Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (6 page)

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOTHING

Hartley told his Mother, that he was thinking all day—all the morning, all the day, all the evening—“what it would be, if there were
Nothing!
if all the men, & women, & Trees, & grass, and birds & beasts, & the Sky, & the Ground, were all gone:
Darkness & Coldness
—& nothing to be dark & cold.”

—SAMUEL TAYL
OR
COLERIDGE
, letter to Sara (“Asra”) Hutchinson, June 1802 (Hartley was Coleridge’s son.)

NOTHING! thou elder brother even to shade
That hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixed) are alone of ending not afraid.

—JOHN WILMO
T,
EARL OF ROCHESTER,
“Upon Nothing”

Nothing,
said Heidegger,
the modernist
eminence,
noths.

—ARCHILOCHUS JONES,
“Metaphysics Explained for You”

W
hat is nothing? Macbeth answered this question with admirable concinnity: “Nothing is, but what is not.” My dictionary puts it somewhat more paradoxically—“
nothing
(n.)
: a thing that does not exist.” Although Parmenides, the ancient Eleatic sage, declared that it was impossible to speak of what is not—thereby violating his own precept—the plain man knows better. Nothing is popularly held to be better than a dry martini, but worse than sand in the bedsheets. A poor man has it, a rich man needs it, and if you eat it for a long time, it’ll kill you. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further. It can be both black and white all over at the same time. Nothing is impossible for God, yet it is a cinch for the rankest incompetent. No matter what pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is mysterious. But that would only mean that everything is obvious—including, presumably, nothing.

That, perhaps, is why the world abounds with people who know, understand, and believe in nothing. But beware of speaking blasphemously of nothing, for there are also many bumptious types about—call them “nullophiles”—who are fond of declaring that, to them, nothing is sacred.

Ex nihilo nihil fit
, averred the ancient philosophers, and King Lear agreed: nothing comes of nothing. This maxim would appear to attribute to nothing a remarkable power: that of generating itself—of being, like God,
causa sui
. The philosopher Leibniz paid nothing another compliment when he observed that it was “
simpler and easier
than something.” (Hard experience teaches the same lesson: nothing is simple, nothing is easy.) Indeed, it was the alleged simplicity of nothing that moved Leibniz to ask why there is something rather than nothing. If there
were
nothing, after all, there would be nothing to be explained—and no one to demand an explanation.

If nothing is so simple, so natural, then why, one wonders, does it seem so deeply mysterious? In the 1620s, John Donne, speaking from the pulpit, furnished a plausible answer: “
The less anything is
, the less we know it: how invisible, how unintelligible a thing, then, is this
Nothing
!”

And why should such a simple (albeit unintelligible) thing strike others as so sinister? Take the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, one of the most profound and brave thinkers of the twentieth century. What, asked Barth, is Nothing? It is “
that which God
does not will.” In his massive and unfinished life’s work,
Church Dogmatics
, Barth wrote, “The character of nothingness derives from its ontic peculiarity. It is evil.” Nothing rose up simultaneously with Something when God created the world, according to Barth. The two are rather like a pair of ontological twins, though contrary in moral character. It is nothingness that accounts for man’s perverse tendency to do evil, to rebel against divine goodness. For Barth, nothingness was downright Satanic.

The existentialists, though godless themselves, regarded nothingness with similar dread. “
Nothingness haunts being
,” declared Jean-Paul Sartre, in his ponderous treatise
Being and Nothingness
. For Sartre, the world was like a little sealed container of being floating on a vast sea of nothingness. Not even a Parisian café—on a good day a “
fullness of being
,” with its booths and mirrors, its smoky atmosphere, animated voices, clinking wine glasses, and rattling saucers—could afford sure refuge from nullity. Sartre drops into the Café de Flore to keep a rendezvous with his friend Pierre. But Pierre is not there!
Et voilà
: a little pool of nothingness has seeped into the realm of being from the great
néant
that surrounds it. Since it is through dashed hopes and thwarted expectations that nothingness intrudes into the world, our very consciousness must be to blame. Consciousness, says Sartre, is nothing less (or more?) than a “hole at the heart of being.”

Sartre’s fellow existentialist Martin Heidegger was filled with
Angst
at the very thought of nothing, although this did not keep him from writing copiously about it. “
Anxiety reveals
the Nothing,
” he observed—his italics. Heidegger distinguished between fear, which has a definite object, and anxiety, a vague sense of not being at home in the world. What, in our anxious states, are we afraid of? Nothing! Our existence issues from the abyss of nothingness and ends in the nothingness of death. Thus the intellectual encounter each of us has with nothingness is suffused with the dread of our own impending nonbeing.

As to the nature of nothingness, Heidegger was wildly vague. “
Nothing is neither
an object nor anything that is at all,” he sensibly declared at one point. Yet in order to avoid saying,
Das Nichts ist
—“Nothing is”—he was driven to an even more peculiar locution,
Das Nichts nichtet
: “Nothing noths.” Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.

The American philosopher Robert Nozick took Heidegger’s idea a step further. If nothing is an annihilating force, Nozick conjectured, it might just “noth” itself, thereby giving rise to a world of being. He imagined nothing as “
a vacuum force
, sucking things into non-existence or keeping them there. If this force acts upon itself, it sucks nothingness into nothingness, producing something or, perhaps, everything.” Nozick recalled the vacuum cleaner–like beast in the movie
Yellow Submarine
that goes around sucking up all it encounters. After hoovering away everything else on the movie screen, it ultimately turns on itself and sucks itself into nonexistence. With a pop, the world reappears, along with the Beatles.

