This question 'Why something rather than nothing?' is not new. The narratives that we create regarding it are the oldest of all, the stories of the universe.
Throughout the centuries there have been many who have tackled this most fundamental of questions. The question in this form, originates from Leibniz, who kindly, also provided an answer to the question, that it was God who created the universe. Like Aristotle, the why God, or who created God question was accounted for, at this time under the absolute necessity for a God, or the concept of the unmoved mover in an Aristotelian sense. The presence of a supreme being was to remain a possibility even for Newton, such was the inconceivable nature of the universe. The 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume extoled the virtues of Isaac Newton’s discoveries on gravitation, not only for their explanatory brilliance but also to recognize that by doing so, Newton “thereby restored natures ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and will remain”. Humes proposition was pointing to the deeply mysterious unknown that existed and that still exists regarding the universe. The idea that effect is transferred without matter, the mystical principle of action at a distance, renders the mind body problem unintelligible and far from eradicating the ghost from the machine, calls into question our very idea of the material world that the machine was made from. The mechanism of conscious thought is still deeply mysterious in its relationship to the matter of the brain.
The discourse surrounding this question in the subsequent times has moved to a “How” is there something rather than nothing. This includes the long history of modern science and cosmology. The question was reframed in decades of analysis of ways of how the universe is here, the singularity, the big bang, the multiverse and so on, but very little about why?
The task of why is not only stern but it is awesome in its scope, the potential energy bounded by this little word is known to many who practice psychotherapy or those who have experienced the real-life drive of meaning. Victor Frankl quotes Nietzsche “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
The concept of Why unpacks within us not too dissimilar to the inflationary theory of big bang, all at once there is much more than there was before, and yet no more. The magnificence of the universe astounds us and those who seek answers to its workings, Stephen Weinberg, a theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in an interview with Richard Dawkins contemplated the human condition as a tragic one, where we are never likely to find the answers to the fundamental questions. We may unify our theories but to find the why seems a step too far. Noam Chomsky suggests that our “cognitive abilities” have limitations of mind, that perhaps leave these questions beyond us as a species.
Irving Yalom suggests in Love’s Executioner that “the answer to why questions (Why do I live?) supplies an answer to how questions (How do I live?).”
Psychotherapy provides a uniquely fertile space for this to happen. When faced with the deep questions of life we find many ways of opening to the possibilities, portals to transformation, in therapy this space can be guarded for our clients by remaining aware to ourselves as human, and also to the subtle underling inclination to causality in its most rigid form. A form that David Hume showed not to arise a priori but entirely from experience. These experiences are the treasures of therapy, and we are the privileged ones, that get to share in and marvel at them and peer out with our clients, far into the deep cosmos of their lived lives. We journey into the constellations of meaning, sometimes the dark antimatter of nothingness and at times down to the fiery core.
The wonderful path psychotherapy and this question opened for me, through this tattered couch, and the deeply mysterious observations from cosmology remind me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of solitude. Beyond having the greatest opening line of any novel, I have read its magical realism seems not too far removed now. The seven generations of the Buendia family lived in the fictional town of Macondo, where magic and realism coalesced in time and space to tell a story of Latin America, in his Nobel acceptance speech Marqueze states that that it was indeed ‘real’ life that is hard to believe.
“we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”
Having engaged with this question, the last in a series given to us as doctoral students, I have enjoyed reading each of the other blogs from the tattered couch through a new lens. I’m minded to think of Foucault’s archaeology, that something can be told not only from what we and I have written here, along with all the contributors to the tattered couch but also from the configuration of our ideas on this site, from which it will be one day excavated.
This post was created by Declan Nolan psychotherapist, and Psychotherapy Doctoral candidate at Dublin City University.
Suggested reading
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