Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story Read Online Free PDF

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