of interest in the mystery of existence, mainly thanks to the French philosopher Henri Bergson. “I want to know why the universe exists,” Bergson declared in his 1907 book, Creative Evolution. All existence—matter, consciousness, God himself—was, it seemed to Bergson, a “conquest over nothingness.” But after much pondering, he concluded that this conquest was not really so miraculous. The whole something-versus-nothing question was based on an illusion, he came to believe: the illusion that it was possible for there to be nothing at all. By a series of dubious arguments, Bergson purported to prove that the idea of absolute nothingness was as self-contradictory as the idea of a round square. Since nothingness was a pseudo-idea, he concluded, the question Why is there something rather than nothing? was a pseudo-question.
This killjoy conclusion certainly made no impression on Martin Heidegger, for whom nothingness was all too real, a sort of negating force that menaced the realm of being with annihilation. At the very beginning of a series of lectures delivered in 1935 at the University of Freiburg—where he had been given the job of rector after proclaiming his allegiance to Hitler’s national socialism—Heidegger declared “Why is there being rather than nothing at all?” to be the “deepest,” “the most far-reaching,” and “the most fundamental of all questions.”
And what did Heidegger do with this question as the lectures progressed? Not a lot. He dilated on its existential pathos. He dabbled in amateur etymology, piling up Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit words related to Sein, the German word for “being.” He rhapsodized about the poetic virtues of the pre-Socratics and the Greek tragedians. At the conclusion of the final lecture, Heidegger observed that “being able to ask a question means being able to wait, even one’s whole life long”—which must have had those in the audience who had been hoping for a hint of an answer wearily nodding their heads.
Heidegger was, without question, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century in continental Europe. But in the English-speaking world, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who had the greatest philosophical sway. Wittgenstein and Heidegger were born in the same year (1889). They were pretty much opposites when it came to character: Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain. Yet they were equally seduced by the mystery of existence. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” Wittgenstein averred in one of the lapidary numbered propositions—6.44, to be precise—in the sole work he published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Some years earlier, in the notebooks he kept as a soldier in the Austrian army during the First World War, Wittgenstein wrote in the entry of October 26, 1916, “Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists.” (Later that day, he made the entry, “Life is serious, art is gay”—this while fighting on the Russian front.) Wonder and amazement at the existence of the world was, Wittgenstein said, one of the three experiences that enabled him to fix his mind on ethical value. (The other two were the feeling of being absolutely safe, and the experience of guilt.) Yet, as with all truly important matters—ethical value, the meaning of life and death—attempting to explain the “aesthetic miracle” of the world’s existence was futile; it took one beyond the limits of language, Wittgenstein held, into the realm of the unsayable. While he “deeply respected” the urge to ask Why is there something rather than nothing? he ultimately believed the question to be senseless. As he starkly put it in Tractatus proposition 6.5, “The riddle does not exist.”
Ineffable though it may have been to Wittgenstein, the mystery of existence nevertheless filled him with awe and gave him a sense of spiritual illumination. For many of the British and American philosophers in his wake, by contrast, it seemed a woolly waste of time. Typifying their dismissive attitude was A. J. “Freddy” Ayer, the British champion of logical positivism, sworn enemy of metaphysics, and self-avowed philosophical heir of David Hume. In a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, Ayer engaged Frederick Copleston, a Jesuit priest and historian of philosophy, in a debate on the existence of God. Much of the Ayer-Copleston debate, as it turned out, was taken up with the question of why there is something rather than nothing. For Father Copleston, this question was an opening to the transcendent, a way of seeing how God’s existence is “the ultimate ontological explanation of phenomena.” For Ayer, his atheist opponent, it was illogical twaddle.
“Supposing,” Ayer