At the edge of reality

Every man asks himself the great questions. At least, he should do so once in his life.

Sometimes they are purely philosophical questions, other times scientific ones, although, as some may recall, the separation of knowledge is no longer something we believe in as we once did. It is a very interesting matter, one that I have been working on for some time and which, over the years, I have entrusted to short essays for journals, while waiting for a longer work in which I hope to express my position clearly, cohesively, and effectively.

That said, returning to the great questions, it’s clear that for a “philosopher” like me, the first is: Why being and not nothing? It’s an extremely complex question, one that Heidegger most recently tackled in his own way. For him, Western thought has taken the wrong path: it has forgotten being, focusing instead on the entity, the thing, that has dominated the scene and led man to believe he could manipulate it (something he could never do with being itself). This culminates in the will to power of Nietzsche. In his view, being has been “entified”, made into a thing, but being cannot be handled that way — it should be approached for what it is: the non-entity, the nothing.

Indeed, for Heidegger, and here we return to the initial point, nothingness is being.

His ideas, provocative to say the least, seem themselves driven by a kind of intellectual will to power that aims to make such theses acceptable (fascinating yet tenuous, and treated head-on in my long work in progress). Especially considering that Heidegger, while rejecting a subjectivistic knowledge of man, that is, a knowledge driven by will to power, where the subject manipulates the object, nonetheless makes a series of declarations about being, science, and hermeneutics that suggest a capacity to grasp reality which somehow escapes the very critique he directs at Western metaphysics.

Critics, for their part, have often taken issue with Emanuele Severino for his stance, for claiming to have theoretically halted the nihilistic drift of Western thought. But what, then, about Heidegger? He too sought to oppose the metaphysics that preceded him, though to be fair, he traced the worst of it only a few centuries back, to the era of Descartes and Galileo. For me, it remains important to ask the fundamental questions, and “Why being and not nothing?” is certainly one of them. Yet we might wonder whether such questions are “all too human,” meaningful to us but not to reality itself. Thought, after all, is presumably the finest product man possesses for interacting with the surrounding environment and surviving within it, but not necessarily for grasping ultimate reality. We believe otherwise because we are heirs of Galileo, who thought man could know reality with the same quality of knowledge that God possessed, since reality spoke the mathematical language, and mathematics was, and still is, accessible to man.

These are, of course, open questions, unlikely ever to find a definitive answer. One could linger on more “scientific” questions, nearly (and I stress nearly) as fascinating. As an unconventional philosopher, being, I repeat, a theorist of writing “forced” at times to deal with philosophy, I sometimes overhear scientific issues that make me sit up in alert. For example, some scientists warn against asking what existed before the universe, simply because “before” and “after” presuppose the existence of time, and time does not exist outside the universe. In asking such a question, you contradict yourself: if you ask what came before time, you are already implying time, since only within its framework can you speak of a “before.” At this point, one might ask why, if it is meaningless, scientists still concern themselves with the beginning of the universe, knowing full well they cannot address the truly interesting question: what happened an instant “before” conception, being able to deal only with conception itself.

So what is the meaning of the Big Bang?

Many think it describes the moment before the universe arose, but it would seem quite the opposite, it concerns something that already existed. To look at what was “before” the universe is to ask the wrong question, one that should at least be reformulated. I would put it this way: what was there before the universe, and therefore before time, which in truth was not “before,” since time did not yet exist? Whatever it was, it was not “before.” It’s a situation that, as the reader will notice, we can’t even imagine. Once again, man speaks of things he cannot represent, as Bishop Berkeley already observed, and we know how that turned out. Science, like philosophy, has no certainties. Yet these are enriching questions — and it would be a shame never to have touched them, as might happen to a poor man of letters like me, before closing his experience on this earth.