could a nothing be a something? Lacking a symbol for it in their number systems, they could not take advantage of convenient “positional” notation (in which, for example, 307 stands for 3 hundreds, no tens, and 7 ones). That’s one reason why multiplying with roman numerals is hell.

The idea of emptiness was familiar to Indian mathematicians from Buddhist philosophy. They had no difficulty with an abstract symbol that signified nothing. Their notation was transmitted westward to Europe during the Middle Ages by Arab scholars—hence our “arabic numerals.” The Hindu
sunya
became the Arabic
sifr
, which shows up in English in both the words “zero” and “cipher.”

Although European mathematicians welcomed zero as a notational device, they were at first chary of the concept behind it. Zero was initially regarded more as a punctuation mark than as a number in its own right. But it soon began to take on greater reality. Oddly enough, the rise of commerce had something to do with this. When double-entry bookkeeping was invented in Italy around 1340, zero came to be viewed as a natural dividing point between credits and debits.

Whether discovered or invented, zero was clearly a number to be reckoned with. Philosophical doubts about its nature receded before the virtuoso calculations of mathematicians such as Fibonacci and Fermat. Zero was a gift to algebraists when it came to solving equations: if the equation could be put in the form
ab
= 0, then one could deduce that either
a
= 0 or
b
= 0.

As for the origin of the numeral “0,” that has eluded historians of antiquity. On one theory, now discredited by scholars, the numeral comes from the first letter of the Greek word for “nothing,”
ouden.
On another theory, admittedly fanciful, its form derives from the circular impression left by a counting chip in the sand—the presence of an absence.

Suppose we let 0 stand for Nothing and 1 stand for Something. Then we get a sort of toy version of the mystery of existence: How can you get from 0 to 1?

In higher mathematics, there is a simple sense in which the transition from 0 to 1 is impossible. Mathematicians say that a number is “regular” if it can’t be reached via the numerical resources lying below it. More precisely, the number
n
is regular if it cannot be reached by adding up fewer than
n
numbers that are themselves smaller than
n
.

It is easy to see that 1 is a regular number. It cannot be reached from below, where all there is to work with is 0. The sum of zero 0’s is 0, and that’s that. So you can’t get from Nothing to Something.

Curiously, 1 is not the only number that is unreachable in this way. The number 2 also turns out to be regular, since it can’t be reached by adding up fewer than two numbers that are less than 2. (Try it and see.) So you can’t get from Unity to Plurality.

The rest of the finite numbers lack this interesting property of regularity. They
can
be reached from below. (The number 3, for example, can be reached by adding up two numbers, 1 and 2, each of which is itself less than 3.) But the first infinite number, denoted by the Greek letter omega, does turn out to be regular. It can’t be reached by summing up any finite collection of finite numbers. So you can’t get from Finite to Infinite.

But back to 0 and 1. Is there some other way of bridging the gap between them—the arithmetical gap between Nothing and Something?

As it happens, no less a genius than Leibniz thought he had found a bridge. Besides being a towering figure in the history of philosophy, Leibniz was also a great mathematician. He invented the calculus, more or less simultaneously with Newton. (The two men feuded bitterly over who was the true originator, but one thing is certain: Leibniz’s notation was a hell of a lot better than Newton’s.)

Among much else, the calculus deals with infinite series. One such infinite series that Leibniz derived is:

1/(1–
x
) = 1 +
x
+
x
2
+ x
3
+
x
4
+
x
5
+ …

Showing remarkable sangfroid, Leibniz plugged the number –1 into his series, which yielded:

1/2 = 1–1 + 1–1 + 1–1 + …

With appropriate bracketing, this yielded the interesting equation:

1/2 = (1–1) + (1–1) + (1–1) + …

or:

1/2 = 0 + 0 + 0 + …

Leibniz was transfixed. Here was a mathematical analogue of the mystery of creation! The equation seemed to prove that Something could indeed issue from Nothing.

