Big, meaty questions, those we tend to associate with metaphysics, inhabit the intellectual ecosystem like slaughtered prey on the plains. Once the lions of science take them down, carrion seekers—religion vultures, philosophy maggots—take over to see that the bones are picked clean, and whenever we gnaw at them, we could be said to be doing philosophy, at least in some way. Not all philosophers concern themselves with what “it” and “mean” mean when we say “What does it mean?” but those who devote careers to these questions tend to be philosophers.
Before the Continental/Analytic divide, Leibniz, who has since become a major figure for thinkers on both sides of the aisle, asked “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, which the Continental Heidegger called “the only genuine philosophical question.” Later, Wittgenstein, a hero of the Analytic school, pointed out that just because a sentence can work grammatically doesn’t mean it has any real content. The Why Something question would, in all likelihood, be one of those topics that he would have us pass over in silence.
And yet, Nozick, another major figure of the Analytic tradition, seemed to have missed the memo about what not to talk about, because in his later work Philosophical Explanations he discusses just about everything. He is best known for contributing one of the two major works of 20th century political philosophy, but in Explanations he shows that epistemology, ethics, free will, and metaphysics are on his radar as well. Like a 20th century Aristotle, his interests in this book cover just about every field of inquiry (except aesthetics—unlike Plato’s most famous student, which is fine with me because I never much liked the Poetics anyway).
It is this last topic that drew me to this work of his, because in trying to account for the diversity of the world he appeals not to staid questions of universals or forms or types and tokens but to an all-embracing notion he calls the principle of fecundity. Like David Lewis’s modal realism, it is an attempt to reframe the question of why is the world the way it is when it could have been any number of others ways. His approach, like Lewis’s, is a kind of maximalism in which all possible worlds exist and all are equally real.
As an Analytic philosopher to the core, he cannot quite make peace with the idea of “brute facts,” those final givens beyond which we simply cannot explain or understand anything further. (When a child asks why he shouldn’t put his hand on a flame and you explain that it will burn him, and then he asks why and you explain that skin is destroyed by fire, and then he asks why and you say “Just because,” you’ve reached a brute fact threshold. (A scientist could come in and explain more, but even she will reach a point at which she will have to concede and say “Just because.” Those are the brutest facts of all.) Unwilling to accept a theological argument, and frustrated with circular arguments or any definition that uses the terms of the thing being defined, he proposes the fecundity principle as a way to, as his one-time undergraduate student Brian Greene once put it, “defang the question.” Nozick therefore places himself in a long and distinguished line of philosophers who solve the problem by restating it. If “this” world is no more significant than any other, you can’t even call it “this” world at all.
If this sounds less than satisfying to you, that’s ok. Unlike Heidegger, who said the question hadn’t been properly asked until he came along, or Wittgenstein, who doubted whether it was a question at all, Nozick seems to imply that the question can be resolved but that it is just not all that pressing. At the end of his chapter on metaphysics, he admits that “we need not resolve the question; it suffices to consider, elaborate, and keep track of the hypotheses.”
OK, I can live with that. Nozick arrives at a well-defended, if not earth-shattering, conclusion that for now the best he can do is fine-tune this central question of metaphysics and suggest a path forward.
But then things get weird. And not just weird but kind of gross. Ever fearful of infinite regress, he rejects the possibility that the universe could be its own explanation; this is derived from the self-evident notion that you cannot include the word for a thing in its definition without lapsing into tautological absurdity. This strikes me as a perfectly sound, perhaps even essential, bit of reasoning. It falls short, however, when trying to take on the Big Questions, especially when the “what” is as hard to define as the “why.” Trying to clarify the link between the two is an even more convoluted endeavor. Nozick’s strategy is to do something very un-Analytic: He appeals to mysticism, specifically that of the Hatha Yoga practitioner. (This book was published in 1981, when, I suppose, yoga hadn’t quite become assimilated into the mainstream to the extent it has today.) He devotes a footnote at the end of the chapter on metaphysics entirely to yoga in which he refines and to some extent undercuts the already limited credence he gives to the mystic’s privileged insight into the Why-Something question:
The practitioner of Hatha Yoga develops extraordinary suppleness and physical capabilities, and the yoga manuals are explicitly dark and mysterious about some of the practices. …[The practitioner is] warned to keep some things very secret and to do them only in private.
Then Nozick launches a barrage of questions, sounding like an interrogator pounding the table, demanding answers:
What are the yoga manuals keeping hidden, which the practitioner is expected to come to himself? What does the cutting of the fraenum linguae aid [the flap of skin attaching the tongue to the bottom of the mouth]? What nectar is brought upwards and drunk? What is the mouth of the well of nectar over which the tongue is placed and what ambrosia is drunk daily?
What, indeed? If you want the truth and think you can handle the truth, Nozick has it for you: “I conjecture that one of the acts the (male) yogis perform…is auto-fellatio.”
I’m going to let that sink in for a minute.
OK. Now you may be asking what such a conjecture is doing in a philosophical treatise. (I know I did.) Well, Nozick points out, this image of self-gratification is reminiscent of the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, a symbol of creation as an act of self-consumption. Of course, under even the slightest scrutiny the metaphors fall apart: Fellatio, auto- or otherwise, doesn’t lead to procreation, and the snake is eating, not stimulating, its tail and not its genitals. (There's also nothing in the ouroboros that leads us to believe it is necessarily male.) So chill out Bob, you pervert.
