Why the World Does Not Exist

Markus Gabriel, Gregory Moss

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745687605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Where do we come from? Are we merely a cluster of elementary particles in a gigantic world receptacle? And what does it all mean?

In this highly original new book, the philosopher Markus Gabriel challenges our notion of what exists and what it means to exist. He questions the idea that there is a world that encompasses everything like a container life, the universe, and everything else. This all-inclusive being does not exist and cannot exist. For the world itself is not found in the world. And even when we think about the world, the world about which we think is obviously not identical with the world in which we think. For, as we are thinking about the world, this is only a very small event in the world. Besides this, there are still innumerable other objects and events: rain showers, toothaches and the World Cup. Drawing on the recent history of philosophy, Gabriel asserts that the world cannot exist at all, because it is not found in the world. Yet with the exception of the world, everything else exists; even unicorns on the far side of the moon wearing police uniforms.

Revelling in witty thought experiments, word play, and the courage of provocation, Markus Gabriel demonstrates the necessity of a questioning mind and the role that humour can play in coming to terms with the abyss of human existence.

IV
The Worldview of Natural Science

We live in modernity, and modernity is the age of science and enlightenment. Above all, “Enlightenment” signifies an event in the eighteenth century, which many see as a pinnacle of modernity, though others, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their joint book Dialectic of Enlightenment, see it as a clear precursor of the political disasters of the twentieth century.³⁵ With this book Adorno and Horkheimer became the founders of Critical Theory, which is critical by virtue of its goal of unmasking the warped ideological assumptions of their own time. In a subtle way, a similar critique of the Enlightenment was also worked out in the French philosophy of the twentieth century, for example in the work of the philosopher, sociologist, and historian Michel Foucault.

However, one should not identify modernity as the age of science with the historical process of the Enlightenment, for modernity had already begun in the early modern era, starting in the fifteenth century with the scientific revolution – which admittedly also resulted in political revolutions – while the Enlightenment commenced in the eighteenth century. The scientific revolution essentially consisted in the process whereby the entire ancient and medieval worldview came apart at the seams. The world turned out to be ordered not in the least in the way it had been conceived in Europe for thousands of years, since the beginnings of early Greek philosophy. The ancient idea of a cosmos came under pressure, even though it was almost immediately replaced by just another cosmos, another order, whose outlines were described by modern natural science. But, in this new order, there was no special place for man, which was perfectly in line with the discovery that man misconstrued the cosmos for so long. Mistrust in the human faculties underlying our earlier apparent knowledge followed on the heels of these early (from our contemporary perspective, naïve) insights into space and the mechanics of heavenly bodies. Modernity begins with the decentralization of humanity and its life environment, the planet earth. Humanity grasped that it was located in a much larger context than it had previously dared to dream, and that this context was in no way tailored to human needs. Yet, from this, a scientific worldview was prematurely inferred in which humans are no longer to be found. The human being began to erase itself from the world and to turn the world into its cold home: it began to identify the world with the universe. In so doing the human being had underhandedly smuggled itself into the worldview. For the assumption that the world is essentially a world without spectators cannot be posited without the spectator, which one wants to do away with. Insofar as this is still a worldview, we can expect that it is driven and maintained by some desire on the part of the spectator. This does not make it false, but it does make it inadequate to the extent to which the spectator loses sight of himself. And this is exactly what happened and what drives the current fantasy of a post- or transhuman age. Humanity chases after the dream of overcoming itself so as to make it true that there really is only a meaningless universe by eliminating meaning, or what we take to be meaning.

Besides this, it is especially interesting that the idea of a cold home without spectators arose just as the then inhabitants of Europe came upon other people with a genuinely different home. The discovery of the Americas is the really striking discovery that more exists than had previously been assumed. It was rather irritating for the Europeans at that time that the others should be recognized as fully valid human beings who differed from the Europeans. As a result of this encounter, the place of humanity in the cosmos was put into question. As the remarkable and brilliant Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro emphasized, the gradual expulsion of the supposed “wild things” became a motor for the assumption that the universe could do without people completely. As he also showed, many of the indigenous communities which are still found within the frontiers of Brazil today have progressed ontologically much further than the scientific worldview, for they do not assume that there is really only a world without spectators but, rather, they have grappled with the question “Why are there spectators?” and what this actually means. Viveiros de Castro therefore sees these communities through the eyes of an anthropologist, from whom we can learn that we cannot get around the question concerning who we are as human beings.³⁶ He calls this “symmetrical anthropology,” which, in the final analysis, means that both the European discoverers and the indigenous communities are people who study one another, such that the different ways in which they make sense of one another are on an equal footing. The European discoverers simply were not superior in their understanding of what it is to be a human being, as they even had problems recognizing indigenous people as human beings! This failure lies at the heart of modern racism, and it ushered in one of the biggest genocides of modernity.

