to the mathematical theory of sets). Today, those working on the problem of consciousness are trying to bridge mind and matter, and those trying to unify physics are trying to bridge matter and mathematics. With such conceptual linkages taking form, one can perhaps begin to see the faint outlines of a bridge between Nothing and Something (or perhaps a tunnel, if the quantum theorists are right). One can only hope it doesn’t turn out to be a bridge of asses.
THE MOTIVES FOR pursuing the mystery of existence are not just intellectual ones. They are also emotional. Our emotions typically have objects; they are about something. I am sad about the death of my dog. You are overjoyed that the Yankees are in the World Series. Othello is enraged at Desdemona’s infidelity. But some emotional states seem to be “free-floating,” without any determinate objects. Kierkegaard’s dread, for instance, was directed at nothing, or at everything. Moods like depression and exhilaration, if they have any object at all, seem to be about existence itself. Heidegger maintained that at the deepest level this is true of all emotions.
What sort of emotion is appropriate when the object of that emotion is the world as a whole?
This question divides people into two categories: those who smile on existence, and those who frown on it. For a notable frowner, consider Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism influenced such later thinkers as Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and Freud. If we are astonished at the existence of the world, Schopenhauer declared, our astonishment is one of dismay and distress. That is why “philosophy, like the overture to Don Juan, starts with a minor chord.” We live not in the best of all worlds, he went on, but in the worst. Nonexistence “is not only conceivable, but even preferable to its existence.” Why? Well, in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, the entire universe is a great manifestation of striving, one vast will. All of us, with our seemingly individual wills, are merely little bits of this cosmic will. Even inanimate nature—the attractive force of gravity, the impenetrability of matter—partakes in it. And will, for Schopenhauer, is essentially suffering: there is no end that, if achieved, would bring contentment; the will is either frustrated and miserable, or sated and bored. Schopenhauer was the first thinker to import this Buddhist strain into Western thought. The only way out of suffering, he taught, is to extinguish the will and thereby enter a state of nirvana—which is as close to nonexistence as we can get: “No will: no idea, no world. Before us there is certainly only nothingness.” It must be said that Schopenhauer himself hardly practiced the pessimistic ascetism he preached: he was fond of the pleasures of the table; enjoyed many sensual affairs; was quarrelsome, greedy, and obsessed with his fame. He also kept a poodle named Atma—Sanskrit for “world soul.”
In the last century, Schopenhauerian frowners have predominated, at least in the literary world. An especially heavy concentration of them could be found on the boulevards of Paris. Take E. M. Cioran, the Romanian writer who came to Paris and reinvented himself as an existential flâneur. Not even the charms of his adopted city could ease his nihilistic despair. “When you have understood that nothing is,” Cioran wrote, “that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.” Samuel Beckett, another expatriate in Paris, was similarly afflicted by the emptiness of being. Why, Beckett wanted to know, is the cosmos indifferent to us? Why are we such an insignificant part of it? Why is there a world at all?
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his moods, could be similarly jaundiced about existence. Roquentin, the autobiographical hero of Sartre’s novel Nausea, finds himself “choked with rage” at the “monstrous lumps” of “gross, absurd being” that environ him as he sits under a chestnut tree in the fictional village of Bouville (French for “Mudville”). The sheer contingency of it all strikes him as not just absurd but downright obscene. “You couldn’t even wonder where all that sprang from, or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness,” Roquentin muses, whereupon he is moved to shout, “Filth!” at the “tons and tons of existence” and then lapses into an “immense weariness.”
American literary figures have tended to wear their ontological pessimism more cheerfully. The playwright Tennessee Williams, for example, simply observed that “a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature