Nothing Ventured, Something Gained

“Das Nichts nichtet.” —Martin Heidegger, allegedly¹

Suppose, for a moment, that there is nothing.² Not “nothing” in the sense of “there’s nothing in the fridge except old mustard,” but Nothing as a fully capitalized metaphysical state: pure, undifferentiated absence.³

Now, if there were nothing, there would be no laws — no gravity, no ethics, no struggling Sam Montembeault squirting water into his mouth after failing to stop a beach ball for the third time this period, no municipal codes against parking in front of fire hydrants.⁴ 

Because laws, whether physical or moral, are something, and something cannot exist in a situation defined precisely by its lack of somethings.

And if there were no laws, then everything would be permitted.⁵ This is not, strictly speaking, a moral claim, but a grammatical one. The absence of constraint implies the presence of possibility.⁶

If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden.

This much, even the least metaphysical among us must concede. Even if you didn’t spend five years studying philosophy, as I did, with a noticeable lack of women in the seminars. What the hell were we thinking? Funny you should ask.

Ahem. Follow the bouncing ball-acy.

Therefore, if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden.

So far, we’ve followed the logic of the thing (or rather, the non-thing). But now comes the sleight of hand — what theologians might call the Ontological Pirouette. For if nothing would be forbidden, then nothing itself is un-forbidden, that is, allowed.⁷ But if nothing is allowed, then it exists in some permissive state of being. Which means: it’s something.

Contradiction.⁸

Thus, nothing forbids itself.

And from contradiction, as the logicians tell us, anything follows.⁹ Up to and including my hairline. So out of the barren void of Nothing, we have birthed the trembling, inexplicable fact of Something.¹⁰

Q.E.D.¹¹

1. On the Ontological Side of the Street

   
   

What we have here is not so much a failure to communicate as a kind of metaphysical chain reaction — a logical Big Bang. It’s not unlike Anselm of Canterbury’s 12th century Ontological Argument, which claimed that merely because we can conceive of a perfect being, such a being must exist. Why? Because to exist is more perfect than not existing.¹²

But notice: we have arrived at the same conclusion from the opposite direction. Where Anselm argued from the fullness of perfection, we argue from the poverty of Nothing. His God was compelled into Being by his perfection; our cosmos tumbles into Being by Nothing’s own self-contradiction. Both routes, you’ll note, bypass the messy question of evidence.¹³

Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.

II. The Teleological Hitchhiker

Our argument also moonlights as a kind of Teleological Argument. Observe the design! See how elegantly Nothing ties itself into a knot and thereby midwifes the universe. This cannot be coincidence.¹⁴

Even a vocal atheist like Richard Dawkins (author of The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion), in a rare moment of silence, might admit that such tight logical subtilizing and sophistry suggests intention — or at least, Gene Kelly-level choreography. With gusts to George Balanchine.

And the Cosmological Argument? Oh, it’s here too, lurking in the wings. Everything has a cause, except the first thing, which doesn’t. In our case, the first cause is Nothing — which, by forbidding itself, becomes its own denial, its own cause, its own punchline.

III. Heidegger’s Smirk

German phenomenologist, existentialist and Nazi shit-from-the-heels-up Martin Heidegger, of course, had already sensed this. Das Nichts nichtet, he said — the Nothing nothings.¹⁵

It was one of those phrases that sound profound until you realize it’s untranslatable on purpose. Yet in its nonsensical way, it captures the same intuition: Nothing is not a passive absence but an active negation, a kind of jesuitical yoga move in which Being folds itself inward until it disappears.

In our version, the move goes too far and accidentally snaps back into existence. Like a rubber band of ontology.¹⁶ (This is the point where that curious hit by The Spinners should kick in like an acid flashback from 1968: “Just move it, just move it, just move, move, move it, just rubber-band, rubber-band man …”)

IV. The Existential Implications (Spoiler: We’re Still Here)

So what follows from this logically suspect but spiritually thrilling deduction? Only that the mere act of you reading these words — right now, in whatever café, fluorescent cubicle or shallow body of water you find yourself, sidling about in your patented benthic manner like an octopus while your significant other watches an episode of Call the Midwife in a bedroom upstairs — proves that Nothing failed. The cosmic veto did not hold.

Which means Being wins. Again.

You and I both are, in a very literal sense, an instance of the universe’s inability to stay quiet.¹⁷

V. Closing Remarks (and One Modest Theological Suggestion)

If nothing cannot be, then something must. And if something must, then perhaps mustness itself is divine. Not God as bearded overseer, but God as the necessity that Nothing cannot not-be.¹⁸

In this way, the argument is less a proof than a shrug of cosmic inevitability.

And yet, strangely comforting. Because even if all this is nonsense (which it almost certainly is), the nonsense itself exists. Which, by our logic, is enough. I think therefore I yam what I yam. And that’s all that I yam.

