Topics Existence

Question It makes sense to me that there should be nothing rather than anything. I find this issue rather mind boggling because obviously there is something. Fortunately I'm able to dismiss this issue and go on to other things. My only hope is that if there is an afterlife, and there are orientation sessions I will ask the lecturer (an angel?) about it. I'm just afraid that his reply will be a board with a bunch of incomprehensible formulae. My question is do philosophers deal with this issue or has it already been dismissed as undealable.

Accepted:
August 10, 2011

Comments

As your formulations nicely bring out, the problem here arises from the combination of two phenomena: that there is something rather than nothing, and that our mind finds it more natural (less surprising, less boggling, more sense-making) that there should be nothing rather than anything.

Our disposition to find certain things disturbing is a feature of the mind we have, which developed through evolution and education. It's not hard to tell a story about why our mind should have developed this way: we do best concentrating our explanatory efforts on events and changes rather than where nothing it happening. So we reason with a maxim like "nothing happens without a reason" (meaning: whenever something happens, then there is a reason for it). But this useful maxim, deeply entrenched in even our more unreflective behavior, may not serve us best in all contexts. It may make us overlook that in some cases a non-event needs explanation (Sherlock Holmes' famous case of the dog that did not bark). And it may leave us stunned before the question of why there is something rather than nothing at all, because any reason we can think of (e.g., a creator god) would leave us equally at a loss to explain why he/it should exist rather than not exist. (This is how Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, expresses this mind-boggling experience: "Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss. Eternity itself, in all its terrible sublimity ... is far from making the same overwhelming impression on the mind; for it only measures the duration of things, it does not support them. We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? ' All support here fails us....")

As Kant also recognized, the only way to banish our anxiety is to recognize the contribution our mind makes to our sense of puzzlement, to recognize that we have no good reason for our disposition to find nothingness natural ("it makes sense to me") and somethingness mind-boggling or even terrifying. One could then add that, once we make the effort to suppress this disposition, then somethingness perhaps even becomes the less surprising outcome. There are countless ways for there to be something, after all, and only one way for there to be nothing -- so would it not be mind-bogglingly surprising, if there had been nothing at all? (Unsurprisingly, surprise occurs only if there is something rather than nothing, of course.)

As for philosophers having dealt with this question, I would also mention Hegel (the Science of Logic), Heidegger (Being and Time), and Nozick (Philosophical Explanations) -- plus see the entry "Nothingness" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Perhaps in the Western tradition the most useful approach to your sense of puzzlement is the kind of philosophy as therapy that Wittgenstein developed in his later work, most strikingly perhaps in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. And then there is also a great deal of Eastern religion and philosophy to explore, though you would need a better guide for that literature and teaching than I could be.