Does anybody want cake? Everybody loves the new puppy. Anybody who wants cake should pass their plate. Nobody brought their bag. We can use these words on their own for a short answer.
A: What do you want to eat? B: Nothing! We can use them at the beginning of a sentence as the subject or as the object of a sentence. Nothing was done. She did nothing. Some- and any- We have already talked about how to use some and any. See here if you need to review. We can find somebody who can help. There's something in the bag. Let's go somewhere this weekend. I can't find anybody who can help.
By this, if there is a grouping defining what is contained within, this grouping is an existent entity. Now, applying this to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing? That's it; that's everything; there's nothing else; it would be everything that is present. It is the all. An entirety, whole amount or an "all" is a grouping defining what is contained within and is therefore an existent entity.
In other words, because the absolute lack-of-all is the entirety of all that is present, it functions as both what is contained within and the grouping defining what is contained within. It defines itself and is, therefore, the beginning point in the chain of being able to define existent entities in terms of other existent entities. A couple of things I've run up against in thinking about this are:. It's very easy to confuse the mind's conception of "non-existence" with "non-existence" itself, in which neither the mind nor anything else is present.
Because our minds exist, our mind's conception of "non-existence" is dependent on existence; that is, we must define "non-existence" as the lack of existence this is why, to the mind, non-existence just looks like nothing at all.
But, "non-existence" itself, and not our mind's conception of "non-existence", does not have this requirement; it is independent of our mind, and of existence, and of being defined as the lack of existence.
Some might say that in the above, just by using the word "nothing", I'm reifying, or giving existence to, something that's not there at all. But, this ignores the point about our mind's conception of "nothing" and therefore the use of the word "nothing" being different than "nothing" itself in which no minds are present.
It also ignores the fact that in order to even discuss the topic, we have have to talk about "nothing" as if it's a thing. It's okay to do this; our talking about it won't affect whether or not "nothing" itself, and not our mind's conception of "nothing", exists. That is, we're not reifying "nothing" itself by talking about it because our talking wouldn't even be there in the case of "nothing" itself. What is all of this good for? Like all proposed solutions to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?
This assertion is based on the thinking that because the hypothesis proposed here is about the most fundamental of existent entities, because the universe exists and seems to be composed of existent entities, and because physics is the study of how the universe works, then the laws of physics and of the universe should be derivable from the properties of the fundamental existent entity proposed here. I refer to this type of thinking as a metaphysics-to-physics approach or philosophical engineering.
I believe that using this type of thinking, physicists and philosophers would be able to make faster progress towards a deeper understanding of the universe than by using the more top-down approach they currently use.
This method also seems to be a way to merge the often fighting camps of physics and philosophy. This one is longer and has more philosophical stuff Thanks for listening! Tuesday, April 12, -- PM. Nothing is? Is being a Venn diagram? A category? A spatial inclusion? No exit? What happens to the subjunctive? Harry, are you referring to The Architecture of Experience? Wednesday, April 13, -- PM. Congratulations on the Templeton. I'd say that counts for something, which, in this and most cases means much more than nothing.
Don't let anyone tell you different. Thursday, April 14, -- PM. Sunday, April 17, -- PM. I'm just listening to the podcast of "Why is there something rather than nothing. A bit of deja-vu feeling coming on, so pardon me if I've mentioned this before, but the song "Nothing" sung by the Fugs is based on an old Yiddish song called "Potatoes" Bulbes -- Sunday, potatoes, Monday, potatoes; Tuesday, Wednesday potatoes, etc.
It's a comic lament about the lack of variety in the diet. Tuli Kupferberg changed the refrain to "Nothing" and it is amazingly fit for the tune and the character of the original song. Bored with spuds?
When we say anything 'is' we are differentiating quite as much as we are uniting. It is as critical to the meaning of the proposition that the subject is as different from the predicate as attributed of it.
But that difference hangs a pall over our inferences from that proposition as its antecedent. Is that pall nothing? What nothingness is? Heidegger, for all his atrocious personal attributes and political views, was quite right when he claims the issue of reason is the question of the meaning of 'being'. If there is a pall on every proposition that differs that meaning with every inference, then ignoring that question, leaving it unasked, renders reason nothing, nihilism.
But the question requires an act, a loss of that conceit that we know what it means to be. And that act enables a response that is freed in the character of that loss from that conceit.
