[b]Why Buridan’s Ass Doesn’t Starve?
by Michael Hauskeller
Imagine you go to a restaurant. Looking at the menu, you discover that they serve your two favourite meals – say asparagus and spinach tart. What will you do? You may hesitate for a while, but then you will make your choice. You have to make a choice, don’t you? Even if you’re hungry or greedy enough to order both, you have to decide which to eat first.
Now, how do you decide? Given that you like both equally, why do you choose, say, spinach tart, and not asparagus? There are two possible general answers. You can say either that:
a) There is no reason (no cause) for your choice. You just act, and you could equally well choose the other meal. Or:
b) There is a reason, but it’s unknown to you.
The second answer seems more plausible, because it accords with a principle that’s fundamental to the way we think. This principle is commonly called Leibniz’s Law, or the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It can be stated in various ways:
• Nihil sine ratione: Nothing is without a reason.
• Nothing happens without a sufficient reason/cause.
• For each event A there is another event B (or a combination of events) that precedes it and fully explains why A had to happen.
• Ex nihilo nihil fit: Nothing comes out of nothing.[/b]
Just how mysterious are the choices that we make? Leaving aside those that revolve around moral responsibility, the mere fact of choosing what to eat [or what to eat first] can be made to seem quite perplexing.
We know that “I” is in there somewhere but we don’t know if “I” can ever really grapple with this wholly.
Try as I might, I am not able come up with an argument that would seem to contain the whole truth here. I know that my choice of foods is embedded in dasein. Which is to say that I choose the sort of foods that I have become acclimated to choose given the life that I have lived. For example, I don’t choose the foods that someone who was raised in a more affluent/cosmopolitan family/community might choose. In other words, those who are more familiar [existentially] with far more exotic, “gourmet” meals from around the world.
That’s just never been a part of my life. Now, sure, I could perhaps choose to explore that world. Anyone who has the financial wherewithal, always has that option. But, given the manner in which I have come [again, existentially] to think about food in my life, it is just not something I have any inclination to do. But that too is no less embedded in dasein.
So, the reasons that I choose to eat as I do seem apparent to me. But is there actually the possibility that what seems apparent to me is only that which must seem apparent to me? Is my “agenda” regarding food no different from my moral and political agendas: merely the embodiment of matter unfolding as it only ever could have unfolded?
But then I am back to the seeming futility of devising a methodology for determining this…given all of the conflicting arguments I have come across over the years that tug me ambivalently in equal and opposite directions.
As for nothing and something, some seem to argue that everything there is came out of nothing at all. And how do we pin that down?