The Life of the Mind (22 page)

 

The Platonic wonder, the initial shock that sends the philosopher on his way, was revived in our own time when Heidegger, in 1929, concluded a lecture entitled "What is Metaphysics?" with the words, already cited, "Why is there anything at all and not, rather, nothing?" and called this "the basic question of metaphysics."
⁵¹

The question, expressing the philosopher's shock in modern terms, had been asked before him. It occurs in Leibniz' "
Principes de la nature et de la grâce": "Pourquoi il y a plutôt quelque chose que rien?
" For since "
le rien est plus simple et plus facile que quelque chose,
"
⁵²
this something must have a sufficient cause for its existence, and this cause in turn must have been caused by something else. Following this train of thought, one finally arrives at the
causa sui,
at something which is its own cause, so that Leibniz' answer arrives at the ultimate cause, called "God," an answer we already find in Aristotle's "unmoved mover"—the god of the philosophers. It was Kant, of course, who dealt the death blow to that god, and in his words on the subject we can clearly recognize what Plato only hinted at: the uncaused and "unconditioned necessity" our cause-and-effect thinking "so indispensably require[s] as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss.... We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is there through my will,
but whence then am IF
All support here fails us; and the
greatest
perfection, no less than the
least
perfection, is unsubstantial and baseless for the merely speculative reason, which makes not the least effort to retain either the one or the other, and feels indeed no loss in allowing them to vanish entirely."
⁵³
What strikes us here as specifically modern is that in the restatement of Parmenides' early insight that nothingness is inconceivable, unthinkable, the emphasis has shifted, as it were, from nothingness to Being: Kant nowhere says that the abyss of nothing because of being inconceivable
is not,
and though he might have said that the antinomies of reason, rousing him from dogmatic slumber, had made him think, he nowhere says that the experience of this abyss—the other side of Plato's wonder-had done so.

Schelling quoted Kant's words emphatically and it was probably from this passage, rather than from the more casual remark in Leibniz, that he derived his own repeated insistence on this "ultimate question" of all thinking—Why is something at all, why is there not nothing?
⁵⁴
He calls it the "most despairing question."
⁵⁵
This reference to sheer despair, as arising out of thinking itself, occurs in Schelling's late writings, and it is so very significant because the same thought had haunted him earlier, in his youth when he still believed that no more was needed to banish nothingness than "absolute affirmation," which he called "the essence of our soul." By virtue of it "we recognize that non-being is forever impossible," neither knowable nor understandable. And for the young Schelling, this ultimate question—Why is there not nothing, why is there anything at all?—posed by the intellect seized with vertigo at the rim of the abyss—is forever suppressed by the insight that "
Being
is necessary, [made so] that is, by the absolute affirmation of Being in cognition."
⁵⁶

All this would suggest a simple return to the position of Parmenides if Schelling had not felt that only the "absolute
positing
of the idea of God" could guarantee this affirmation, which according to him is "the absolute negation of nothingness": it is "as certain that reason forever negates nothingness, and that nothingness is nothing, as it is certain that reason affirms the All and that God is eternal." Hence, the only "completely valid answer to the question,
Why is there not nothing, why is there anything at all?
is not the something but the All
or God."
⁵⁷
" Reason, unaided by the idea of God, according to "its mere nature," may "posit a Being that is forever," but then, confronting this thought which it is in reason's nature to posit, reason remains as it were "thunderstruck (
quasi attonita),
paralyzed, unable to move."
⁵⁸
No Iris-like messenger, bringing the gift of speech, and with it the gift of reasoned argument and reasonable response, accompanies the philosophical shock; and the affirmation of Being, clearly corresponding to the element of admiration in Plato's wonder, needs faith in a Creator-God to save human reason from its speechless dizzy glance into the abyss of nothingness.

What happens to thought's "ultimate question," once this faith is resolutely rejected and human reason is left completely alone with its own capacities, we can trace in Sartre's
Nausea,
by far the most important of his philosophical works. There the hero of the novel, looking at the root of a chestnut tree, has been suddenly overcome by "what 'to exist' meant...; existence usually hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is
us,
you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it." But now "existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things....Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer." The reaction of Sartre's hero is not admiration, and not even wonder, but nausea at the opaqueness of sheer existence, at the naked thereness of the factually given, which indeed no thought has ever succeeded in reaching, let alone illuminating and making transparent: "You couldn't even wonder where all that sprang from, or how it was that a world came into existence, rather than nothingness." Now that all marveling had been eliminated, it was the scandal of Being that nothingness was "unthinkable." There had been nothing
before
it. Nothing ... That was what worried me: of course there was no
reason
for this flowing larval stuff to exist.
But it was impossible
for it not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the middle of the world, alive, with your eyes wide open....I felt with boredom that I had no way of understanding. No way. Yet it was there, waiting, looking at one." It is this completely meaningless thereness that makes the hero shout: "'Filth! what rotten filth!'...but it held fast and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless."
⁵⁹

