Now for something
about nothing ... Why Does the World
Exist? An Existential Detective
Story by Jim Holt. Reviewed by Spengler
In the first
pages of his new book, Jim Holt misquotes my old
professor, Columbia University philosopher Sidney
Morgenbesser: "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."
Morgenbesser actually said:
"If there was nothing, you'd also complain."
There's a world of difference, as we shall see,
between "not being satisfied" and "complaining".
Part of the difference, of course, is the
unmistakably Jewish irony directed at the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, a member of the Nazi
party. Heidegger's famous question, "Why is there
something instead of nothing?" is the opening
challenge of the German philosopher's famous essay
"What is Metaphysics?" and the jumping-off point
for Holt's peroration through the mysteries of
Creation.
But there was a deeper point to
Morgenbesser's quip. To brandish Nothingness
against Being is not an analytical procedure, but
a complaint - specifically, the Devil's complaint
about Creation. Since the philosopher Parmenides
taught a generation before Socrates, philosophers
have confronted a paradox: We can neither think
nor speak of "Nothing", for the moment we employ
the term, we are speaking or thinking about a
thing, namely "nothing". One can't get at
"Nothing" directly; one can only sneak up upon it
through such things as boredom, violence and
perversion.
As Holt quotes Heidegger:
The question [of Nothing] 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 to hopelessly
commonplace that we no longer care whether
anything is or is not.
Every German
schoolboy (but few American writers) would
recognize in Heidegger the voice of Goethe's
Mephistopheles, who tells Faust:
I am the spirit that denies! And
justly so; for all that time creates, He does
well who annihilates! Better, it ne'er had
had beginning; And so, then, all that you
call sinning, Destruction, - all you
pronounce ill-meant, - Is my original
element.
Mephisto is a manifestation
of the primal chaos which envies the light, and
seeks in vain to restore this chaos:
That which at nothing the gauntlet
has hurled, This, what's its name? this
clumsy world, So far as I have
undertaken, I have to own, remains
unshaken By wave, storm, earthquake, fiery
brand. Calm, after all, remain both sea and
land.
Faust observes that the Devil
can do no harm in the large, and so engages in
petty acts of destruction. "Go find something else
to do, strange son of Chaos!" the philosopher
scolds.
That is why Morgenbesser's actual
joke - "If there was nothing, you would also
complain" - is as insightful as Mr Holt's
misquotation is misleading. Holt doesn't get the
joke; he doesn't even understand that it is
a joke to begin with. The question betrays the
character of the questioner, both in the case of
Heidegger and Holt. A predilection for Nothing is
metaphysical nonsense, but it has an existential
meaning: It is the complaint of the bored, the
jaded, the jealous, the perverted against life.
Goethe's act of genius was to personify the
metaphysical impossibility of Nothingness as a
spiritual craving for Nothingness, in the stage
personage of the Devil.
As the leading
Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod observes,
Heidegger's predilection for Nothingness expressed
itself in his membership in the Nazi Party - in
perversion, destruction and hatred. "The embracing
of nonbeing," he wrote, "is violence. In violence,
being is turned against itself, toward its own
destruction ... Killing is the purest form of
deontology. And it is for this reason that Nazism
is the deontology of Heidegger."
A
brilliant mind, Heidegger tragically remained in
the grip of a Satanic impulse similar to Hitler's
- the disappointment of Germany after its defeat
in World War I. The philosopher killed no Jews
(and made no public anti-Semitic statements even
while he praised Hitler). Eventually the Nazis had
no use for him, but he never apologized for his
Nazi Party membership or his open support for
Hitler during his brief tenure as Rector of the
University of Freiburg.
Holt's fascination
with Heidegger's question betrays the same sort of
existential angst. In a post-religious age, people
will ask themselves why they exist in the first
place, and why, if they are one day to become
nothing, whether they really are something at the
moment. As Holt explained to a newspaper
interviewer:
The question "Why does the world
exist?" rhymes with the question "Why do I
exist?" Both cosmic and personal existence are
precarious in the extreme. This was borne in
upon me when, just as I was writing the last
chapters of the book, about the self and death,
my mother unexpectedly died. I was alone with
her in the hospice room at the last moment. To
see a self flicker into nothingness - the very
self that engendered your own being, no less -
is to feel the weirdness of existence
anew.
Heidegger posed the question,
"Why is there something instead of nothing?," in
just the sense that Sidney Morgenbesser understood
it, as a nod to Goethe's Mephistopheles.
Wrong-footed from the outset, Holt chases the
phantom of Nothingness down the rabbit holes of
metaphysics and discovers - nothing.
Holt
seems to think that he can evade the Parmenides
paradox by speaking of "Nothingness" (the absence
of existence) as opposed to "Nothing", literally
"no thing." As he writes:
Once nothing and nothingness are
distinguished, it is easy to resolve the
supposed paradoxes about nothing that arise form
conflating the two, like those the ancient Greek
philosophers were so fond of. [Nothingness]
designates and ontological option, a possible
reality, a conceivable state of affairs: that in
which nothing exists.
The obvious
problem with this approach is that if we try to
imagine a possible reality in which nothing
exists, it is we who are doing the imagining,
which implies that we exist. There can't be
nothing if we are there. That is a variant of
Descartes' proof of existence, "I think, therefore
I am" (that is: If I don't exist, then who wants
to know?).
Because he misunderstood
Heidegger's point to begin with - that a sense of
Nothingness arises from a complaint against life -
Holt cannot quite get at the problem of
existential despair. He writes:
Although 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."
That sounds very
nice, and very spiritual. But it was the same
Freud, who some time later pulled out of thin air
the notion of a "Death Wish" to explain the mass
suicide of European civilization during the First
World War. What makes it hard to imagine our own
non-existence? It is because our existence is a
social fact.