But none of us, alone, can be both that act and that response. Asking the meaning of being is motivated by the need each of us is of that freedom enabled through that act of loss completed as that freedom that is not its own. It is the drama of this act and response that is the genesis of language. It is how we can know what we mean and persist in the conceit that we have a right to be understood in our own terms, in ignoring the question of the meaning of being.
We are psychologically bound to such ignorance, but we are biologically committed to the question, in recognition that nothing is our end. But if that end enables the rest of time to be freed of that conceit of untroubled being and facile discourse, and is that freedom in that character of loss each of us is of it, then the character of each person, and the characterology of that drama of act and response, is far from nothing.
It is why there is something rather than nothing. Or, at least, why there is something human and personal, rather than dead matter. But even beyond quarks and whatever it is Hawking means by 'strings' [really just the implacable ignorance of their meaning of being that ceaselessly erects frameworks and patterns, geometry and laws around what is freer than that, like the gambling addict that convinces himself he is on a streak and will not be talked out of it, though the facts show that such 'patterns' are wishful thinking] there is something more real than the relentless need we have to impose limits on it.
No, it is not nothing. But it is nothing alone. It is the act of loss that what responds freed in the character of the loss of it is completed in that character, and so is what being is. Facile or conventional terms do not suffice. Wednesday, April 20, -- PM. Nice share. I think your website write my essay should come up much higher in the search results than where it is showing up right now?. Thursday, April 21, -- PM. Something, anything, nothing, these are not being, they are logical quantifiers.
The perplexity of being is not a nicety of logic, it is the mystery of agency. But no god can answer it, because the agency required is absence, absence that enables the rest of time to play out fully the character, and worth, of that loss. But if we look to gods or quantifiers for the answer we will miss the moment of it. The meaning of being is that moment, and that is why being is better than nothing.
Tuesday, May 3, -- PM. The Architecture of Experience? I am not familiar with what that is. There is much I have readmuch I have yet to learn, and less time than I would like to pursue it all. Well, why don't I just Google it? Sure, and yes I will. The Google search proved daunting. Well, the piece from the Harvard Gazette?
Was that what you meant? Sounds more along the lines of the memetics discussion we have been discussing on that PT post, hmmm? Or perhaps you are alluding to something entirely different? Now you've got me wondering. Please advise. Wednesday, May 4, -- PM. Harry, You brought up a text by Graham Martin. I was asking if the book I mentioned was the one you were referring to. I was throwing an olive branch, actually, not assigning you homework.
But when I do recommend a text it is intended to be pertinent, not to waste other people's time. They say be careful what you ask. This is doubly true of philosophers. On closer inspection, you say that Martin, not you, is asking if any of this matters, at which you say, "we kind of have to think so". Is this the kind of have to Kant meant? I kind of think not, but I don't dare ask, because I don't know what you're saying.
Does matter matter? Does it have to? We must be careful what we say, it might just matter. But, other than a venal rat with a love of slop and fortunate in his friends, what is a Templeton? Saturday, May 7, -- PM. Sartre said we are "a useless passion".
Said better, I think. We have a passion for boundaries definitions and delineations, as if needed to clarify the chaos that reality is. This may be helpful to keep us thinking we are getting somewhere, but if we really are going somewhere we have never been before, it is indeed useless. Unless, of course, its only meaning is to help us recognize we are not where we thought we'd be.
Being is a disciplined differing. The discipline is the passion for purpose boundary and constancy of thought. But if differing is the end, its only use is to help us recognize discontinuity. And if that discontinuity is the final term of the discipline of continuity, it must be more real.
It is what alters the condition of being real that is the engine of what is. From quarks to quirks. Harry, I understand how you feel when you suppose I am ignoring your own ideas by referencing them to other texts.
Half a century ago I almost came to blows with an instructor on this point. But if you think you are being original, or just want to keep the discussion to the views you are expressing, you have some responsibility to scour the literature to see if you are being as original as you suppose. Otherwise it becomes ambiguous whether you are asserting a passion for ideas or for self[expression].