In this progressive shift from Being to nothingness, caused not by the loss of wonder or perplexity but by the loss of admiration and willingness to affirm in thought, it would be very tempting to see the end of philosophy, at least of that philosophy whose beginning Plato had fixed. No doubt, the turning from admiration to negation is easy enough to understand, not because it is occasioned by any tangible events or thoughts but because, as Kant had already observed, speculative reason in itself "feels no loss" and no gain in turning to either side of the matter. Hence, the notion that to think means to say "yes" and confirm the factuality of sheer existence is also found in many variations throughout the history of philosophy in the modern age. We find it notably in Spinoza's "acquiescence" in the process in which everything that is swings and in which the "big fish" forever eat the small fish. It appears in Kant's pre-critical writings when he tells the metaphysician that he should first ask: "Is it possible that nothing at all exists?" which then should lead him to the conclusion that "if no existence is given at all, there would also be nothing to think about," a thought that in turn leads to a "concept of absolutely necessary being "
⁶⁰
—a conclusion Kant would hardly have recognized in the critical period. More interesting is a remark he makes a little earlier about living in "the best possible world": he repeats the old consoling thought, "that the whole is the best, and that everything is good for the sake of the whole," but seems himself not quite convinced of this ancient
topos
of metaphysics, for he suddenly injects: "
Ich rufe allem Geschöpfe zu...: Heil uns, wir sind!"—"l
call out to every creature...: Hail to us that we arel"
⁶¹

This affirmation, or, rather, the need to reconcile thought with reality, is one of the leitmotifs of the work of Hegel. It informs Nietzsche's
amor fati
and his notion of "eternal recurrence"—the "highest form of affirmation that can be reached" "
⁶²
precisely because it is at the same time the "heaviest weight."

 

How, if a ... demon were to ... say to you "This life as you now live it ... you will have to live ... innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh ... must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence.... The eternal hour glass of existence is upended over and over and you with it, a dust grain of dust." Would you not throw yourself down ... and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, "You are a god and never have I heard anything more godly."...How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to
crave nothing more fervently
than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal.
⁶³

The point of these passages is that Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence is not an "idea" in the Kantian sense of regulating our speculations, nor, of course, is it anything like a "theory," a relapse, so to speak, into the ancient time-concept with its cyclical motion. It is indeed a mere thought or, rather, a thought-experiment, and its poignancy resides in the intimate connection that binds the thought of Being and the thought of nothingness together. Here the need for confirmation arises not out of a Greek admiration for the invisible harmony and beauty that bind together the infinite diversity of particular beings, but out of the simple fact that nobody can think Being without at the same time thinking nothingness, or think Meaning without thinking futility, vanity, meaninglessness.

 

The way out of this perplexity seems to be indicated by the old argument that without an aboriginal confirmation of Being, there would be nothing to think about and nobody to do the thinking; in other words, the very activity of thinking no matter what kind of thought already presupposes existence. But such merely logical solutions are always treacherous; nobody who clings fast to the notion that "there is no truth" will ever be convinced if it is pointed out to him that the proposition is self-defeating. An existential, meta-logical solution of the perplexity can be found in Heidegger, who, as we saw, evinced something like the old Platonic wonder in reiterating the question Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? According to Heidegger,
to think
and
to thank
are essentially the same; the very words derive from the same etymological root. This, obviously, is closer to Plato's wondering admiration than any of the answers discussed. Its difficulty lies not in the etymological derivation and the lack of an argumentative demonstration. It is still the old difficulty inherent in Plato, of which Plato himself seems to have been well aware and which is discussed in the
Parmenides.

Admiring wonder conceived as the starting-point of philosophy leaves no place for the factual existence of disharmony, of ugliness, and finally of evil. No Platonic dialogue deals with the question of evil, and only in the
Parmenides
does he show concern about the consequences that the undeniable existence of hideous things and ugly deeds is bound to have for his doctrine of ideas. If everything that appears partakes in an Idea visible only to the eye of the mind and derives from this Form whatever reality it may possess in the Cave of human affairs—the world of ordinary sense perception-then everything that appears at all, by no means only admirable things, owes its very appearingness to such a suprasensory entity to explain its presence in this world. So, asks Parmenides, what about utterly "trivial and undignified objects" such as "hair and mud and dirt," which have never aroused admiration in anybody? Plato, speaking through Socrates, does not use the later common justification of evil and ugliness as necessary parts of the whole that appear evil and ugly only to the limited perspective of men. Instead, Socrates replies that it would be simply absurd to ascribe ideas to such stuff—"...in these cases, the things are just the things we see"—and suggests that it is better to retreat at this point "for fear of falling into a bottomless pit of nonsense." (Parmenides, however, an old man in the dialogue, points out: "That ... is because you are still young, Socrates, and philosophy has not yet taken hold of you so firmly as I believe it will someday. You will not despise any of these things then, but at present your youth makes you still pay attention to what the world will think."
⁶⁴
But the difficulty is not resolved and Plato never again raises the question.) We are not interested here in the doctrine of ideas, or only to the extent that one might be able to demonstrate that the notion of ideas occurred to Plato because of beautiful things and would never have occurred to him had he been surrounded by nothing but "trivial and undignified objects."

There is, of course, a decisive difference between Plato's and Parmenides' quest for divine matters and the seemingly more humble attempts of Solon and Socrates at defining the "unseen measures" that bind and determine human affairs, and the relevance of the difference for the history of philosophy, as distinguished from the history of thought, is very great. What matters in our context is that in both instances thought is concerned with invisible things that are pointed to, nevertheless, by appearances (the starry sky above us or the deeds and destinies of men), invisibles that are present in the visible world in much the same way as the Homeric gods, who were visible only to those whom they approached.