The Questions That We Can’t Answer and Can’t Stop Asking

My copy of Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing: Questions From The Great Philosophers, by Lesek Kolakowski, arrived at my house in a roundabout way. When I ordered it online, I accidentally had it mailed to my wife’s niece in Alaska, for whom I had ordered another book, I forget which or when.

So this wonderful book went to Alaska where it waited patiently — and philosophically — on an Alaskan doorstep for several weeks, until my wife’s niece discovered it. This niece, seeing that I was the sender, mailed it to me.

I mention this book’s journey because of its aptness to its subject matter, which is broad like the North American continent between Alaska and Massachusetts, and wild like Alaska.

The author, a Polish intellectual best known for his critiques of Marxism, in this book writes about the fundamental question that each of thirty different philosophers poses to himself. What is real? asks Parmenides of Elea. What is the source of truth? Plato wants to know. Kant wants to know how knowledge is possible. What is the human spirit, Bergson wonders. William of Ockham asks whether ideas exist. And so on.

But the greatest question of all, it seems to me, is: Why is there something rather than nothing?

When I was in high school, my best friend and I would sometimes retreat to an old barn on my family’s property where, sitting on bales of hay, we would twist the tail the cosmos, confident in our ability to extort from it the answer to any question that we cared to pose. What is causality? Why nothing, really — only our expectation, founded on experience, that throwing an egg against a wall will be followed immediately by the egg cracking. (We didn’t know that this view of causality had been proposed several hundred years before our time by a man almost as young as we were, David Hume.)

But we had no such easy answer to that biggest of all questions, the only one really worth asking, it still seems to me: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

We first thought that there might be an ineluctable logical necessity that something exist. But, then, why does logic exist? Any answer to this question that we could think of was merely kicking the can a little farther down the road, because the answer itself was always something that existed.

Were we like a cat sitting on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board makes an announcement that throws all the traders into a panic? What would the cat think was causing all the commotion? That a mouse was running around among the traders’ feet? Would the question even occur to the cat? Are we cats on the Stock Exchange floor when we ask why there is something rather than nothing?

In Kolakowski’s book, this biggest of all questions is fielded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 – 1716). Surely Leibnitz would know. “His brilliant mind,” Kolakowski began by writing, “encompassed everything; whatever he touched was enriched by him.”

I read on eagerly, wishing to be enriched by Leibnitz. Kolakowski’s account of his ideas was expressed in plain non- technical English, which could not conceal, however, the strangeness and difficulty of his thought.

So why is there something, rather than nothing, according to Leibnitz? Because God is the sufficient reason of everything that is. And a sufficient reason, according to Leibnitz, is the reason why a thing is, and is what it is and not something else. The sufficient reason of something, being itself something, must have a sufficient reason of its own. Thus, there is a sequence of sufficient reasons, which must however originate in one absolute reason which needs no sufficient reason. This absolute reason can only be God.

I must admit I am a little disappointed in Leibnitz’s answer to the biggest question. I am disappointed because it is pretty much the answer that I came up with on my own, minus the terminology, and minus “ monads”, those irreducible absolutely simple particles of being that somehow are at the bottom of what is.

I am sure I am committing a foul outrage on Leibnitz’s logic, which must be powerful. He discovered calculus, after all, although not in time to prevent Newton from trying to patent it.

Still, I don’t believe that God can be found by logic. That means that the answer to the question, why is there something rather than nothing, cannot be found by logic, either. But the philosophers who raise the questions that we have to ask but cannot answer are giving voice to the needs of our minds, and for that I think we must honor them.

Anyway, there is something, rather than nothing. There is, for example, my toothache, which has been getting worse since I started to write this post. Its existence, mysterious but indubitable, now compels me to go get some Extra Strength Tylenol. But why is there my toothache, rather than nothing?