A post by an American philosopher currently living in Hong Kong.
Why is there something rather than nothing? The fact of existence cannot be explained by an appeal to any beings, since this would assume what it wants to prove. Nishida Kitarō, the Japanese philosopher and founder of the Kyoto School, therefore proclaimed that only nothingness can be the ultimate source of existence.An important thing going on here is a lack of univocal terminology. The Japanese don't mean the same thing by "nothing" that Western thinkers do, since they are informed by the Buddhist (and hidden behind it, Hindu) tradition that nothingness is a kind of field of possibility.
Of course, Western thinkers run into univocal/equivocal problems here too. We don't appeal to "any being" in resolving the question with the One/God/"The Father," because that is not a being in the same sense that any of the things we encounter are. All beings that are beings like us come to be and perish; the kind of being who could be the source of existence is not like that. Avicenna (and after him Aquinas, etc) argues that such a being must exist essentially; and since that being's essence is existence, such a being must exist in a different, transcendent, and permanent way.
Both of these answers end up saying that the ultimate ground of our existence can't be anything like us. Either we are grounded in a kind of everlasting field of potency, or the world was brought into being by a process set up from outside of it.
Yet the first answer, the Japanese one, doesn't really find a solid ground. Why should the potential exist, rather than no potential? After all, potentiality is already a kind of existence (per Aristotle, etc). A potential house is already something: bricks or stones or something else that could be made into a house (as opposed to, say, fire). The potential already has an actuality that allows it to serve as the potential for something else. So too a potential world, however much the Japanese philosopher insists that he means absolutely nothing.
What Avicenna called the Necessary Existant really is necessary. His proof isn't a proof that God exists as anything like our conception of Him, but it is a proof all the same.
5 comments:
That's interesting. By nothing, do you know if they are using the concept of 'mu' -- 無 ?
Also, what do you think about this "paradoxical logic" of Hegel's?
Much as with Kant, the question isn't whether he's using a particular word; the question is to what degree his concept of what that word ought to mean lines up with anyone else's. I believe the answer here to be no, but even more no once you factor in that consideration.
Hegel had an interesting idea that was wrong. Reality does not evolve along a set path that is logically determined. That idea is intensely appealing to intelligent young men (mostly men) who are flattered by the idea that they could understand the workings of the universe, and predict the future, if only they grasp the dialectic. But it's not like that, not really, and thank God.
Makes sense.
I am interested in what you said about Buddhist nothingness being a field of possibility, that's why I asked about 'mu'.
I'm familiar with some philosophical uses of 'mu' in, e.g., Japanese literature, classical martial arts, etc., but never studied it from the philosophical perspective. I was more interested in the culture, and the philosophical context was just one aspect of that.
But that idea is really interesting to me.
It's a very plausible concept; the idea is that 'nothing' is not a thing, just as advertised. But it isn't empty either: it's a field out of which things can spring into being.
This is probably right, or close to right. We think of electrons as orbiting the nucleus of the atom like a moon orbiting a planet, but that's not quite right. They exist as probabilities that become certainties when measured, then revert to probabilities -- at least, that's how physicists like to say it.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/154777/do-electrons-pop-into-and-out-of-existence-around-the-nucleus-of-an-atom
They dislike the phrase 'pop into and out of existence,' but that's because they're not engaged in careful metaphysics. They want to say that the 'thing' that becomes an electron is always there, but it takes different forms under different circumstances. If you define a 'thing' as having a physical manifestation -- like a particle -- then it turns out that the 'thing' does pop into existence and then out again. The field isn't a thing in the same sense.
So the question is really one of Aristotle's questions of categories, i.e., what counts as a 'thing' that can have being?
It seems as if the field has to have priority, but then it's a substance (in Aristotle's sense) without a matter. It's very similar to prime matter in the Aristotelian metaphysics: a pure potential to take on form. Here the field is primed, so to speak, to take on the form of an electron under certain circumstances; and insofar as it does, then you have a 'thing' that has both a form and a matter. Somehow, and this is really mysterious, this kind of thing can be the building blocks for things that don't come in and out of existence (substitute the probability/position language if you like). They have form and matter, and seem to sustain themselves over time. Those things are substances in Aristotle's own sense.
Somehow. But it seems like what is there at the basis of it all really is a kind of not-thing, out of which things can 'pop' when they need to.
Well thanks. That also helps me understand your criticism of the Kyoto School. Their "nothing" is actually like that field, then, rather than a complete absence of existence / being.
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