Ideas are shared to help us set each other free, not to bind us in agreement with each other. And if not borne of our needing each other free we are a useless passion indeed! Friday, September 14, -- PM. Monday, August 19, -- PM. A proper question should have a legitimate basis. It is not clear to me that the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing," has a legitimate basis. I am of the opinion that any question is a request for information, and that if the questioner does not have a clear idea of what would count as a satisfactory answer, his or her question should be dismissed as illegitimate.
At a very tender age, I discovered the power of asking "Why? He very much enjoyed explaining what he had learned about geography, biology, meteorology, and other subjects he had studied in college.
At that point in my childhood, I was still an only child; my sister would not arrive for another few years. I loved my father's attention, and I learned I could usually get it by asking "Why?
But eventually my father figured out that sometimes I was asking the question with a genuine desire for information and at other times I was only asking in order to keep him talking.
After he had thoroughly explained why something was the case, I would still ask, "But why? I had no idea what that reply, in the form of a question, meant, other than that he was through talking and would at that point start ignoring my illegitimate use of "Why?
In the case of "Why is there something rather than nothing? And that, for me, is an indication that the question is not legitimate. I could give a clever answer: "So that you could annoy people with that question. Nobody's answer satisfies them. That's another thing that makes the question seem illegitimate to me. No answer would bring them satisfaction, because their satisfaction comes from making others try to come up with an answer, then rejecting it as unsatisfactory.
Tuesday, August 20, -- AM. But to address the question seriously, and directly, I would suggest that 'nothing' is a word that has no defining content. It is not an indicator of content in the way that 'bird,' 'mountain,' or 'planet' are indicators of content.
But for there to even be such a denial, there first has to be a denier, and if a denier exists, then clearly something exists. So the very function, linguistically, of the word 'nothing' and all its synonyms in other languages demands the existence of something. Only because something exists can we even invent the term 'nothing,' which then enables us to at least try to imagine the difference it would make if nothing existed.
We can't, really, but at least the term gives us a formal pretence of trying, by asking the question "Why is there something rather than nothing? Driving the point home, "Nothing exists" is internally at odds with itself, not only logically, but semantically. If the "nothing" in "Nothing exists," had any content at all, then it would follow that something--namely, that content--existed. The so-called proposition "Nothing exists" is therefore self-contradictory and devoid of content.
It is, in short, only a pseudo-proposition. And that is why something--not much, but something--has to exist rather than nothing: It has to exist for the term "nothing" to have a function, let alone a meaning. Skip to main content. Search form Search. Why Does Anything Exist? Laura Maguire.
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Leibniz says that the actual world must have something rather than nothing because the actual world must be the best of all possible worlds, and something is better than nothing.
But by the same reasoning, Leibniz concludes there are no vacuums in the actual world: more is better than less. Leibniz also targets the possibility of there being more than one void. If there could be more than one void, then there could be two voids of exactly the same shape and size. These two voids would be perfect twins; everything true of one void would be true of the other.
This is precluded by the principle of the identity of indiscernibles: if everything true of x is true of y , then x is identical to y.
A second problem with multiple voids arises from efforts to paraphrase them away. According to C. If this paraphrase strategy works for vacuums, it ought to work for the more prosaic case of holes.
Can a materialist believe that there are holes in his Swiss cheese? The holes are where the matter is not. So to admit the existence of holes is to admit the existence of immaterial objects! What appeared to be a wild existential claim has been domesticated into a comment on the shape of the cheese.
But how are we to distinguish between the cheese having two holes as opposed to one? Lewis and Lewis , 4 Well, some cheese is singly perforated, some cheese is doubly-perforated, yet other cheese is n -perforated where n equals the number of holes in the cheese. Can holes be evaded by confining ourselves to the process of perforation? Single-hole punchers differ from triple-hole punchers by how they act; singlely rather than triply.
The difficulty with this process-oriented proposal that the product, a hole, is needed to distinguish between successful and merely attempted perforation. Furthermore, the paraphrase is incomplete because it does not extend to holes that arise from processes such as looping. If the universe popped into existence five minutes ago, then most holes formed without any process. David and Stephanie Lewis note that this strands us with an infinite list of primitive terms.
Such a list could never have been memorized. The air cannot rush in quickly enough to fill the gap. This explains why rock vapor from the impact shoots back up into the atmosphere and later rains down widely on the surface.
During a meteorite shower, the atmosphere is multiply vacuumed. But this is just to say that there are many vacuums in the atmosphere. Parmenides maintained that it is self-defeating to say that something does not exist. A statement can be about something only if that something exists.
