Read Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story Online
Authors: Jim Holt
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To take axiarchism seriously, you have to believe three things.
First,
you have to believe that goodness is an objective value—that there are facts about what is good and evil, and that these facts are timelessly and necessarily true, independently of human concerns, and that they would be true even in the absence of all existent things.
Second
, you have to believe that the ethical needs that arise from such facts about goodness can be creatively effective—that they can bring things into existence and maintain those things in existence without the aid of any intermediary agent or force or mechanism.
Third
, you have to believe that the actual world—the world that we ourselves are a part of, even if we can only see a very tiny region of it—is the sort of reality that abstract goodness would bring into being.
In other words, you have to believe that (1)
value is objective
, (2)
value is creative
, and (3)
the world is good
. If you buy into all three of these propositions, you’ve got your resolution to the mystery of existence.
The first of them is philosophically controversial, to say the least. The most radical of the value skeptics, who trace their lineage to David Hume, hold that there is no such thing as objective goodness. Our judgments of right and wrong, on the Humean view, are just a matter of our sentiments, which we project onto the world and imagine to be part of the fabric of reality. Such moral judgments have nothing to do with objective truth, or even with reason. As Hume himself famously put it, “ ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
That is surely taking skepticism about value too far. Yet even philosophers on the opposite side of the issue, those who staunchly affirm the objectivity of value, have doubts about whether ethical needs could float completely free of the interests and concerns of sentient beings like ourselves. As Thomas Nagel once asked, if all sentient life were destroyed, would it still be a good thing if the Frick Collection survived?
Leslie himself is what might be called an “objective subjectivist” when it comes to value. He is a
subjectivist
because he believes that value ultimately resides only in states of consciousness, not in anything outside the mind. Yet he is an
objective
subjectivist because he believes that happiness is objectively better than suffering, not better merely because we happen to prefer it.
Why is a world of happy sentient beings objectively better than nothingness? Well, you might say, if there were a world of happy sentient beings, its annihilation would be ethically bad. But suppose we start from the nothingness side. If there were nothing at all, would it be objectively better if a world of happy sentient beings were to pop into existence? Perhaps it would. After all, the sum of happiness would go from zero to some positive number, which seems an objectively good thing. And it also seems objectively true that the sentient beings brought into existence were thereby benefitted (although it would be odd to say that if those sentient beings had
not
been brought into existence, they would thereby have been
harmed
).
But—moving on to the second point—even if there are objective truths about goodness, how could those truths
do
anything? How could they summon up a world out of sheer nothingness? Even if values are objective, they are not “out there” the way galaxies and black holes are. (If they were, they’d be useless for explaining why there is something rather than nothing, because they would be part of the something to be explained.) To say that values are objective is to say that we have objective
reasons
to do certain things. And reasons require agents to act on them if they are to have any impact on reality. Reasons without agents are impotent. To believe otherwise is to flirt with the scientifically discredited Aristotelian notion of “final cause” or “immanent teleology”—that it rains in the spring because that is good for the crops.
But perhaps this conclusion is too hasty. Can we make sense of a reason that might favor the existence of something even in the absence of any person who might act on the reason—a reason not to
do
but to
be
? What we’re looking for, remember, is an explanation of why there is anything at all—a causal explanation. Now, what styles of causal explanations are there? Well, there is
event
causation, where one event (say, the decay of a certain scalar field) causes another (the Big Bang). And there is
agent
causation, where an agent (say, God) causes an event (the Big Bang). Evidently, neither event causation nor agent causation can explain why there is something rather than nothing, since each presupposes the existence of something. There is, however, a third style of causal explanation,
fact
causation, where the fact that
p
causally explains the fact that
q
. In most cases of fact causation we are familiar with, the causing fact
p
involves something that exists—as in, for instance, “Jones died because he swallowed poison.” Yet it may be that, when
q
is the fact that
there is something rather than nothing
, the causing fact
p
needn’t itself cite anything that exists—any agent or substance or event. The causing fact might just be an abstract
reason
. And, if there is no additional fact that opposes or undermines this abstract reason, then such a reason could make for an adequate causal explanation. That, indeed, would appear to be the only hope for a noncircular resolution to the mystery of existence.
However—and now we move on to the third part of the axiarchic case—is it really plausible that the explaining reason should be that this world is better than an ontological blank? Actually, the axiarchist is committed to a much stronger thesis. He must believe that the world is not merely
better
than nothing, but that it is
maximally
good,
infinitely
good, the nicest reality that money can buy.
