Tymieniecka ~ Monday, 18 November 2019

From pp. 9-10: 

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? 

Prolegomena to the Phenomenology of Cosmic Creation 

by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. 

Van Gorcum & Comp. N. V. -- Dr. H. J. Prakke & H. M. G. Prakke Assen MCMLXVI 

(p. 9)

As Wittgenstein says: "How extraordinary that anything should exist!" (2) 

(2) Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir, footnote, p. 70.

Thus the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" appears as the most fundamental question because the real problem is, how is it that something exists at all? It is also the terminal of the major array of philosophical questions, and thus it synthesizes all philosophical questioning bearing upon the whole of reality and being. 

However, by formulating our query about the reasons for existence in this way, we run the risk of falling -- as have others before us -- into a trap prepared by reflection itself. We are tempted to attribute a distinctive and positive denotation to the entirely mind-construed concept of nothingness, putting it on the same level with being, as (p. 10) its counterpart or alternative. With the next step, we consider being as relative to nothingness, and the existence of beings, reality, and being-as-such as a "conquest over nothingness." (1) Whether we then equate nothingness with the void or, as contemporary thinkers do, endow it with a specific plenitude by positing it as an alternative to the being, we vitiate the question by pinning it down too promptly to the assumed instant of its origin, its emergence from nothingness, which is supposed to have always preexisted. 

In fact, the basic truth that "being is and nonbeing is not" remains valid. "Something" is, whereas "nothing," upon careful scrutiny, is merely (to repeat Bergson) "a word that symbolizes a concept." This concept does not possess a distinctive denotation but draws all its content from the reality which it means to negate. 

Should we attribute a positive value to nothingness and accept it as existentially equivalent to being, we would be drawn into a delusive scheme of the mind moving within the narrow circle of its own artifacts. We would fail to approach being in its own right. That is, since being embraces all there is, it cannot have a counterpart, and must account for its reasons itself. 

This all-inclusive plenitude of being, the acceptance of which separates us radically from the philosophers of existence, does not (as Bergson would have it) dispense with the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing" as no more than a "pseudo-question raised on the basis of a pseudo-idea." (2) 

(1) Bergson, L'Evolution Créatrice, p. 728.

(2) Ibid., p. 745.