The existential man

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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I seem to be stuck on the idea of Everything and Nothing (E&N). The more I ponder philosophical questions the more I realize that E&N is at the root of many of my thought struggles.

How do we even have the concept of E&N? The concept of zero and something? One of my professors, an Indian chap, was bragging one day about how the Indians invented the concept of zero. I don’t know that they “invented it” but I was watching a math history program that confirmed that the earliest description of the number zero or the empty set was in India. It’s not important to me who first described the concept of nothing/zero, but perhaps it can help me in my pursuit of higher understanding of zero/nothing. I feel like I still don’t truly understand zero/nothing.

I guess it just seems crazy (and quite amazing) that a human could even come up with the thought that “There is something… What if there was nothing?” It’s as if it seems possible that there could be nothing. Obviously there isn’t nothing, the universe, you and I exist. As I always seem to be saying, “It doesn’t matter whether you believe God created a universe or you are an atheist…” there is something. If God has always been, I don’t really care. Maybe the universe has always been. But that is not my struggle. The fact is that something IS. Something exists. Something cannot come from nothing. It’s a crazy paradox or impossibility to think that at some point there was nothing. That’s why I think the big bang is so stupid. It doesn’t answer anything! You can reduce everything back to a point, but you still have some antecedent cause. And theists just drop God at the beginning of everything, but that doesn’t help. The whole thing seems absurd to me. It seems way beyond me that THERE IS SOMETHING.

It is similar to the feelings in those moments when you realize you are conscious. “Wow, I exist… What the f**k!?”

When I was young, I was not “into” philosophy until I began reading Camus. That opened the flood gates. I believe existential questions will always remain close to my heart.

So I suppose I am making this post to ask for direction or for references to philosophers that wrote about this subject.

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What particular book started you on Camus?
Parmeneides was the most sublime address on the subject. Check this site for a translation of the fragments that have survived.
history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/parmends.htm

His point is echoed in the theory, or law of Energy Conservation. Even if you were to accept the Big Bang theory, for example, you would still have incredibly condensed universe. The theory imagines that the universe (and time) originated in an unimaginably hot and dense point. That point is still something, so it would seem that however useful the zero has been for mathematics, that a true empty set is a conceptual reality rather than a physical reality.
You’ve got to love the pre-socratics.

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Thank you for the excellent post. It was The Myth of Sisyphus that got me started. That Camus imagines Sisyphus as happy gave me great encouragement in the face of the absurd. I also appreciated The Rebel. I enjoyed his small essays more than his plays. Though his plays are fantastic for philosophical discussion as well.

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Heidegger discusses the ontological question: Why is there something and not nothing? His most famous book is Being and Time. That might be right up your alley.

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It is one of the greatest philosophical works. I have been listening to lectures by Dreyfus on Being and Time. Thanks for the suggestion.

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Who is Dreyfus? What are you listening to, a CD? Being itself is a mystery to me. It must be eternal.

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Hi bdhanes. Isn’t Camus vastly overrated? Why waste your time with a novelist? passion.

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I don’t know about others, but for me he was a breath of fresh air. Perhaps it was that the existentialists hit me at the right moment at the right time in my life. I have never been one to read novels. I always read “how-to” books and purely philosophical essays. Not many novels or plays. Overall, I believe there are plenty of novelists out there that have a unique perspective to add. There is always something to learn.

In the end, it was Camus’ outlook on issues such as suicide, rebellion, and the absurdity of the human condition that I appreciated because they were completely new and original perspectives for me.

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Being,matter,whatever you want call has always been. Given an infinite amount of time and space,and finite matter;if all matter can be destroyed, it would have been and all that would remain would be an infinite void. Since we are obviously here it can’t be destroyed and is eternal.Why this is so plain looking backwards,and not forward has puzzled me. It’s probably our fear of death. We did not know of our own birth,thanks mom.

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I suggest that the concept of “nothing” or “zero” was first understood when we started to understand how to share things. So that when we communicated how much of a thing we had, we could indicate “I have nothing” (picture the gesture of a person showing one’s hands as being empty as a non-verbal way of doing it):

usatoday.com/news/health/200 … usat_x.htm

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O- Oh yes, Sisyphus was very good. I loved best the Stranger. However did you read some of the Marxist literature that inspired The Rebel. Not that you must, but you get a whole lot more. Dover has a very cheap edition of edited texts and includes Marx, Kropotin and Proudhon. It is a nice complementary read to the Rebel, but like I said, not essential.

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Hi bdhanes. Thank you for your thoughts. You said; ” I don’t know about others, but for me he was a breath of fresh air. Perhaps it was that the existentialists hit me at the right moment at the right time in my life.”

I hear you. Yet, Camus largely expressed himself vis-à -vis novels and fiction – written for popular consumption – at a profit. I would say this puts his work into the realm of French literature fiction rather than philosophy. Camus is more like a science fiction writer - for example like Ray Bradbury or Charles Darwin – than he is a philosopher like, say, Kierkegaard or Socrates. In that sense, Camus is more like a “pop iconist” than a philosopher. In any event, as far as I can tell, the fiction novelist Camus’ best work, if he had any at all, is probably the “The Plague” and even that work is laden with popular gooey French political correctness of that era.

Last thought; if you are interested in pure existentialist thinking you would probably love Soren Kierkegaard’s many and extraordinary works. Kierkegaard is not only the founder of existentialism but probably the most dramatic and skillful exegete of pure existentialist thinking. You might also appreciate the very talented and highly underrated Spanish existentialist thinker Miguel De Unamuno and his work titled “Tragic Sense of Life.” passion.

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regarding the original post;

if we take the inflationary big bang theory as the correct description of the universes evolution, we have to assume 2 things. first, that matter existed always and second, that the forces present in the universe were always present. otherwise a gravitational singularity is not possible.

we can’t say what the innate cause of the initial matter was with any certainty, nor can we say what caused the forces which are inherent in this universe. the greatest theory physicists ever developed still falls short of giving us an answer to the big question(what created the universe?)

our reasonings are always governed by cause and effect, we think that every state of affairs we can observe was caused by something because we have only our experiance to reason from.

why is that tree knocked over? was is a human, the wind, a bear?
why was i born? was it may parents fucking, a sperm fertilizing an egg?

when we say that something can’t come from nothing we are playing on words. nothing is a blank concept, we cannot concieve of nothing because we cannot observe nothing. the only time we experiance nothing(pardon the pun) is when we die.

If we were void of all sebsation, would we be experiancing nothing? if we were born without any senses whatsoever, is that the experiance of nothing?

dreamless sleep is as close to ‘knowing nothing’ as a conscious being can get. dreamless sleep passes in the blink of an eye and that is the worst case scenario for death.

regarding existentialism, i rather like Satre’s pop culture take on it. existance before essence,we create ourselves everyday. but i disagree that the existentialist belives man has no nature. i think we each have a set nature. that nature is a conscious and mortal nature. as a product of our nature we are confronted with new possibilities everyday and hence we create ourselves through our actions and beliefs. nothing exists in the future and nothing exists in the past, the only things which exist exist now and they exist as such untill the change.

thank you cause and effect for pervading every acceptable human theory, i feel used. science doesn’t disprove god, it just discredits the validity of any such inquiery.

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double post, sorry, impatient

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Thank you for the suggestions. :slight_smile: Obviously Kierkegaard has to come up in a posting titled “the existential man”. I really like Robert Solomon’s passion for existentialists. I have listened to every one of his Teaching Company lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, etc. that I can get a hold of.