Still, there is something to this, if only for the flexibility Nozick demonstrates by his willingness to stretch the austere logic of analytic philosophy—rather than looking for ways to obviate metaphysical inquiry entirely like, say, Wittgenstein. You may think his reasoning and/or his conclusions are profound, ridiculous, or both (as is my impression), but wherever you stand about this as a philosophical insight, I think one thing is clear: Nozick shows that however you look at them, Big Questions can be a mouthful.
—David Crohn
I think there is a way to answer the questions “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and “Why do things exist?”. Also, it seems possible to say that the reason for something’s existence is intrinsic to that thing and not outside of it as long as you can provide the reason. My thinking on these issues is as follows.
In brief, I propose that “something” and “nothing” are just two different words, derived from two different ways of thinking, for describing the same underlying thing: what we’ve traditionally, and, as I’ll try to show, incorrectly, thought of as the “absolute lack-of-all” or “non-existence”. I put these phrases in quotes because I try to show by my argument that when we’ve gotten rid of everything that is traditionally thought to exist, the supposed “absolute lack-of-all” or “non-existence” that’s left actually meets the definition I propose of an existent entity. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but a summary of my reasoning is as follows:
A. To start, I think the reason that something exists is that it’s a grouping defining what is contained within. A grouping defining what is contained within is similar to a surface. For example, a book is composed of tons of individual atoms, but when they’re grouped together (via their chemical bonds), a new and unique existent entity called the book is formed. The book is a different entity than the individual atoms that compose it. Other examples are the outlines of a cloud, and the curly braces around a set. These define what is contained within and give existence to the thing as a separate existent entity from the contents of the thing. Even for an abstract concept in our mind, we have a list of the things that we think are included within that concept. Without a grouping defining what is contained within, a thing doesn’t exist.
B. Now, getting back to “nothing”, we’ve always thought that when you get rid of all matter, energy, space/volume, time, thoughts and concepts as well as all minds to consider this, then what’s left is the complete lack-of-all, “non-existence”, or “nothing”. But, I think once we’ve gotten rid of all that stuff, there’s one existent thing we can’t get rid of, which is the existent entity that is the supposed “absolute lack-of-all” itself. How can this be? Consider the supposed “absolute lack-of-all”. That lack of volume, matter, energy, concepts, minds, time, etc. would be the entirety of all that is present. It would be the all. Entirety and all are groupings defining what is present and contained within. Therefore, what we’ve previously thought of as the “absolute lack-of-all” is, when thought of a little differently, an existent state. So, really, what we’ve called “the absolute lack-of-all” in the past is, when thought about differently, not really the lack of all existent entities; it is itself an existent entity. In fact, I think it’s the most fundamental of existent entities. This means that the problem in answering the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is because of our incorrect distinction between “something” and “nothing”. As described above, even the supposed “absolute lack-of-all” is an existent entity, or “something”.
If you’re interested, there’s a better explanation at my website (about 3 pages) including more on infinite regress at:
sites.google.com/site/whydoesanythingexist
Thanks!
Hello Roger.
Your comments remind me of Buddhism and the Buddhist notion of Emptiness. I’m not sure how much that idea figures into your comment, but it sounds very similar.
As I understand it, Buddhist’s posit Emptiness as being the middle between the two extremes – 1) The Extreme of Existence – the false belief that something exists when in fact it does not, and 2) The Extreme of Non-Existence – the false belief that something does not exist when in fact it does.
In this case, Emptiness is something like the existence of the absence of inherent existence (i.e., being permanent, part-less, and unitary).
I would leave it to you to speculate as to whether your “absolute lack-of-all” would also necessarily not be permanent, part-less, and unitary.
…the flux of Heraclitus?
Had the discussion in the ASU podcast acknowledged his unique writing style, I don’t think the podcasters would have given him such a hard time. The problem is that they read ASU as if it were an analytical argument supporting comprehensive conclusions, like Rawls’ Theory. Like Philosophical Investigations, ASU features meandering asides and discussions of arguments. It is focused on discussing or deconstructing arguments, not affirmatively making points.
I had forgotten Nozick’s comments on yoga, since I read them first when I was 20 years old and had never meditated or practiced yoga. Now that I am 47 and have been meditating daily for several years, his statements reveal a stark ignorance of even basic concentration practices and the easy-to-obtain results of applying basic head-mudras in yoga practice. His conjecture is utterly clueless, the remarks only an utter outsider would ever consider. His idiocy will be in print for centuries and become yet another example of. “nothing ever being too stupid that no philosopher has never said it.”
And that isn’t even Nozick’s worst stuff. Try his The Examined Life for metaphysical prose so dense Immanuel Kant will seem clear by comparison. Nozick is in places a strange blend of Plato’s careful abstraction and Hegel’s grandiosity and impenetrability. At least Kant was after a model for the mind that is in outline accepted now in cognitive science. Nozick’s stuff is either brilliant and in need of translation or utter academic balderdash, or insanity. It seems to be some complex, abstract, platonic metaphysic that he is sincere about but won’t clarify how he arrived at.
Nozick was a brilliant outside-the-box thinker and a terrible writer, badly in need of an editor that could keep up with him. Sometime after Anarchy, State, and Utopia he got up to his ears in symbolic reasoning and metaphysical concerns, and never came home.