No relation without relata! Parmenides and his disciples elaborated conceptual difficulties with negation into an incredible metaphysical monolith.
The Parmenideans were opposed by the atomists. The atomists said that the world is constituted by simple, indivisible things moving in empty space. They self-consciously endorsed the void to explain empirical phenomena such as movement, compression, and absorption. Since these imply that compression and absorption are also impossible, Zeno rejects the data of the atomists just as physicists reject the data of parapsychologists. Less radical opponents of vacuums, such as Aristotle, re-explained the data within a framework of plenism: although the universe is full, objects can move because other objects get out of the way.
Compression and absorption can be accommodated by having things pushed out of the way when other things jostle their way in. The atoms are the Platonic solids regular, convex polyhedra , each having a distinctive role in the composition of objects. Like an irreverently intelligent school boy, Aristotle objects that the Platonic solids cannot fill space. Every arrangement of Platonic solids yields the sort of gaps that one can more readily predict in a universe composed solely of spherical atoms.
Aristotle agrees that atoms could fill space if they were all cubes. Pressing his luck, Aristotle goes on to claim that tetrahedra can also complete space. Almost any choice of shapes guarantees interstitial vacua. This geometrical pressure for tiny vacua creates a precedent for the cosmic void which surrounds the material cosmos and the intermediate empty spaces that provide a promising explanation of how motion is possible.
Yet Aristotle denied the void can explain how things move. Movement requires a mover that is pushing or pulling the object. An object in a vacuum is not in contact with anything else. If the object did move, there would be nothing to impede its motion. Therefore, any motion in a vacuum would be at an unlimited speed. This conflicts with the principle that no object can be in two separate places at the same time. There were two limited dissenters to his thesis that vacuums are impossible.
The Stoics agreed that terrestrial vacuums are impossible but believed there must be a void surrounding the cosmos. Hero of Alexandria agreed that there are no naturally occurring vacuums but believed that they can be formed artificially.
He cites pumps and siphons as evidence that voids can be created. Hero believed that bodies have a natural horror of vacuums and struggle to prevent their formation. You can feel the antipathy by trying to open a bellows that has had its air hole plugged. Try as you might, you cannot separate the sides. However, unlike Aristotle, Hero thought that if you and the bellows were tremendously strong, you could separate the sides and create a vacuum.
God could have chosen to create the world in a different spot. He could have made it bigger or smaller. God could have also chosen to make the universe a different shape. This possibilities entail the possibility of a vacuum. A second motivation is a literal reading of Genesis This opening passage of the Bible describes God as creating the world from nothing.
Such a construction seems logically impossible. If creation out of nothing were indeed a demonstrable impossibility, then faith would be forced to override an answer given by reason rather than merely answer a question about which reason is silent.
All Greek philosophy had presupposed creation was from something more primitive, not nothing. Consistently, the Greeks assumed destruction was disassembly into more basic units.
If destruction into nothingness were possible, the process could be reversed to get creation from nothing. The Christians were on their own when trying to make sense of creation from nothing. Ancient Chinese philosophers are sometimes translated as parallel believers in creation from nothing. JeeLoo Liu cautions that both the Daoist and Confucians are speaking about formlessness rather than nothingness. Creation out of nothing presupposes the possibility of total nothingness.
This in turn implies that there can be some nothingness. Thus Christians had a motive to first establish the possibility of a little nothingness. Their strategy was to start small and scale up. Accordingly, scholars writing in the aftermath of the condemnation of proposed various recipes for creating vacuums Schmitt One scheme was to freeze a sphere filled with water. After the water contracted into ice, a vacuum would form at the top. Aristotelians replied that the sphere would bend at its weakest point.
When the vacuists stipulated that the sphere was perfect, the rejoinder was that this would simply prevent the water from turning into ice. Neither side appears to have tried out the recipe. If either had, then they would have discovered that freezing water expands rather than contracts.
To contemporary thinkers, this dearth of empirical testing is bizarre. The puzzle is intensified by the fact that the medievals did empirically test many hypotheses, especially in optics. Hero was eventually refuted by experiments conducted by Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal.