Try to imagine your own
funeral; even if you are in the coffin, you are
present in the thoughts and feelings of your
family and friends, and you feel yourself to be
still present. Then imagine dying alone as the
last speaker of your language. We exist through
our ancestors and our children, and through the
transmission of our culture. But individuals who
foresee the extinction of their entire culture not
only are quite able to imagine their own
non-existence, but often desire it avidly. That is
why, for example, some Muslim countries today
produce so many volunteers for suicide attacks.
Heidegger's contemporary, the religious
existentialist Franz Rosenzweig, explains this
clearly, but his name appears nowhere in this
volume.
Holt's discussion of ontology
misses the point. In Plato's eponymous dialogue,
Parmenides explains to the young Socrates the
absurdity of attempting to think about Nothing (or
"Nothingness" - the verbal distinction is
immaterial). The older philosopher asks a
different question: "Why are there different
things, and not just one Big Thing?"
If we
cannot conceive of Non-Being, Parmenides tells
Socrates, then we must think of Being as one big
thing with no parts. It cannot change, for that
would imply that some part of Being has become
Non-Being, and we cannot conceive of Non-Being.
Being cannot be differentiated into different
kinds of Being, for that would that some part of
Being contains Non-Being with respect to another
part of Being, and so forth. Therefore the One
exists, but not the Many.
I am still not
quite sure how Plato intended this dialogue to be
read - whether Parmenides is a Stand-up
Philosopher in the sense of Mel Brooks'
History of the World Part I, and his
argument a classic version of Abbott and
Costello's "Who's
on First?" routine - or whether it is a great
statement of ontological paradox. The two readings
are not mutually exclusive.
Two points
should be underscored.
For one thing,
there is no difference as far as we are concerned
between Parmenides' undifferentiated One and
nothing. It is impossible to imagine a world in
which there was only an undifferentiated One
because we could not distinguish it from nothing.
If everything were the same, it would be the
indistinguishable from nothing. One cannot so
easily dismiss Parmenides' paradox of the One and
Many, for it terms up again and again in
philosophy, notoriously in Spinoza. For just that
reason it seems pointless to argue whether the
Creation story in the Bible implies creation ex
nihilo, or creation from a primal chaos
("without form and void"). We could not
distinguish absolute disorder from nothing.
The second and far more important point is
that no system of philosophy ever has emerged that
can explain the differentiation of reality without
reference to a God who creates different things. I
reviewed these issues in a 2010 essay for First
Things, entitled "The
God of the Mathematicians", and summarize the
key points here.
In Genesis, Creation
occurs through a series of separations: light from
darkness, heaven from earth, water from dry land,
and so forth. The philosopher and would-be Bible
debunker Benedict Spinoza's great (if
unintentional) accomplishment was to prove that a
God who is identical to nature will transform all
of nature into a single blob of undifferentiated
goo.
Spinoza wrote:
As God is a being absolutely
infinite ... and he necessarily exists; if any
substance besides God were granted it would have
to be explained by some attribute of God, and
thus two substances with the same attribute
would exist, which is absurd; therefore, besides
God no substance can be granted, or
consequently, be conceived.
In other
words: If we actually can conceive of God as
existing within the natural world, then we can
conceive of nothing else at all. A century and a
half later, G W F Hegel joked that the cause of
Spinoza's death "was consumption, from which he
had long been a sufferer; this was in harmony with
his system of philosophy, according to which all
particularity and individuality pass away in the
one substance." That was cruel, but quite
accurate.
Spinoza has the reputation of a
rationalist who rejected religious superstition,
but his immanent God, conceived of as natura
naturens ("Nature naturing") gives us the
absurd results that Hegel noted. More "realistic,"
in my view, is the rabbinical concept of
Tzimzum, (Hebrew, "contraction"): God
shrinks his presence in the world by an act of
divine will in order to make room for the
abundance of creation.
The rabbinic
concept of a voluntaristic God upsets not only
atheists but followers of natural theology.
Nonetheless, it can be argued quite credibly that
the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria not only
understood Spinoza's way of looking of things a
century before Spinoza, but also proposed a
solution to the problem of differentiation on
which his system founders. One may not like the
Bible and its rabbinic interpretation, but this
tradition does offer a clear answer to the
problem.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the
philosopher and mathematician who (along with
Isaac Newton) invented the calculus, offered an
antidote to Spinoza's consumption that is not too
distant from the rabbinic solution. Instead of a
single "infinite substance", Leibniz proposed a
"pre-established harmony" that governed an
infinite number of independent "monads", or
atom-like entities each as unique as a snowflake.
Leibniz added a purely theistic premise: By the
law of sufficient reason, he argued, God does not
do anything superfluous and therefore does not
create anything twice.
The systems of
Spinoza and Leibniz seem to be mirror images:
Spinoza's single substance cannot explain
individuality, while Leibniz' individual monads
cannot communicate with each other. We have a
"pre-established harmony" instead of "infinite
self-generating substance". Undergraduate courses
misleadingly lump the two together under the
rubric of "rationalism". But there is a
fundamental difference: By turning Spinoza's
inside out, Leibniz makes room for God to return
from his Babylonian captivity in natura
naturans, to lordship over being.
The
last part of the book is taken up by a long
interview with the novelist John Updike conducted
shortly before his death in 2009. Updike wrestled
with death and faith throughout work, and his
voice is more interesting than Holt's. It is a
shame that the interview can't be purchased
separately as an e-book.
Why Does the
World Exist? An Existential Detective Story,
by Jim Holt (Liveright, 2012). ISBN-10:
0871404095. Price US$27.95, 320 pages.
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