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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Thinking Philosophy Anew
Appearance and Being
New Realism
The Plurality of Worlds
Less than Nothing
Notes
I What is this Actually: the World?
You and the Universe
Materialism
“The World is Everything that is the Case”
Constructivism
Philosophers and Physicists
Notes
II What is Existence?
The Super-Object
Monism, Dualism, Pluralism
Absolute and Relative Differences
Fields of Sense
Notes
III Why the World Does Not Exist
The Super-Thought
Nihilism and Non-Existence
The External and the Internal World
Notes
IV The Worldview of Natural Science
Naturalism
Monism
The Book of the World
Subjective Truths
Holzwege
Science and Art
Notes
V The Meaning of Religion
Fetishism
The Infinite
Religion and the Search for Meaning
The Function of God
Notes
VI The Meaning of Art
Ambivalences
On Sense and Reference
The Demon of Analogy
Reflexivity
Diversity
Notes
VII Closing Credits: Television
A Show about Nothing
The Senses …
… and the Meaning of Life
Notes
Glossary
Index of Names
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Begin Reading
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Why the World Does Not Exist
Markus Gabriel
Translated by Gregory S. Moss
First published in German as Warum es die Welt nicht gibt © UllsteinBuchverlage GmbH, Berlin, 2013
This edition © Polity Press, 2015
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8760-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gabriel, Markus, 1980-[Warum es die welt nicht gibt. English]Why the world does not exist / Markus Gabriel. -- English edition.pages cmTranslation of: Warum es die welt nicht gibt.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-7456-8756-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Ontology. 2. Postmodernism. 3. Philosophy, Modern--21st century. I. Title.
BD311.G3313 2015111--dc23
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
IWhat is this Actually: the World?
So, let us start over again! What does it all mean? This is the fundamental philosophical question per se. One day we came into a world without knowing where we came from or where we were going. Then, through upbringing and habituation, we found our way in our world. And as soon as we had become accustomed to this situation we mostly forgot to ask what it all means. What is this actually, the world?
In our life, our interactions, hopes, and wishes, as a rule, make sense. For example, as I write these words I am sitting in the carriage of a train in Denmark. Someone next to me is writing a text message, the train attendant is walking back and forth, and now and again I hear an announcement in Danish. All of this makes sense, since I am traveling to Aarhus, a city in northern Denmark, for which I am using a train, and on the trip I am experiencing what usually pertains to a train ride. Now let us imagine an alien being that is 88 feet tall and consists of a green liquid substance who comes to earth and gets on board the same train. To this being, everything would appear quite remarkable, maybe even completely unintelligible. It crawls through the narrow passages of my carriage and is astonished by all the new impressions (and especially by the hairy animals which sit in the compartments and tap a small screen frantically with their fingers).
Philosophers view the world to a certain extent in the same way as do alien beings or children. Everything is always completely new. They mistrust strongly ingrained judgments, and, yes, they even mistrust the scientific claims of experts. For starters, philosophers believe just about nothing at all. Accordingly, let us follow the model of a great philosophical hero: Socrates. In his famous defense before the Athenian court Socrates asserts: “I know that I know nothing.”5 In this respect, at least, nothing has changed for philosophers.
All the same, one can still learn a lot from philosophy; in particular one can learn never to forget that things could be very different from how they appear to us. Philosophy incessantly calls everything into question, even philosophy itself. And only in this way is it possible to understand what it all actually means. If one occupies oneself intensely with philosophy and its big questions, then one learns to scrutinize what is allegedly self-evident – an approach which, by the way, stands behind all the great accomplishments of humanity. If no one had ever posed the question “How should we live together?,” then democracy and the idea of the free community would never have developed. If no one had ever posed the question “Where are we actually?,” then we would still not yet know that the earth is round and the moon is only a revolving rock. On account of this claim, the philosopher Anaxagoras was charged with blasphemy. And Giordano Bruno, the great Italian philosopher, was condemned as a heretic because he was of the opinion that extra-terrestrial life exists and that the universe is infinite. This appeared irreconcilable with Christian theology, which assumed that the human being and the earth were the focus of God’s interest, and God created the world at a particular moment in time (on account of which it was not allowed to be infinite).