In effect, they created a barometer consisting of a tube partially submerged, upside down, in bowl of mercury. What keeps the mercury suspended in the tube? Is there an unnatural vacuum that causes the surrounding glass to pull the liquid up? Pascal answered that there really was nothing holding up the mercury. The mercury rises and falls due to variations in the weight of the atmosphere. The mercury is being pushed up the tube, not pulled up by anything. When Pascal offered this explanation, Descartes wrote Christian Huygens 8 December that the hasty young man had the vacuum too much on his mind.
Descartes identified bodies with extension and so had no room for vacuums. If there were nothing between two objects, then they would be touching each other. And if they are touching each other, there is no gap between them. Well maybe the apparent gap is merely a thinly occupied region of space. There is merely unevenly spread matter. This model is very good at eliminating vacuums in the sense of empty objects.
However, it is also rather good at eliminating ordinary objects. What we call objects would just be relatively thick deposits of matter. There would be only one natural object: the whole universe. Indian philosophers associate nothingness with lack of differentiation. Descartes was part of a tradition that denied action at a distance. This orthodoxy included Galileo. How could the great Kepler believe something so silly?
How else could the universe be bound together by causal chains? Hunger for ether intensified as the wave-like features of light became established. It is tautologous that a wave must have a medium. Or is it? As the theoretical roles of the ether proliferated, physicists began to doubt there could be anything that accomplished such diverse feats. He presented his theory as a relational account of space; if there were no objects, there would be no space.
Space is merely a useful abstraction. Even those physicists who wished to retain substantival space broke with the atomist tradition of assigning virtually no properties to the void. Instead of having gravitational forces being propagated through the ether, they suggest that space is bent by mass. To explain how space can be finite and yet unbounded, they characterize space as spherical. When Edwin Hubble discovered that heavenly bodies are traveling away from each other like ants resting on an expanding balloon , cosmologists were quick to suggest that space may be expanding.
Quantum field theory provides especially fertile ground for such speculation. To say that vacuums have energy and energy is convertible into mass, is to deny that vacuums are empty. Many physicists revel in the discovery that vacuums are far from empty.
Frank Wilczek , Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow , as well as Lawrence Krauss explicitly claim that this answers the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The basic idea goes back to an issue raised by the symmetry of matter and anti-matter. Given that the symmetry implies equality, matter and anti-matter should have annihiliated each other.
Creation should have been aborted. Why is there NOW something particles rather than nothing mere energy in a quantum field? This question was answered by calculations suggesting that there was about a billionth more matter than anti-matter. Although it is still possible for the universe to be without particles, the slight numeric imbalance biases the universe toward states in which there are many particles. A small random change can trigger a phase transition analogous to the transformation of very cold liquid beer into solid beer when the cap of the bottle is popped suddenly reducing the pressure in the bottle.
A proud physicist is naturally tempted to announce these insights through the bullhorn of metaphysics. But philosophers interested in the logic of questions will draw attention to the role of emphasis in framing requests for explanations. But for rhetorical effect, physicists anachronistically back-date their domain of discourse to the things of nineteenth century physics.
Philosophers complain of misleading advertising. They asked one question and the proud physicists answered a different question. Lawrence Krauss defends the switch as an improvement. Often scientists make progress by altering the meaning of key terms.
Why stick with an intractable and arguably meaningless question? We should wriggle free from the dead hand of the past and rejuvenate our curiosity with the vocabulary of contemporary cosmology. Although the new terms are not synonymous with the old, they bear enough similarity to disarm the objection that the physicists are merely changing the topic. Our questions, like our children, can mature without losing their identity over time. The idea of there being two different questions being asked is pursued in Carroll , Other Internet Resources.
David Albert is open to the possibility of old questions being improved by new interests and discoveries. Pascal thinks human beings have a unique perspective on their finitude. Pascal elevates us to the level of angels by exalting in our grasp of the infinite, and then runs us down below the beasts for wittingly choosing evil over goodness.
From this valley of depravity Pascal takes us up again by marveling at how human beings tower over the microscopic kingdom, only to plunge us down toward insignificance by having us dwell on the vastness of space, and the immensity of eternity.
For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.
II, Their poetry de-emphasized salvation, seeking to immerse the reader in a raw apprehension of nature, unmediated by reason. Kant further obscured God by casting Him into the noumenal abyss, available only through practical faith rather than theoretical reason.