Independently of the difficult historical and philosophical question as to whether modernity led to the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment in turn to the great political catastrophes of the last century, as strict followers of Adorno and Horkheimer would have to assume, it can be stated plainly and without bias that it is of the greatest advantage to live in an epoch of science. It is simply better to go to a dentist with contemporary knowledge and modern technology than to go to Plato’s dentist. Even traveling has become significantly more comfortable. When an ancient Greek philosopher from Athens was invited to a lecture in Sicily, he had to make his journey on a very uncomfortable ship that was powered by rowing slaves. (And certainly the dinner after the lecture would not have been very desirable by modern-day standards, since at that time there were not even tomatoes in Europe – these first arrived on the continent following the voyages of discovery in early modernity. Moreover, the ancient Greeks did not have a great abundance of spices. No wonder that the struggle for the sea route to the spice paradise of India was an important factor in the development of modernity. Spices originally drove the development of the scientific worldview, a fact mythologically coded in Frank Herbert’s science-fiction masterpiece Dune.)

Despite all of their great scientific achievements, the ancient Greeks believed that the universe was quite limited – no doubt they would have been surprised to find out how many solar systems, according to current estimations and calculations, exist in the Milky Way. What is more, in Greek philosophy the human being was at the center of all events, which is also an overstatement. The thesis that the human being is the “measure of all things,” attributed to the philosopher Protagoras, has gone down in history as the HOMO MENSURA PRINCIPLE. Against this, modernity posits the SCIENTIA MENSURA PRINCIPLE, as elucidated by the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars.

But, speaking as a philosopher, I am quite prepared to say that the common sense world of physical objects in Space and Time is unreal – that is, that there are no such things. Or, to put it less paradoxically, that in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.³⁷

In the age of science, the world of the human being is looked upon with suspicion as the domain of illusion, while the world of science, the universe, is advanced as the measure of objectivity. The question is no longer how the world appears to us, but how it is in itself.

However, given the previous chapters, we should be prepared to call this general background of the scientific worldview into question. From fields of sense ontology it follows that there cannot be a fundamental level to reality – the world in itself – that only ever presents itself in distorted ways to our registries. SCIENTISM, the belief that only the natural sciences understand the fundamental level of reality, namely the world in itself, while all other knowledge claims are always reducible to the sciences or, at any rate, should be measured by these, is simply false.

Neither a critique of any one specific discipline nor a critique of the ideal of modern science in our investigation of the universe follows from this. Scientific progress yields medical, gastronomic, economic, and even political progress. The more scientific knowledge we acquire, the closer we come to overcoming old errors based on false assumptions about the workings of the universe. There is no doubt about that. Aside from the question regarding how the Enlightenment and science relate to each other, we can rest assured that scientific progress is welcome. However, scientific progress is not identical to progress in the natural sciences. There is progress in sociology, the fine arts, and philosophy, as well as developments in progress which take place completely beyond the course of science, such as progress in skateboarding or haute cuisine. There are also significant regresses, some of them triggered indirectly by modernity’s achievements, some of them simply due to human forgetfulness.

Scientific achievements are of great benefit. When we state that we live in an age of science, this is a joyful message – a kind of honorary title. For we connect science to the absence of prejudice, as well as with knowledge, which can be communicated to every human being independently of their social status. Science proceeds in a way that is reproducible and verifiable for every individual who appropriates its methods. In this sense it is a democratic project, because it takes for granted the equality of human beings in light of the value of truth and the establishment of truth – which does not mean, by the way, that there are not better and worse scientists. Nevertheless, science is fundamentally a collective good. Unfortunately, access to this common good is mediated by power struggles that often merely confirm the power structure of a given society. This is particularly evident in the academic system in the English-speaking world, because access to education there is built on a brutal capitalist economic model. This threatens to disconnect science from the democratic hope of equality for all in light of the scientific method.

However, the situation now becomes difficult when one connects the honorary title “science” or the predicate “scientific” with a worldview. And that is on account of two general reasons, each of which speaks against a scientific worldview and against the scientific nature of worldviews as such. These reasons are themselves scientific, for they are well justified and are reproducible and verifiable for everyone, which also means that one can rebut, reject, or even refute them – which, however, one must first do scientifically and in a way that is comprehensible to all. Philosophy is a science in this sense, as it is an undertaking capable of proof and justification, against which one can raise objections. In the last two hundred years, especially in the wake of Kant, the concept of the world in particular was revolutionized in philosophy. Here too philosophy makes progress, which has put it in a position to undermine worldviews as such.

The first reason for the failure of the scientific worldview lies simply in the fact that the world does not exist. One cannot create a picture of something that does not exist and cannot exist even in thought. One cannot even invent the world. The other reason, which will play a larger role in this chapter, is related: we cannot create a picture of the world because we cannot look at the world from the outside. As I have already mentioned in connection with an insightful phrase from Thomas Nagel, we cannot attain the “view from nowhere.” We always peer at reality from some standpoint or other. We are always somewhere and never view reality from nowhere.

The first reas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Thinking Philosophy Anew
• I What is this Actually: the World?
• II What is Existence?
• III Why the World Does Not Exist
• IV The Worldview of Natural Science
• V The Meaning of Religion
• VI The Meaning of Art
• VII Closing Credits: Television
• Glossary
• Index of Names
• End User License Agreement