replaces it with,” and then had another whiskey. John Updike channeled his ambivalence about Being into his fictional alter-ego, that blocked, priapic, and despair-prone Jewish novelist Henry Bech. In one Updike story, Bech is invited to give a reading at a Southern girls’ college, where he is regarded as a literary star. At a dinner in his honor after the reading, he “looked around the ring of munching females and saw their bodies as a Martian or a mollusc might see them, as pulpy stalks of bundled nerves oddly pinched to a bud of concentration in the head, a hairy bone knob holding some pounds of jelly in which a trillion circuits, mostly dead, kept records, coded motor operations, and generated an excess of electricity that pressed into the hairless side of the head and leaked through the orifices, in the form of pained, hopeful noises and a simian dance of wrinkles.” Bech has a nihilistic epiphany: “the void should have been left unvexed, should have been spared this trouble of matter, of life, and, worst, of consciousness.” All existence, he declares to himself, is but a “blot on nothingness.” Yet, in his sunnier humors—or when he is affecting sunniness during the taping of a literary interview—Updike’s Bech is capable of smiling upon Being: “He believed, if this tape recorder must know … in the dignity of the inanimate, the intricacy of the animate, the beauty of the average woman, and the common sense of the average man.” In short, Bech believed “in the goodness of something vs. nothing.” Bech’s spasm of ontological optimism puts one in mind of a famous nineteenth-century New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, who was fond of exclaiming, “I accept the universe!” (to which the acidulous Thomas Carlyle responded, “Gad, she’d better”).
Perhaps the most ringing endorsement of the goodness of the world is not literary or philosophical, but musical. It is offered by Haydn in his oratorio The Creation. At first, all is musical chaos, a mixture of eerie harmonics and fragmentary melodies. Then comes the creative moment, when God declares, “Let there be light!” As the singers respond, “And there was light,” both orchestra and chorus mark the miracle by bursting into a powerful and sustained C-major triad—the very opposite of the gloomy Schopenhauer’s “minor chord.”
The attitude one takes toward existence as a whole shouldn’t merely be a matter of temperament—of whether or not one is liverish, or of how well one slept the previous night. It should be subject to rational evaluation. And it is only by exploring the question Why is there something rather than nothing? that we might come to see the value of existence in a rational light.
Could it be, for instance, that the world exists precisely because it is, on the whole, better than nothing? There are indeed philosophers who believe such a thing. They call themselves “Axiarchists.” (The word comes from the Greek for “value rules!”) They think the cosmos may have exploded into being in answer to a need for goodness. If they are right, the world, and our existence within it, may be better than it appears to us. We should be on the lookout for its subtler virtues, like hidden harmonies and dappled things.
Others hold that the triumph of Being over Nothingness may well have been a matter of blind chance. There are, after all, lots of ways for there to be Something—worlds in which everything is blue, worlds made of cream cheese, and so on—but there is only one Nothing. Assuming that all possible realities were assigned equal chances in the cosmic lottery, it is overwhelmingly likely that one of the many Somethings would win, not the lonely Nothing. If this blind-chance view of reality turned out to be right, we would have to revise our attitude toward existence downward a bit. For if reality is the outcome of a cosmic lottery, it is probable that the winning world will be a mediocre one: neither very good nor very wicked, neither very neat nor very messy, neither very beautiful nor very ugly. That is because mediocre possibilities are common, and truly excellent or awful ones rare.
If, on the other hand, the answer to the puzzle of existence turns out to be a theistic or quasi-theistic one—that is, if it involves something like a creator—then the attitude one takes toward the world would depend on the nature of that creator. The major monotheistic religions hold that the world was created by a God that is all-good