It’s right there in Exodus 3:14 if you care to check. Or even if you don’t.

At this juncture, we’d be remiss not to give a shoutout to some obvious affinities between our sketchy logic regarding what the scholastics deemed creatio ex nihilo and the prevailing scientific view that the universe arose from the void as a quantum fluctuation, simply because nothingness is unstable.

Empty space — more precisely a quantum vacuum — is saturated with energy fields. It seethes with virtual particles that are forever popping into and out of existence faster than you can say: Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

A vast universe like the one we inhabit (even in the relatively small portion we can observe, there are 100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars) could emerge from such a void as a matter of quantum chance. Moreover, the cosmos we know might be just one of a virtually infinite number of universes with their own quantities of space, time, matter, energy, information, physical laws, constants … the multiverse.

You will have seen the brochures.

But the question inevitably arises: Why should such a quantum vacuum ever have existed in the first place? Empty space is not nothing. It bends and flexes like a rubber-band man. It has a mathematical structure. The virtual particles within it roil into and out of existence like bubbles in a bottomless boiling kettle. If one quantum tunnels too long at the fair, then it’s wham, bam, Big Bang ma’am — and let’s call the whole thing on!

To quote the American physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth: “A proposal that the universe was created from empty space seems no more fundamental than the proposal that the universe was spawned by a piece of rubber. It might be true, but one would still want to ask where the rubber came from.”

One could, of course, invoke God at this point as the creator of the universe and forget about all this free-lunch-for-existence chitter-chatter. But to do so would invite the apposite question from the nearest five-year-old, bane of the sacerdotal caste the world over: “But Mommy, who made God?”

If your answer to that one is that God bootstrapped Himself into existence (ens causa sui) or has existed eternally — the story adhered to by the vast majority of believers of all faiths — then you really haven’t an explanation at all. Your send icon is spinning but goes nowhere until we avert our gaze and the First Cause submission disappears into the cracks between the ontological floorboards. Oh, that way madness lies.

Maybe God is so perfect that He doesn’t have to exist. He simply does, like a party girl jumping out of a cake. But if that’s true, you could make exactly the same claim about the universe, which is presumably less of a wonder than its putative creator. If Henry Ford could pop into existence, so could a 1908 Model T. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

As William James sadly conceded when confronting the mystery of existence, the coalface of human befuddlement, “All of us are beggars here.”

Me, I’m with Molly Bloom in Ulysses: “… well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they don’t know neither do I … .”

Stealing a page from Saint Anselm a millennium ago, who treated existence as if it were an ordinary property of an object or subject such as its colour or size, we’ll take refuge in equally dubious logic that plays on multiple meanings of the word “nothing.” So let us conclude, in proper scholastic fashion, by finding a spurious logical bridge from nudnik to being:

Since Nothing is self-forbidding,

Something is self-permitting.

Therefore, Being.

Or, as the cosmologists put it:

Saturday brunch.¹⁹

Last word goes to Columbia University prof Sidney Morgenbesser, who no longer exists in this vale of tears but once responded thus to a student’s reformulation of Gottfried Leibniz’s bedevilling question: Why is there something rather than nothing? “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied!”

Footnotes

1. Possibly Heidegger; possibly a T-shirt in a campus bookstore.

2. Be careful here; “imagine nothing” is a dangerous instruction. Some readers report temporary ontological vertigo.

3. Or perhaps “un-differentiated lack,” if you prefer your metaphysics artisanal.

   
   

4. Though paradoxically, the absence of hydrants would make parking impossible, since there would be no streets.

   
   

5. Dostoevsky said this first, though he was talking about God, not zoning ordinances.

   
   

6. Philosophers call this “logical overreach.”

   
   

7. “Allowed” by whom, you ask? Shhhhhhh. You’re ruining the vibe coding.

   
   

8. Philosophers love contradictions the way moths love lamps.

   
   

9. This principle is known as ex contradictione quodlibet — Latin for “We can now say anything we want.”

   
   

10. Including at least three Kardashians, gluten and quantum mechanics.

    
    

11. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or, more accurately, Quod Erat Dubitandum: “Which was to be doubted.”

    
    

12. Anselm, Proslogion, 1078 CE, before philosophy discovered the delete key.

    
    

13. God bless a clean syllogism. I mean, He would if He were immortal. Therefore Socrates is a man.

    
    

14. Try saying “randomly emergent elegance” out loud — it tastes like denial.

    
    

15. Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? — a title that doubles as a cry for help. Or at least a decent pair of bowling shoes.

    
    

16. The Big Snap Theory: new in Scientific American, probably.

    
    

17. Congratulations.

    
    

18. Friedrich Schleiermacher once said something like this, but with way more ümlaüts.

19. And on the seventh day, God rested, but the calendar kept going.