Thus, the leading question of this book is What does it all mean? Does human life, human history, and human knowledge have any meaning at all? Are we only animals on some planet – cosmic ants or pigs in outer space? Are we simply very strange beings, who are just as alarming to strange aliens as the aliens (in the film with the same name) are to us?
If we want to find out what it all means we must first of all not forget what we believe we know, and begin afresh. The great French philosopher and scientist René Descartes rightly characterized the basic philosophical approach that at least once in one’s life one ought to call into question everything that one has believed. At least once, we should put aside our usual convictions and ask – like aliens or children – where we actually find ourselves. For, before we ask ourselves the question “What does it all mean?,” it seems sensible to answer the question concerning what the whole actually is.
In Buddha’s Little Finger (2009), a popular contemporary Russian novel, a character with the significant name “Pjotr Pustota” (in English, “Peter Emptiness”) makes the following observation: Moscow is located in Russia; Russia is located on two continents; the continents are located on the earth; the earth is located in the Milky Way; and the Milky Way is located in the universe. But where is the universe located? Where is the domain in which all of the entities mentioned above are located? Is it located, perhaps, only in our thoughts which contemplate this domain? But where are our thoughts located? If the universe is located in our thoughts, these cannot be located in the universe. Or is this not the case? Let us take heed of the two protagonists in their Socratic conversation:
We clinked glasses and drank.“And where is the Earth?”“In the Universe.”“And where is the Universe?”I thought for a second. “In itself.”“And where is this in itself?”“In my consciousness.”“Well then, Petka, that means your consciousness is in your consciousness, doesn’t it?”“It seems so.”“Right,” said Chapaev, straightening his moustache. “Now listen to me carefully. Tell me, what place is it in?”“I do not understand, Vasily Ivanovich … The concept of place is one of the categories of consciousness, and so …”“Where is this place? In what place is this concept of place located?”“Well now, let us say that it is not really a place. We could call it a real …”I stopped dead. Yes, I thought, that is where he is leading me. If I use the word “reality”, he will reduce everything to my own thoughts once again. And then he will ask where they are located. I will tell him they are in my head, and then … A good gambit.
6
With that Peter grasped the dizzying thought that the world does not exist. In the end, everything takes place in a great nowhere. In this novel, the title of which is Chapayev and the Void, its famous author, the Russian novelist Viktor Olegovich Pelevin, gives us an answer to our question “Where are we?”: we are located in the universe, and this is located in emptiness, in nowhere. Everything is surrounded by a great emptiness, which reminds us of The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, in which the childish world of fantasy, Fantastica, is constantly threatened with destruction by the Nothing. Everything takes place only in our imagination, and outside of this exists the Nothing that constantly threatens it. For this reason, the message of the novel, as is well known, is that we must nourish and care for the world of childhood fantasy and as adults should not cease to dream, for otherwise we may fall victim to the Nothing, a completely meaningless reality, in which nothing has any meaning any more.
Philosophy is concerned with the questions that are raised through novels such as Buddha’s Little Finger and The Neverending Story, through films such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television film World on a Wire, which is the incomparably better precursor of The Matrix. These questions were not only raised in postmodern novels or in the popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The question as to whether reality is only a kind of gigantic illusion, a mere dream, has left deep tracks in the history of the human spirit. For thousands of years it has been posed wherever there has been religion, philosophy, poetry, painting and science.
In addition, modern science calls a great portion of reality into question, namely that reality which we experience with the help of our senses. In early modernity Galileo Galilei, for example, another Italian condemned to heresy, already doubted that colors existed independently of our sensations and claimed that reality was colorless and was constituted by mathematically describable material objects and changes in their spatial location. Modern theoretical physics is even more radical. So-called string theorists assume that reality is ultimately not spatio-temporal in any sense that is familiar to us. Regarding four-dimensional space-time, it could at the very least concern a type of hologram that is being projected from higher dimensions through determinate processes that are describable in terms of physical equations.7
That reality is other than it appears is a familiar idea to the modern person, one which was brought home to us in school, for example, when in amazement we realized for the first time that calculations can be formed