Ever since Leibniz made the fatuous-sounding claim that we live in the “best of all possible worlds” (and was mercilessly mocked by Voltaire for doing so), apologists for the goodness of creation have tried to explain away the apparent evil that permeates it. Perhaps, they say, evil has no genuine reality but is merely a negation, the local absence of goodness, the way blindness is the absence of sight. (This is the so-called privative theory of evil.) Or perhaps evil is an inevitable by-product of the good of freedom, which cannot exist without the possibility that it will be abused. Or, again, perhaps a bit of evil makes reality better as an “organic whole”—the way the dissonance in a Mozart string quartet heightens its overall beauty, or the way death is necessary to the aesthetic power of tragedy. After all, a world that is good through and through is a bland world; it is the presence of evils to be overcome through noble struggle that gives it piquancy. And sometimes evil itself can come to seem positively glamorous and romantic. What would
Paradise Lost
be without the rebellious pride of Satan?
Leslie himself concedes the existence of evil. He admits that “many items in our universe are far from splendid”—ranging from headaches to mass murder to the destruction of entire galaxies through false-vacuum fiascoes. Yet he purports to render the problem of evil manageable by making our world a tiny part of a much greater reality—a reality consisting of an infinite number of infinite minds, each of them contemplating everything of value. As long as the world around us contributes at least a little net value to this infinite reality, its existence is sanctioned by the abstract need for goodness. It may not be perfect, but—with its causal orderliness, its congeniality to life, and its conduciveness to more happy states of consciousness than unhappy ones—it’s good enough to merit inclusion in a maximally valuable reality.
So, at least, Leslie claimed. Yet I wondered whether he wasn’t just projecting his own happy consciousness onto a harsh and uncaring cosmos. He struck me as a temperamentally sunny man, one whose capacity for skepticism and irony only enhanced the intellectual pleasure he took in the worldview he had so painstakingly elaborated. In fact, he struck me as a sort of latter-day Spinoza. Leslie’s own metaphysical scheme, as he cheerfully admitted, was Spinozistic in flavor (even if, with its infinite number of pantheistic minds, it was “far richer” than the one that Spinoza described). Like Spinoza, Leslie sees all individual things as ripples on the sea of a unified divine reality. By all accounts, Spinoza was endowed with a deep intellectual reverence for this reality. His gentle integrity made him, according to Bertrand Russell, “
the noblest and most
lovable of the great philosophers.” Spinoza understood human suffering—of which he experienced his share, being ostracized as an infidel by his fellow Jews, and as a dangerous atheist by Christians—to be a minor discord in a larger cosmic harmony. Leslie seemed to have the same gift. And, like Spinoza, he lived as a sort of exile—in Canada.
It is tempting to join the sunny Spinoza-Leslie consensus. There is something to be said for cosmic optimism—especially when it not only helps us avoid despair in the face of evil, but also promises to explain why the world exists. But there is also something to be said for the contrary point of view. Schopenhauer said it in the nineteenth century: reality is overwhelmingly a theater of suffering, and nonexistence is better than existence. So did Byron, in his lines, “Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth… .” More recently, Camus declared that the only genuine philosophical problem is suicide, and E. M. Cioran epigrammatized endlessly about the “curse” of existence. Even Bertrand Russell, despite his professed admiration for Spinoza’s character, could not accept the Spinozist view that individual evils are neutralized by absorption into a larger whole. “
Each act of cruelty
,” Russell insisted, “is eternally a part of the universe.” Today, the most uncompromising opponent of cosmic optimism may be Woody Allen. In an interview he gave in 2010 (to a Catholic priest, curiously enough), Allen spoke of the “
overwhelming bleakness
” of the universe. “Human existence is a brutal experience to me,” he said. “It’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases.” There is no justice to it, Allen maintained, and no rationality either. Everyone does what one can to alleviate “the agony of the human condition.” Some distort it with religion; some chase money or love. Allen himself makes films—and whines. (“I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.”) Yet in the end “everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.”
A confirmed axiarchist might respond that Woody Allen takes too parochial a view of reality. There is more to heaven and earth than is encompassed in the morbid imagination of a Manhattan neurotic. But it could be argued that it is John Leslie, in his still hearth among the barren crags of Canada’s western coast, far from all centers of civilization, who is the cosmically parochial one. Leslie cites the causal orderliness of the universe and its fine-tuning for life as self-evidently good, as things that
ought to be
. But do they outweigh the sheer volume of agony inflicted on sentient beings, often by one another?
