Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,20

If we cannot speak meaningfully of “nothing,” then we cannot meaningfully ask why there is something rather than nothing. The words would have no more sense than the bubbles issuing from the mouth of a fish.

But sense can be quickly restored by drawing a simple distinction between nothing and nothingness. As the logicians remind us, nothing is not a name; it is mere shorthand for “not anything.” To say, for example, that “nothing is greater than God” is not to talk about a super-divine entity; it is simply to say that there is not anything greater than God. “Nothingness,” by contrast, is indeed a name. It designates an ontological option, a possible reality, a conceivable state of affairs: that in which nothing exists.

Some languages mark the distinction between nothing and nothingness more clearly than others. In French, for example, “nothing” is rien, while “nothingness” is le néant. In mathematics, the distinction is made precise by the notion of the “empty set.” An empty set is a set that has no members; hence it is a something that contains nothing. Using the brackets of set theory, one gets the following equations:

Le néant = {rien}

Nothingness = {nothing}

Once nothing and nothingness are distinguished, it is easy to resolve the supposed paradoxes about nothing that arise from conflating the two, like those the ancient Greek philosophers were so fond of. (“How can anything be something that is not something?” one Greek riddle went. “By being nothing.”) It is also easy to deal with gnomic formulations like Heidegger’s Das Nichts nichtet. If Englished as “Nothing noths,” the statement is quite true but uninteresting: of course there is not anything that “noths”! If Englished as “Nothingness noths,” then it is quite false. Nothingness does nothing of the kind. It is merely a possible reality, and a possible reality either can be the case or fail to be the case. That is all. It cannot engage in any activity; it can neither cause nor “noth.”

But is nothingness a possible reality? Certainly we have all experienced absence and loss. We are intimately familiar with holes and gaps, with lacks and deficits. Indeed, as the late Peter Heath, a mischievous British philosopher (and former teacher of mine), observed, voids and vacancies are even advertised in the newspapers. But these are mere bits of nothingness, surrounded, as they are, by a world of being. What about Absolute Nothingness, the total absence of everything? Is this possible?

Some philosophers have argued that it isn’t. The very idea, they say, is self-contradictory. If these philosophers are right, then the riddle of being has a cheap and rather trivial solution: there is something rather than nothing simply because nothingness is impossible. As one contemporary philosopher has put it, “There is just no alternative to being.”

Could that be true? Close your eyes, if you will, and stop up your ears. Now picture to yourself an absolute void. Try to wish into nonbeing the entire contents of the world. You might begin, as Coleridge’s little boy did, by imagining away all the men and women and trees and grass and birds and beasts and earth and sky. And not just the sky, but everything in it. Think of the lights going out all over the cosmos: the sun disappearing, the stars extinguished, the galaxies winking into nonexistence one by one, or billion by billion. In your mind’s eye, the entire cosmos is sliding into silence, cold, and darkness—with nothing to be silent or cold or dark. You have succeeded in imagining absolute nothingness.

Or have you? When the French philosopher Henri Bergson tried to imagine universal annihilation, he found that there was inevitably something left over at the end of the experiment: his inner self. Bergson thought of the world of being as “an embroidery on the canvas of the void.” But when he attempted to strip this embroidery away, the canvas of his consciousness remained. Try as he might, he could not suppress it. “At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished,” he wrote, “another consciousness lights up—or rather, it was already alight; it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first.” He found it impossible to imagine absolute nothingness without some residuum of consciousness creeping into the darkness, like a little light under the door. Therefore, he concluded, nothingness must be an impossibility.

Bergson was not the only philosopher to argue in this way. The British idealist F. H. Bradley, author of the dauntingly titled Appearance and Reality, similarly