Nothingness
First published Thu Aug 28, 2003; substantive revision Thu Aug 31, 2017
Since metaphysics is the study of what exists, one might expect metaphysicians to have little to say about the limit case in which nothing exists. But ever since Parmenides in the fifth century BCE, there has been rich commentary on whether an empty world is possible, whether there are vacuums, and about the nature of privations and negation.
This survey starts with nothingness at a global scale and then explores local pockets of nothingness. Let’s begin with a question that Martin Heidegger famously characterized as the most fundamental issue of philosophy.
1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Well, why not? Why expect nothing rather than something? No experiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’ because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer.
Is there any a priori support for ‘There is nothing’? One might respond with a methodological principle that propels the empty world to the top of the agenda. For instance, many feel that whoever asserts the existence of something has the burden of proof. If an astronomer says there is water at the south pole of the Moon, then it is up to him to provide data in support of the lunar water. If we were not required to have evidence to back our existential claims, then a theorist who fully explained the phenomena with one set of things could gratuitously add an extra entity, say, a pebble outside our light cone. We recoil from such add-ons. To prevent the intrusion of superfluous entities, one might demand that metaphysicians start with the empty world and admit only those entities that have credentials. This is the entry requirement imposed by René Descartes. He clears everything out and then only lets back in what can be proved to exist.
St. Augustine had more conservative counsel: we should not start at the beginning, nor at the end, but where we are, in the middle. We reach a verdict about the existence of controversial things by assessing how well these entities would harmonize with the existence of better established things. If we start from nothing, we lack the bearings needed to navigate forward. Conservatives, coherentists and scientific gradualists all cast a suspicious eye on ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’.
Most contemporary philosophers feel entitled to postulate whatever entities are indispensable to their best explanations of well accepted phenomena. They feel the presumption of non-existence is only plausible for particular existence claims. Since the presumption only applies on a case by case basis, there is no grand methodological preference for an empty world. Furthermore, there is no burden of proof when everybody concedes the proposition under discussion. Even a solipsist agrees there is at least one thing!
A more popular way to build a presumption in favor of nothingness is to associate nothingness with simplicity and simplicity with likelihood. The first part of this justification is plausible. ‘Nothing exists’ is simple in the sense of being an easy to remember generalization. Consider a test whose questions have the form ‘Does x exist?’. The rule ‘Always answer no!’ is unsurpassably short and comprehensive.
In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo contrasts universal negation with universal affirmation:
All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ‘no.’ To ‘no’ there is only one answer and that is ‘yes.’ Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread. (1862, pt. 2, bk. 7, ch. 6).
As far as simplicity is concerned, there is a tie between the nihilistic rule ‘Always answer no!’ and the inflationary rule ‘Always answer yes!’. Neither rule makes for serious metaphysics.
Even if ‘Nothing exists’ were the uniquely simplest possibility (as measured by memorability), why should we expect that possibility to be actual? In a fair lottery, we assign the same probability of winning to the ticket unmemorably designated 4,169,681 as to the ticket memorably labeled 1,111,111.
Indeed, the analogy with a lottery seems to dramatically reverse the presumption of non-existence. If there is only one empty world and many populated worlds, then a random selection would lead us to expect a populated world.
Peter van Inwagen (1996) has nurtured this statistical argument. In an infinite lottery, the chance that a given ticket is the winner is 0. Van Inwagen reasons that since there are infinitely many populated worlds, the probability of a populated world is equal to 1. Although the empty world is not impossible, it is as improbable as anything can be!
For the sake of balanced reporting, van Inwagen should acknowledge that, by his reasoning, the actual world is also as improbable as anything can be. What really counts here is the probability of ‘There is something’ as opposed to ‘There is nothing’.
Is this statistical explanation scientific? Scientists stereotypically offer causal explanations. These are not feasible given the comprehensive reading of ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’. However, Elliott Sober (1983) argues that scientists also accept “equilibrium explanations”. These explain the actual situation as the outcome of most or all of the possible initial states. There is no attempt to trace the path by which the actual initial state developed into the present situation. It suffices that the result is invariant. Why do I have enough oxygen to breathe even though all the oxygen molecules could have congregated in one corner of my room? The physicist explains that while this specific arrangement is just as likely as any other, the overwhelming majority of arrangements do not segregate oxygen.
2. Is there at most one empty world?
Most philosophers would grant Peter van Inwagen’s premise that there is no more than one empty world. They have been trained to model the empty world on the empty set. Since a set is defined in terms of its members, there can be at most one empty set.