According to Schopenhauer, religion and rationalism aim to reassure us that the universe has a design. Our astonishment that there is anything betrays awareness that it is all a meaningless accident.
Readers of Schopenhauer were presented with the awesome contingency as an actuality rather than a terrible possibility. The experience captured the attention of William James who had experimented with nitrous oxide to understand the oceanic philosophy of Georg Hegel and, in , published the phenomenological investigation in Mind. James provides a simple recipe for eliciting the emotion:.
Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Another close reader of Schopenhauer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, characterizes the phenomenology as exhausting the thrust of the riddle of existence. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. From Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Lectures on Ethics, Wittgenstein uses the language of seeing-as. This gestalt switch is not a mistake.
Nor is it an insight. Even the logical positivists were willing to grant the question has emotive meaning just not cognitive meaning. The characteristic phenomenology of the question has also been suggested as a resource in explaining why we fail to recognize the radical ambiguity of the question. Andrew Brenner , conjectures that the multiplicity of interpretations is masked by the emotional unity.
Instead of tossing the question into the emotivist waste basket, like the logical positivists, or lapsing into quietism, like Wittgenstein, existentialists provide detailed treatments of the awe expressed by the ultimate question. Emotions are intentional states; they are directed toward something. If angered, I am angry at something. If amused, there is something I find amusing. Free floating anxiety is often cited as a counterexample. But Kierkegaard says that in this case the emotion is directed at nothingness.
According to Heidegger, we have several motives to shy away from the significance of our emotional encounters with nothingness. They are premonitions of the nothingness of death.
They echo the groundlessness of human existence. Some have hoped that our recognition of our rootlessness would rescue meaning from the chaos of nothing. But Heidegger denies us such solace. Heidegger does think freedom is rooted in nothingness. He also says we derive our concept of logical negation from this experience of nothing. This suggests a privileged perspective for human beings. We differ from animals with respect to nothing.
Since Heidegger thinks that animals do not experience nothingness, he is committed to skepticism about animal reasoning involving negation. Consider the Stoic example of a dog that is following a trail.
The dog reaches a fork in the road, sniffs at one road and then, without a further sniff, proceeds down the only remaining road.
Sniff—he did not go down this road. Therefore, he went down that road. They deny that human beings have a monopoly on nothingness. A classic anomaly for the stimulus-response behaviorist was the laboratory rat that responds to the absence of a stimulus:. These anomalies for behaviorism fill rationalists with mixed emotions. On the one hand, the experiments refute the empiricist principle that everything is learned from experience. On the other hand, the experiments also constitute a caution against over-intellectualizing absences.
A correct explanation of emotional engagement with absences must be more general and cognitively less demanding than rationalists tend to presuppose. Even mosquito larvae see shadows.
Doubts about whether they have consciousness do not make us doubt that they see shadows. So the perception of absences cannot depend on consciousness or any other advanced mental state.
Perhaps the earliest form of vision was of these absences of light. So instead of being a pinnacle of intellectual sophistication, cognition of absences may be primal. Existentialists tend to endorse the high standards assumed by rationalists. Their disagreement with the rationalists is over whether the standards are met.
The existentialists are impressed by the contrast between our expectations of how reality ought to behave and how it in fact performs. This sense of absurdity makes existentialists more accepting of paradoxes. Whereas rationalists nervously view paradoxes as a challenge to the authority of reason, existentialists greet them as opportunities to correct unrealistic hopes. Existentialists are fond of ironies and do not withdraw reflexively from the pain of contradiction.
They introspect upon the inconsistency in the hope of achieving a resolution that does justice to the three dimensionality of deep philosophical problems. For instance, Heidegger is sensitive to the hazards of saying that nothing exists. Like an electrician who must twist and bend a wire to make it travel through an intricate hole, the metaphysician must twist and bend a sentence to probe deeply into the nature of being.
This paragraph, especially the last sentence, became notorious as a specimen of metaphysical nonsense. There is a difference between a failure to understand and an understanding of failure. After all, Carnap was patient with the cryptic Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein speaks like an oracle. He even characterized his carefully enumerated sentences as rungs in a ladder that must be cast away after we have made the ascent and achieved an ineffable insight. And Wittgenstein meant it, quitting philosophy to serve as a lowly schoolmaster in a rural village.
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