On being and nothingness, which are enough

We just got home from a funeral service for a friend who died last week while we were at Chautauqua in New York. On Friday, we’ll be attending a memorial gathering for another friend who died on the same day. Not surprisingly, matters of mortality are on my mind. I’ve awakened the last few days feeling off balance, and songs about living and dying have been running through my head. I realize that this is likely how my life will often look from here forward—at least until it’s my turn. It is my peers who are dying now, not our parents (mostly) but ourselves. Despite my outwardly sanguine approach to the end of life, I think I have to consider that these events not only feel sad, they also feel frightening.

This is not a new train of thought for me. You’ve seen bits of it before in my discussions of aging and the meaning of death. But it came up again, big time, this past week. First, unexpectedly, during my course on astrophysics, “The Elegant Universe.” And then again with the news of these friends’ deaths.

Last time I wrote, I promised blogs about three topics from my trip to Chautauqua: the experience of Chautauqua itself, thrilling stories of the universe, and musings on Being and Nothingness (to borrow Sartre’s capitalization). I’ve actually started writing blogs on the first two topics, planning to save Being and Nothingness for last. But events of the past week and the encouragement of some friends prompted me to get on with it. So here you have it: musings on the meaning of Being and Nothingness, life, death, and community.

It all started with a speaker who got stuck in Chicago. First, some back-story: Chautauqua in New York has programming all day, every day, some of which follows the theme for the week. During the week I was there, the theme was “The Elegant Universe,” so several speakers addressed that topic from various perspectives. One of these speakers was Jim Holt, a philosopher, whose topic was “Why Does the World Exist?” I was excited to hear this talk. It promised an exploration of weighty matters of existence, chance, and purpose, and I’m an old philosophy buff, so I love this hyper-abstract stuff. But severe weather marooned him in Chicago. Still intrigued, I went to the local bookstore and bought his book by the same title.

The early chapters considered a series of positions on the question of why the world exists (as opposed to not existing—i.e., Being vs. Nothingness). Most suggested that without a divine entity to create reality, eternal nothingness (the void) would prevail. I skimmed the next  few chapters, which were full of “ps” and “qs,” attempts to answer the question of why the world exists through formal logic: Is there a logical reason for the world to exist (or not)? Old philosophy buff or no, my eyes glazed over during this part.

But then, reading around in the last part of the book, my attention was caught by this line:

“Although my birth was contingent, my death is necessary.”

And this:

“The world got on quite happily for eons prior to that unlikely moment when I was abruptly awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, and it will continue on quite happily after the inevitable moment to come when I return to that night.”

Holt’s talk was to be Wednesday morning, and by Wednesday evening, I was deeply into the book and reflecting on these ideas. Then, Wednesday evening and Thursday morning, we learned about our friends’ deaths. The near-simultaneous news of their deaths flashed against the background of these lines from the book, and I started thinking a lot about death. The song “May I suggest” (which I have talked about here before) played and replayed in my mind. Clearly, it was time to think again about existence—mine and ours.

Another speaker had made a point that got me thinking anew about a very old question, and these thoughts seemed especially important as I reflected on mortality. The question: How it is that the universe has precisely the characteristics that allow for and sustain human life—not just life, not just intelligent life, but the particular form of life that we embody? Why, in other words, does this particular world exist in this particular form, and what does that have to do with us?

For many people, the answer lies in an appeal to a higher power: Clearly, they say, a universe so precisely attuned to us must have been created by a supreme being who intentionally brought both the world and us into existence, who made the world explicitly for us. But my thoughts on this question took me in a different direction entirely. It seems to me that, framed this way, the question circumvents a profound (if perhaps uncomfortable) possibility: It’s not that the world was made for us at all. Why the world is this way has nothing to do with us. Instead, the point is that if the world were any other way, there would be no “us” to wonder about it why it’s here. We humans are an accident, I think, of the particular physical events that arose when the stuff of the universe came together in this particular way. To assume that it happened with a purpose—especially, with the purpose of being perfect for us—seems to me inescapably anthropocentric. Holt paraphrases one philosopher’s position, “Our universe arose by chance from a quantum fluctuation in the void”—and, I would add, it emerged with properties that, by chance, resulted in us.

The latter part of Holt’s book (parts of which are quoted above) spoke directly to these reflections. If neither the universe nor we were created for a purpose, then what is the meaning of Being? And does this mean that the end is simply Nothingness? Remarkably, Holt dared write about the struggle to name the Nothingness we fear (his words are in italics, mine aren’t):

“The dread of death goes beyond the fear that the rush of life will continue without us.” Yet, I must admit that when I read this line, I acknowledged (perhaps for the first time) that some part of my fear is precisely this—the awareness that the world will go on when I die, barely missing a beat.

“It is the prospect of nothingness that induces in me a certain queasiness… How to envision this nothingness? From the objective standpoint, my death, like my birth, is an unremarkable biological event, one that has happened billions of times to members of my species.” Again, he nailed it. How distressing to be reminded that on one level, my death will not be at all special, that it will have no more significance than that of billions of other people.

“But from the inside it is unfathomable—the vanishing of my conscious world and all that it contains, the end of subjective time.” Exactly. How can we grasp, how can we even imagine the end of consciousness. The fact that all experience will simply stop.

It seems to me deeply, personally, albeit painfully, true that our being here—collectively and individually—is a quirk of cosmic chance. Our individual existence is, in Holt’s words, contingent—it might never have happened. But once born, our death is inevitable. And, since I believe that my death will be simply the end of my experience and nothing more (OK, I’d like for my cells to feed some trees or worms or fishes or something), my Being becomes a fortuitous happenstance and my slide into Nothingness an inevitable winking out of that happenstance. Describing the moment when his mother died, with him at her bedside, Holt writes, “I had just seen the infinitesimal transition from being to nothingness. The room had contained two souls; now it contained one.”

Some folks might hear in this a fatalistic, even morbid perspective. But for me, it is the most hopeful possible one, because it reminds me every time I think about it that what happens in these moments between the fluke of my birth and the certainty of my death is my opportunity, my responsibility. I have this time—however long I have between chance and inevitability—to give meaning to my existence. It didn’t come with my birth, no agent had a plan for my life; meaning is mine to create or to squander.

This perspective and the reminder it brings has new substance in the aftermath of these friends’ deaths. Each of them in her own way lived well and fully, gave much to others, thrived on the challenges of a complicated world. And each gathered around herself a broad and deep community. The woman who was memorialized today had already lived a full, productive, generous professional life when she decided, late in her life, to come out as a lesbian and work for the betterment of the LGBT community. She left a remarkable legacy that’s expressed in the work she did and the people whom she loved and who loved her with equal depth. The woman who will be celebrated Friday loved to travel the world, and she always performed good works en route to “spend her privilege” well. The folks who will be singing in her honor Friday know well the importance of community and the gift she was to theirs.

From where I stand, theirs were lives that enriched the world while they were here, and those of us who knew them are the better for their time with us. I have no need to seek an extraordinary origin for them or for the world they inhabited. Nor do I need the reassurance that they continue in some way, other than in the impact they had while they were here and its continuing echo in the people they touched.

For me, the amazing miracle—quantum fluctuation though it may have been—that gifted them to us was enough. And the thought that they were once and will again be star stuff suits me fine.