Alas, he was deceived. As mathematicians soon came to appreciate, such series made no sense unless they were
convergent
series—unless, that is, the infinite sum in question eventually homed in on a single value. Leibniz’s oscillating series failed to meet this criterion, since its partial sums kept jumping from 0 to 1 and back again. Thus his “proof” was invalid. The mathematician in him must surely have suspected this, even as the metaphysician in him rejoiced.

But perhaps something can be salvaged from this conceptual wreckage. Consider a simpler equation:

0 = 1–1

What might it represent? That 1 and –1 add up to zero, of course.

But that is interesting. Picture the reverse of the process: not 1 and –1 coming together to make 0, but 0 peeling apart, as it were, into 1 and –1. Where once you had Nothing, now you have
two
Somethings!
Opposites
of some kind, evidently. Positive and negative energy. Matter and antimatter. Yin and yang.

Even more suggestively, –1 might be thought of as the same entity as 1, only moving
backward in time
. This is the interpretation seized on by the Oxford chemist (and outspoken atheist) Peter Atkins. “Opposites,” he writes, “are distinguished by their direction of travel in time.” In the absence of time, –1 and 1 cancel; they coalesce into zero. Time allows the two opposites to peel apart—and it is this peeling apart that, in turn, marks the emergence of time. It was thus, Atkins proposes, that the spontaneous creation of the universe got under way. (John Updike was so struck by this scenario that he used it in the conclusion of his novel
Roger’s Version
as an alternative to theism as an explanation for existence.)

All that from 0 = 1–1. The equation is more ontologically fraught than one might have guessed.

Simple arithmetic is not the only way that mathematics can build a bridge between Nothingness and Being. Set theory also furnishes the materials. Quite early in their mathematical education, indeed often in grade school, children are introduced to a curious thing called the “empty set.” This is a set that has no members at all—like the set of female U.S. presidents preceding Barack Obama. It is conventionally denoted by {}, the set brackets with nothing inside of them, or by the symbol Ø.

Children sometimes bridle at the idea of the empty set. How, they ask, can a collection that contains nothing really be a collection? They are not alone in their skepticism. One of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century, Richard Dedekind, refused to regard the empty set as anything more than a convenient fiction. Ernst Zermelo, a creator of set theory, called it “improper.” More recently, the great American philosopher David K. Lewis mocked the empty set as “
a little speck of
sheer nothingness, a sort of black hole in the fabric of Reality itself … a special individual with a whiff of nothingness about it.”

Does the empty set exist? Can there be a Something whose essence—indeed, whose
only
feature—is that it encompasses Nothing? Neither believers nor skeptics have produced any strong arguments for or against the empty set. In mathematics it is simply taken for granted. (Its existence can be proved from the axioms of set theory, on the assumption that there is at least one other set in the universe.)

Let’s be metaphysically liberal and say that the empty set does exist. Even if there’s nothing, there must be a set that contains it.

Admit that, and a regular ontological orgy gets under way. For, if the empty set Ø exists, so does a set that contains it: {Ø}. And so does a set that contains both Ø and {Ø}: {Ø, {Ø}}. And so does a set that contains that new set, plus Ø and {Ø}: {Ø, {Ø}, {Ø, {Ø}}}. And on and on.

Out of sheer nothingness, a remarkable profusion of entities has come into being. These entities are not made out of any “stuff.” They are pure, abstract structure. They can mimic the structure of the numbers. (In the preceding paragraph, we “constructed” the numbers 1, 2, and 3 out of the empty set.) And numbers, with their rich web of interrelations, can mimic complicated worlds. Indeed, they can mimic the entire universe. At least they can if, as thinkers like the physicist John Archibald Wheeler have speculated, the universe consists of mathematically structured information. (This view is captured by the slogan “it from bit.”) The whole show of reality can be generated out of the empty set—out of Nothing.

But that, of course, presumes there is Nothing to start with.