Maybe Leslie is right about one thing. Maybe the world really does owe its existence to some sort of abstract principle. But it seems unlikely that this principle should be intimately bound up with human concerns and judgments, the way goodness is. Leslie’s “creative value” looks too much like the ghost of a Judeo-Christian deity, a deity that we made in our own image and likeness. Could there be some other Platonic possibility, perhaps stranger and more alien to us, that might be behind the existence of the world, that might explain why there is Something rather than Nothing? To find a fitting resolution to the mystery of existence, I’d have to broaden the search. And, as it turned out, I’d have to get comfortable with a new and unfamiliar notion: “the Selector.”
Before taking leave of Leslie, though, I wanted to salute him for producing a play of ideas that was so consistently enlightening—and, not incidentally, entertaining.
“Of all the contemporary philosophers I’ve been reading,” I told him, “you’ve got to be the wittiest.”
“You’re very kind,” he said. Then he added, “But I’m not sure that’s much of a compliment.”
Interlude
An Hegelian in Paris
P
ure Being makes
the beginning …
I read these words while sitting—yet again—at a table at the Café de Flore. This time I am on the terrace of the café, facing the busy Boulevard Saint-Germain and, across the street, the Brasserie Lipp, with its promise of
choucroute garnie
. It is one of those rare early-spring days when the delicate oyster-shell gray of the Parisian sky gives way to an access of brilliant sunshine and cobalt blue. Distracted by the lovely weather, I look up from the page for a moment, hoping that I might spot an acquaintance, or at least a recognizable face, among the parade of people passing to and fro along the broad sidewalk in front of me.
Pas de veine.
So I sip the last bit of the café
express
I ordered—my fourth since I’ve been here—and return to my book, which happens to be Hegel’s
Science of Logic
.
That may seem an odd, not to say pretentious, choice of reading material for an idle afternoon in a fashionable (and overpriced) Left Bank café. But it isn’t odd, really. I am, after all, in a place that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made their daily headquarters some decades ago. It was here, in the winter of 1941–42, during the German occupation of Paris, that Sartre began composing his most imposing philosophical treatise,
Being and Nothingness
. That winter was a brutally cold one, but the proprietor of the café, Monsieur Boubal, was adept at procuring enough black-market coal to keep the interior at least minimally heated, and enough tobacco to supply the wants of its smoking patrons. Sartre and de Beauvoir would typically show up first thing in the morning and install themselves at the warmest table, next to the stove pipe. Sartre would ask for a cup of tea with milk, his sole order for the entire day. Then, still bundled up in his fake-fur coat of bright orange, and wearing his round horn-rim glasses, he would scribble away for hours at a stretch, barely looking up from the paper—except (as Beauvoir recalled in her memoirs) to retrieve from the floor and stuff into his briar pipe the occasional cigarette butt discarded by another customer.
And how did Sartre begin his epic inquiry into the relationship between
l’être et le néant
? With a description of this very café as “a fullness of being”—followed by a lengthy riff on the dialectic of being that Hegel set out in his
Logic
. So it is hardly incongruous that I should be striking a Hegelian pose here. As for pretentious … well, Café de Flore sets a very high bar for pretension.
My purpose, though, is a serious one. What I am struggling to do is to see the world in the most abstract way possible. That, it seems to me, is the best remaining hope for puzzling out why the world exists at all. All of the thinkers I had already spoken to fell short of complete ontological generality. They saw the world under some limited aspect. To Richard Swinburne, it was a manifestation of divine will. To Alex Vilenkin, it was a runaway fluctuation in a quantum vacuum. To Roger Penrose, it was the expression of a Platonic mathematical essence. To John Leslie, it was an outcropping of timeless value. Each of these ways of seeing the world purported to yield the answer to why it exists. But none of these answers struck me as satisfactory. They didn’t penetrate to the root of the existential mystery—to what Aristotle, in his
Metaphysics
, called “being
qua
being.” What does it mean
to be
? Is being a kind of property, one possessed by all existing things? Is it an activity, as the participial form of the word “be-ing” suggests? Clearly, one could not expect to understand
why
there is being without first having some grasp of
what
being really is.
And so, like Sartre before me, I find myself turning to Hegel. His doctrine of pure being has been one of the most influential in the whole history of philosophy—that much I knew. And it is in his
Logic
that he reputedly laid out this doctrine in its most comprehensible form.