However, medieval philosophers differentiated empty worlds by the power of places within those worlds (Grant 1981). The Condemnation of 1277 forced Aristotelian philosophers to acknowledge the possibility of a void (to respect God’s omnipotence and the Christian doctrine of creation from nothing). Most thinkers retained Aristotle’s assumption that there was a unique center of the universe. If rocks were introduced into such a world, they would all head toward their natural location at the center of the universe. (Aristotle uses this point to provide a spectacular explanation of why there are not two earths; they would have collided!) However, Nicole Oresme imagined a world without any center. He predicted the rocks would head toward each other. Since air, fire, earth, and water each had their own places in Aristotle’s physics, fourteenth century philosophers could imagine worlds that differed as to which of these places to retain. The void was rarely pictured as homogeneous.
Aristotle’s world was self-governed. Objects have powers that collectively explain the order of the universe. Thinkers in the Abrahamic tradition replaced Aristotle’s invisible hand explanation with God’s hidden hand. God dictated laws of nature to which He made periodic adjustments (like clockmakers who regularly serviced their creations, correcting the accumulating errors). Reflection on God’s perfection eventually made these divine interventions seem like an impious slight against God’s foreknowledge. After the miracles were rescinded, God Himself was retired. What was left were the laws of nature. Since there was no longer any constraint on what laws had to be, the actual world looks highly contingent. At first blush, this vindicates van Inwagen’s probabilistic argument. But the contingency of laws also raises the possibility of individuating empty worlds by their laws (Carroll 1994, 64). For instance, Isaac Newton’s first law of motion says an undisturbed object will continue in motion in a straight line. Some previous physicists suggested that such an object will slow down and tend to travel in a circle. This empty world differs from the Newtonian empty world because different counterfactual statements are true of it.
If variation in empty worlds can be sustained by differences in the laws that apply to them, there will be infinitely many empty worlds. The gravitational constant of an empty world can equal any real number between 0 and 1, so there are more than countably many empty worlds. Indeed, any order of infinity achieved by the set of populated possible worlds will be matched by the set of empty worlds.
John Heil (2013) is bemused by this War of the Possible Worlds. Having given up the Law Maker, we should give up the laws. Once we return to a self-governed world, there will be no temptation to see the world as a lucky accident. After all, we do not literally see states of affairs as contingent. Contingency, unlike color or shape, is not perceptible. Nor is there any presumption for regarding states of affairs as contingent. According to Heil, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ owes its urgency to a partisan background theory, not a neutral arbiter such as perception or methodology.
Although possible worlds became intensely popular among analytic philosophers after revolutionary advances in modal logic in the 1960s, they receive little attention from existentialists. Their discussion of objects is more in line with powers ontology advocated by Heil. Indeed, some existentialists picture nothingness as a kind of force that impedes each object’s existence. Since there is something rather than nothing, any such nihilating force cannot have actually gone unchecked. What could have blocked it? Robert Nozick (1981, 123) toys with an interpretation of Heidegger in which this nihilating force is self-destructive. This kind of double-negation is depicted in the Beatles’s movie Yellow Submarine. There is a creature that zooms around like a vacuum cleaner, emptying everything in its path. When this menace finally turns on itself, a richly populated world pops into existence.
Some cultures have creation myths reminiscent of Yellow Submarine. Heidegger would dismiss them as inappropriately historical. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is not about the origin of the world. Increasing the scientific respectability of the creation story (as with the Big Bang hypothesis) would still leave Heidegger objecting that the wrong question is being addressed.
3. Can there be an explanatory framework for the question?
Some disagree with van Inwagen’s assumption that each possible world is as likely as any other (Kotzen 2013). There have been metaphysical systems that favor less populated worlds.
Indeed, the original purveyor of possible worlds, Gottfried Leibniz, pictured possible things as competing to become actual. The more a thing competes with other things, the more likely that there will be something that stops it from becoming real. The winners in Leibniz’s struggle for existence are cooperative. They uniquely fit the niche formed by other things. This key hole into existence implicitly conveys information about everything. The little bit that is not, tells us about all that there is.
On the one hand, this metaphysical bias in favor of simplicity is heartening because it suggests that the actual world is not too complex for human understanding. Scientists have penetrated deeply into the physical world with principles that emphasize parsimony and uniformity: Ockham’s razor, the least effort principle, the anthropic principle, etc.
On the other hand, Leibniz worried that the metaphysical bias for simplicity, when driven to its logical conclusion, yields the embarrassing prediction that there is nothing. After all, an empty world would be free of objects trying to elbow each other out. It is the world that requires the least effort to produce (Just do nothing!) and sustain (Continue doing nothing!). So why is there something rather than nothing?