Nozick’s speculations about nothing, though playful in spirit, left some of his fellow philosophers exasperated. They felt he was willfully sliding into nonsense. One of them, the Oxford philosopher Myles Burnyeat, commented, “
By the time
one has struggled through this wild and woolly attempt to find a category beyond existence and non-existence, and marvelled at such things as the graph showing ‘the amount of Nothingness Force it takes to nothing some more of the Nothingness Force being exerted,’ one is ready to turn logical positivist on the spot.”

The logical positivists, indeed, dismissed all such speculation as much ado about nothing. One of the most distinguished of them, Rudolf Carnap, observed that the existentialists had been fooled by the grammar of “nothing”: since it behaves like a noun, they assumed, it must refer to an entity—a something. This is the same blunder that the Red King makes in Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass
: if Nobody had passed the messenger on the road, the Red King reasoned, then Nobody must have arrived first. Treating “nothing” as the name of a thing allows one to generate endless paradoxical twaddle, as the opening paragraphs of this very chapter attest.

THE IDEA THAT
it is nonsensical to talk about nothing goes back to the dawn of Western philosophy. It was Parmenides, the greatest of the pre-Socratics, who was most emphatic on this point. Parmenides is a somewhat mysterious figure. A native of Elea, in southern Italy, he flourished in the mid-fifth century BCE. As an elderly man, he reputedly met the young Socrates. Plato described him as “
venerable and awesome
.” Parmenides was the first Greek philosopher to set out a sustained logical argument about the nature of reality, and thus he might be regarded as the original metaphysician. Curiously, he chose to present his argument in the form of a long allegorical poem, of which some 150 lines survive. In the poem, an unnamed goddess offers the narrator a choice between two paths: the path of being, and the path of nonbeing. But the latter path proves to be illusory, since nonbeing can be neither thought about nor spoken of. Just as “seeing nothing” is not seeing, speaking or thinking of nothing is not speaking or thinking at all, and approaching nothing is failing to make progress.

The Parmenidean line certainly seems to deflate the mystery of existence. If we cannot speak meaningfully of “nothing,” then we cannot meaningfully ask why there is something rather than nothing. The words would have no more sense than the bubbles issuing from the mouth of a fish.

But sense can be quickly restored by drawing a simple distinction between
nothing
and
nothingness
. As the logicians remind us,
nothing
is not a name; it is mere shorthand for “not anything.” To say, for example, that “nothing is greater than God” is not to talk about a super-divine entity; it is simply to say that there is not anything greater than God. “Nothingness,” by contrast, is indeed a name. It designates an ontological option, a possible reality, a conceivable state of affairs: that in which nothing exists.

Some languages mark the distinction between
nothing
and
nothingness
more clearly than others. In French, for example, “nothing” is
rien
, while “nothingness” is
le néant
. In mathematics, the distinction is made precise by the notion of the “empty set.” An empty set is a set that has no members; hence it is a something that contains nothing. Using the brackets of set theory, one gets the following equations:

Le néant
= {
rien
}

Nothingness = {nothing}

Once
nothing
and
nothingness
are distinguished, it is easy to resolve the supposed paradoxes about nothing that arise from conflating the two, like those the ancient Greek philosophers were so fond of. (“How can anything be something that is not something?” one Greek riddle went. “By being nothing.”) It is also easy to deal with gnomic formulations like Heidegger’s
Das Nichts nichtet.
If Englished as “Nothing noths,” the statement is quite true but uninteresting: of course there is not anything that “noths”! If Englished as “Nothingness noths,” then it is quite false. Nothingness does nothing of the kind. It is merely a possible reality, and a possible reality either can be the case or fail to be the case. That is all. It cannot engage in any activity; it can neither cause nor “noth.”

But
is
nothingness a possible reality? Certainly we have all experienced absence and loss. We are intimately familiar with holes and gaps, with lacks and deficits. Indeed, as the late Peter Heath, a mischievous British philosopher (and former teacher of mine), observed, voids and vacancies are even advertised in the newspapers. But these are mere bits of nothingness, surrounded, as they are, by a world of being. What about Absolute Nothingness, the total absence of
everything
? Is this possible?

Some philosophers have argued that it isn’t. The very idea, they say, is self-contradictory. If these philosophers are right, then the riddle of being has a cheap and rather trivial solution: there is something rather than nothing simply because
nothingness is impossible
. As one contemporary philosopher has put it, “
There is just
no alternative to being.”

Could that be true? Close your eyes, if you will, and stop up your ears. Now picture to yourself an absolute void. Try to wish into nonbeing the entire contents of the world. You might begin, as Coleridge’s little boy did, by imagining away all the men and women and trees and grass and birds and beasts and earth and sky. And not just the sky, but everything in it. Think of the lights going out all over the cosmos: the sun disappearing, the stars extinguished, the galaxies winking into nonexistence one by one, or billion by billion. In your mind’s eye, the entire cosmos is sliding into silence, cold, and darkness—with nothing to be silent or cold or dark. You have succeeded in imagining absolute nothingness.

Or have you? When the French philosopher Henri Bergson tried to imagine universal annihilation, he found that there was inevitably something left over at the end of the experiment: his inner self. Bergson thought of the world of being as “
an embroidery on
the canvas of the void.” But when he attempted to strip this embroidery away, the canvas of his consciousness remained. Try as he might, he could not suppress it. “At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished,” he wrote, “another consciousness lights up—or rather, it was already alight; it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first.” He found it impossible to imagine absolute nothingness without some residuum of consciousness creeping into the darkness, like a little light under the door. Therefore, he concluded, nothingness must be an impossibility.

Bergson was not the only philosopher to argue in this way. The British idealist F. H. Bradley, author of the dauntingly titled
Appearance and Reality
, similarly maintained that sheer nothingness was unthinkable. He too concluded that it must therefore be impossible.