“Pure Being makes the beginning,” Hegel declares at the outset, “because it is on the one hand pure thought and on the other immediacy itself.”
So far, so good, I think. You can’t get really anywhere in your philosophizing without acknowledging that there
is
something.
But what can we say about this Pure Being? Well, at its very purest, Hegel observes, it is “
simple and indeterminate
.” It has no specific qualities, such as number, size, or color.
That too also makes sense. Pure being is not like an apple, or a golf ball, or a dozen eggs.
Very quickly, though, Hegel’s reasoning takes a peculiar turn. “
This mere Being
, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative,” he avers. In other words, since Pure Being is the absence of all qualities, it is equally the
negation
of all qualities.
And what follows from this? That Pure Being “
is just Nothing
.”
Did I hear a rim shot?
Hegel is aware of the apparent absurdity of this conclusion. “
No great expenditure
of wit is needed to make fun of the maxim that Being and Nothing are the same,” I read. Nevertheless, the two concepts, at this rarefied level of abstraction, are identically empty. Each thus harbors the other within itself. They are dialectical twins.
Yet, despite their conceptual twinhood, Being and Nothing remain mutually contradictory. They stand in opposition to each other. Therefore, Hegel observes, they have to be reconciled. They must be brought together into a unity, a unity that supersedes these two timeless categories without destroying their distinctness.
And what is it that heals the breach? Becoming!
Thus does the great Hegelian dialectic get under way.
Thesis
: Reality is Pure Being.
Antithesis
: Reality is Nothing.
Synthesis
: Reality is Becoming.
Pure Becoming would seem as empty as Pure Being or Pure Nothing. Still, says Hegel, it has an edge to it, a vibrancy, a sense of potential. It is “
an unsteady unrest
which sinks into a restful result.” (Here I am reminded of the “false vacuum” that, according to current cosmological theory, engendered the Big Bang—another sort of pure becoming.) With some additional teasing and prodding by Hegel, Becoming is made to yield all sorts of still more refined determinations: quantity, quality, and measure, nature and history, art, religion, and philosophy—the whole dialectical process culminating in what he considered to be the perfection of the Prussian State—or what I considered to be the perfection of the Faubourg Saint-Germain
au beau soleil du printemps
.
“So
that’s
how all this got here!” I think to myself as I look up from the book.
I may be forgiven for being facetious. Hegel had a gift for eliciting facetiousness in his readers. Wasn’t it Bertrand Russell who remarked of Hegel’s
Logic
, “
The worse your logic
, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise”? And wasn’t it Schopenhauer who derisively credited Hegel with “
an ontological proof of
absolutely everything”?
What can make Hegel seem so preposterous is the way he equates thought with reality. The world, for him, is ultimately a play of concepts. It is the mind coming to know itself. But what could account for the
existence
of this mind? In what psychic arena, exactly, was Hegel’s dialectical orgy supposed to be taking place?
Flipping to the end of
Logic
, I begin to divine the answer. This mind bootstraps itself into existence by constituting its own consciousness. Like Aristotle’s God, it is self-thinking thought—only Hegel calls it not “God,” but “Absolute Idea.”
I come upon Hegel’s definition of Absolute Idea: “
The Idea, as unity
of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea—a notion whose object is the Idea as such, and for which the objective is Idea—an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity.”
Russell called this definition “
very obscure
.” I think he was being charitable. Hegel’s rhetorical fogginess did not deter French philosophers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. They reveled in the air of profundity it gave his dialectic, and emulated it in their own works. For them, Hegel was a model for how an intellectual could “
possess the world
,” as Sartre put it, by thinking alone.
Today, French thinkers still imbibe Hegel with their mother’s milk—or, at the very latest, as teenagers at the
lycée.
And here I am, an American weaned on logic of a drier sort, in a state of intellectual prostration after spending just a couple of hours wrestling with his dialectic. Maybe, I think to myself, it is time once again to leave the intellectually inspissate atmosphere of Paris for the clearer metaphysical air of the British Isles.
Or maybe I’m just suffering from the effects of excessive caffeine intake. As a restorative, I decide to order a nice tall glass of my favorite brand of Scotch whiskey—neat. After some minutes, I succeed in attracting the waiter’s attention.
“
Un grand verre de Glenfiddich, s’il vous plaît
,” I say. “
Sans glace
.”
“Glen-FEE-DEESH,” the waiter replies unsmilingly, presuming to correct my pronunciation.
It’s definitely time to leave Paris.