Leibniz’s worry requires a limbo between being and non-being. If the things in this limbo state do not really exist, how could they prevent anything else from existing?
Leibniz’s limbo illustrates an explanatory trap. To explain why something exists, we standardly appeal to the existence of something else. There are mountain ranges on Earth because there are plates on its surface that slowly collide and crumple up against each other. There are rings around Saturn because there is an immense quantity of rubble orbiting that planet. This pattern of explanation is not possible for ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’. For instance, if we answer ‘There is something because the Universal Designer wanted there to be something’, then our explanation takes for granted the existence of the Universal Designer. Someone who poses the question in a comprehensive way will not grant the existence of the Universal Designer as a starting point.
If the explanation cannot begin with some entity, then it is hard to see how any explanation is feasible. Some philosophers conclude ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is unanswerable. They think the question stumps us by imposing an impossible explanatory demand, namely, Deduce the existence of something without using any existential premises. Logicians should feel no more ashamed of their inability to perform this deduction than geometers should feel ashamed at being unable to square the circle.
David Hume offers a consolation prize: we might still be able to explain the existence of each event even if it is impossible to explain everything all together. Suppose that the universe is populated with an infinite row of dominoes. The fall of each domino can be explained by the fall of its predecessor.
But what is responsible for the arrangement to begin with? Why is there anything in our domain of discourse? There is a tradition of denying that this kind of comprehensive questioning is coherent. Principles that apply within a system need not be applicable to the system itself.
Is there a world? Can worlds be counted in the way presupposed by modal metaphysics? Doubts about absolute generality can descend from logical theorizing about quantification (Rayo 2013). They can also bubble up from suspicions about abstraction (Maitzen 2012). A sortal such as KITTEN tells us the nature of a thing, thereby supplying criteria for counting and persistence. THING is a dummy sortal. How many things do you have when you have a capped pen? The question cannot be answered because you have not been given criteria governing whether the cap and the pen count as separate objects. All questions about existence must be relativized to sorts. Consequently, the question of why there is something rather than nothing is incomplete. Once we remedy the incompleteness with a sortal, the question will be answered by science.
Empiricists such as Hume deny that the existence of anything could be proved by reason alone. Rationalists have been more optimistic. Many have offered a priori proofs of God’s existence. Such a proof would double as an explanation of why there is something. If God exists, then something exists. After all, God is something.
But would God be the right sort of something? If we are only seeking an a priori proof of something (anythingat all!), then why not rest content with a mathematical demonstration that there exists an integer between a square and a cube? There must exist such an integer because 25 is a square and 27 is a cube and only one integer can be between 25 and 27. Therefore, something exists. Why does this come off as a mathematical joke?
4. The restriction to concrete entities
Van Inwagen’s answer is that we are actually interested in concrete things. A grain of sand, a camel, and an oasis are each concrete entities. They are part of the causal order. In contrast, abstract entities (numbers, sets, possible worlds) do not cause anything. Those who adopt the principle that only causes are real will become nominalists; everything is concrete.
A second characterization of concrete entities is in terms of locatability; a concrete entity has a position in space or time. Since concrete entities are situated, they have boundaries with their environment. (The only exception would be an entity that took up all space or all time, say Nature.)
Admittedly, points in space and time have locations. But concrete entities are only accidentally where and when they are. All concrete entities have intrinsic properties (which make their boundaries natural rather than conventional, say Efird and Stoneham (2005, 314)). Their natures are not exhausted by their relationships with other things. Max Black imagines twin iron spheres in an otherwise empty universe. The spheres are distinct yet have the same relationships and the same intrinsic properties.
All material things are concrete but some concrete things might be immaterial. Shadows and holes have locations and durations but they are not made of anything material. There is extraneous light in shadows and extraneous matter in holes; but these are contaminants rather than constituents. Cracks can spread, be counted, and concealed. Once we acknowledge the existence of cracks, we get an unexpected transcendental explanation of why there is something: If there is nothing then there is an absence of anything. Therefore, there exists something (either a positive concrete entity or an absence).
Ontological pluralists do not dismiss this proof as sophistry. Kris McDaniel (2013, 277) thinks the proof is trivially correct. To address a more interesting question, McDaniel follows Aristotle’s principle that there are many ways of being. From the pluralist’s perspective, debate over whether holes exist is equivocal. The friends of absences use a broad sense of being. The enemies of holes speak from a higher link in the chain of being. From this altitude, holes depend on their hosts and so cannot be as real. Alexius Meinong’s talk of subsistence alludes to the lowest level of being. “Why does anything subsist?” is a perfectly legitimate question, according to McDaniel.
If there are souls or Cartesian minds, then they will also qualify as immaterial, concrete entities. Although they do not take up space, they take up time. An idealist such as George Berkeley could ask ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ even though he was convinced that material things are not possible.
William James denied that his defense of parapsychology provided a resource for answering, ‘How comes the world to be here at all instead of the non-entity which might be imagined in its place?’ Philosophy, be it natural or supernatural, can make no progress on this issue “for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge” (1911, 40). James concludes: “The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy. All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak disdainfully of another or give itself superior airs” (1911, 46).
Although all concrete things are in space or time, neither space nor time are concrete things. Where would space be? When would time occur? These questions can only be answered if space were contained in another higher space. Time would be dated within another time. Since the same questions can be posed for higher order space and higher order time, we would face an infinite regress.
There is no tradition of wondering ‘Why is there space and time?’. One reason is that space and time seem like a framework for there being any contingent things.
Absolutists think of the framework as existing independently of what it frames. For instance, Newton characterized space as an eternal, homogeneous, three dimensional container of infinite extent. He believed that the world was empty of objects for an infinite period prior to creation (setting aside an omnipresent God). An empty world would merely be a continuation of what creation interrupted.
Others think the framework depends on what it frames. Like Leibniz, Albert Einstein pictured (or “pictured”) space as an abstraction from relations between objects. Consequently, space can be described with the same metaphors we use for family trees. Maybe space grows bigger. Maybe space is curved or warped or has holes. There is much room to wonder why space has the properties that it has. But since space is an abstraction from objects, answers to any riddles about space reduce to questions about objects. One can wonder why there is space. But this is only to wonder why there are objects.
5. The contingency dilemma
All concrete things appear to be contingent beings. For instance, the planet Earth would not have existed had the matter which now constitutes our solar system formed, as usual, two stars instead of one. If no concrete thing is a necessary being, then no concrete thing can explain the existence of concrete things.
Even if God is not concrete, proof of His existence would raise hope of explaining the existence of concrete things. For instance, the Genesiscreation story suggests that God made everything without relying any antecedent ingredients. The story also suggests that God had a reason to create. If this account could be corroborated we would have an explanation of why there are some concrete things.
This divine explanation threatens to over-explain the data. Given that God is a necessary being and that the existence of God necessitates the existence of Earth, then Earth would be a necessary being rather than a contingent being.
The dilemma was generalized by William Rowe (1975). Consider all the contingent truths. The conjunction of all these truths is itself a contingent truth. On the one hand, this conjunction cannot be explained by any contingent truth because the conjunction already contains all contingent truths; the explanation would be circular. On the other hand, this conjunction cannot be explained by a necessary truth because a necessary truth can only imply other necessary truths. This dilemma suggests that ‘Why are there any contingent beings?’ is impossible to answer.
Rowe presupposes that an answer would have to be a deductiveexplanation. If there are ‘inferences to the best explanation’ or inductive explanations, then there might be a way through the horns of Rowe’s dilemma.
There also remains hope that Rowe’s dilemma can be bypassed by showing that the empty world is not a genuine possibility. Then the retort to ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is ‘There is no alternative to there being something!’.
‘There might be nothing’ is false when read epistemically. (Roughly, a proposition is epistemically possible if it is consistent with everything that is known.) For we know that something actually exists and knowledge of actuality precludes all rival epistemic possibilities. But when read metaphysically, ‘There might be nothing’ seems true. So ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is, so far, a live question.
The question is not undermined by the a priori status of knowledge that something exists. (I know a priori that something exists because I know a priori that I exist and know this entails ‘Something exists’.) Knowledge, even a priori knowledge, that something is actually true is compatible with ignorance as to how it could be true.
Residual curiosity is possible even when the proposition is known to be a necessary truth. A reductio ad absurdum proof that 1 − 1/3 + 1/5 − 1/7 + … converges to π/4 might persuade one that there is no alternative without illuminating how it could be true. For this brute style of proof does not explain how π wandered into the solution. (Reductio ad absurdum just shows a contradiction would follow if the conclusion were not true.) This raises the possibility that even a logical demonstration of the metaphysical necessity of ‘Something exists’ might still leave us asking why there is something rather than nothing (though there would no longer be the wonder about the accidentality of there being something). This leads Andrew Brenner (2016) to deny that ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is restricted to contingent entities. Brenner argues the question is highly ambiguous. At best there is only a family resemblance between the questions under discussion. What appears to be disagreement is too often a verbal dispute.