Kazimir Malevich, Black Square [1915]
Does the world itself exist? Do unicorns exist? German philosopher Markus Gabriel talks to four by three about his latest book Why the World Does Not Exist, tackling the big questions of ontology, why we should abandon metaphysics and why his theory of fields of sense can help us overcome the failures of post-modernism.
Even though you have argued that society has materially and spiritually benefited from attempting to grasp the world in its entirety, you deny that the world exists in your latest book Why the World Does Not Exist [Polity Press, 2015]. What motivated you to reject the concept of the world and why should we repudiate this profoundly familiar conviction? And how does your account differ from that of other philosophers, such as Heidegger or Wittgenstein?
Markus Gabriel: The idea that there is such a thing as the world in its entirety, in particular, very early on in Greek philosophy, comes to be understood as the view that there are overall principles/laws governing everything there is. This is the birthplace of the notion that there is a universe and that the universe is governed by exactly one set of laws. Against this background, humanity has been trying to figure out what exactly those principles were, because insight into those principles promised them some kind of omniscience. Plato and Aristotle clearly tell us that we can somehow know everything by knowing the principles of the world as such.
This form of thinking contributed to the modern ideal of science as a guide to ultimate truth about what there really is. However, the fundamental problem with the idea of a world and an associated world-view (be it scientific, religious, mythological or what have you) is that it can only allow for one set of principles or laws and, therefore, only for one kind of entity to inhabit the world. Somewhat surprisingly, even if you are a dualist and accordingly believe that there are two kinds of things, minds and mind-less objects, you will think of them along the same lines so that they can be seen as inhabiting the same realm. You will look for their causal interaction and wonder how mind and brain hang together and so on. The idea is that implicitly or explicitly existence itself is interpreted as belonging to the world and what it is to belong to the world must be the same for everything there is. It is no coincidence that Descartes, the most famous dualist of all times, argues that minded (thinking) and mind-less things are both substances and that ultimately, there really is only one substance (which he calls God). Ultimately, even Descartes is a monist, someone who believes that world-membership is characterized by a special feature of things, namely that they all be substances. I take all of this to be profoundly misguided on many levels.
Even though one might read Wittgenstein and Heidegger as pointing in a similar direction, there are many details in our accounts that differ. Both reject the position that philosophy is a theoretical activity and want to replace it by something else (Heidegger through thinking and Wittgenstein through therapeutic elucidation). Also, Heidegger never gives up on the existence of the world, as for him reaching out to the whole of beings is what it is to be what he calls a ‘Dasein,’ that is a free being like us. He explicitly writes that our freedom consists precsily in establishing criteria of world-entry (Welteingang) for entities out of nothing, what he therefore calls nihil originarium (original nothing). For him, the world is not itself substantial, but a set of overall assumptions we need to make at each point in the history of philosophy in order to make sense of non-human things being there. Wittgenstein certainly is not looking for a world-picture himself, but also gives a lot of credit to the view that we cannot help, but make world-picture-like overall assumptions about what there is and how we fit into it. In On Certainty he explicitly gives some kind of substance to notions like ‘world-picture’ and ‘mythology’ and seems to argue that we are never really able to operate outside of them. However, I disagree.
‘Everything appears against a background that does not itself appear. When we become aware of this by comprehending the movement of thought that is motivated by Malevich’s work, we understand that the world does not exist’ — Markus Gabriel
Why doesn’t the world exist or why shouldn’t it exist?
MG: Roughly, the argument goes like this: what it is for an object to exist depends on the domain within which it is located (I call domains: fields of sense in order to distinguish them from sets and other kinds of collections of things). For each domain there are specific rules/laws characterizing objects in a certain way (the senses of a field). For instance, the natural numbers are characterized by the laws of basic arithmetic; Germany’s government by the rule of law; the universe by the laws of nature; Sherlock Holmes by the various plays, TV series and movies within which he makes an appearance etc. If the world existed, there would have to be a universal law such that insight into that law would at the same time enable us to understand all other local laws. But there is no such universal law, no universal concept of existence that covers everything. Hence, the world does not exist.
When I say that the world does not exist, I am, therefore, arguing for the position that existence is always local in that informative claims about existence tell us something about a given field or domain, namely that it really contains something. For instance, God certainly exists, namely in the Bible. But that is usually not sufficient for someone who wants to claim that God exists. This is why we tend to say that God does not exist if he only exists in the Bible (or according to the Bible). In this way we implicitly inflate the concept of existence into some heavyweight feature that makes things really real. But this is just an overextension of the case where we insist that God does not exist or learn as children that Santa Claus does not exist.
It’s just that no one has ever clearly told us what the heavyweight feature of real existence would be except that some things which exist in their respective fields lack it (like Santa Claus or God)! Usually, there is just a stubborn insistence that existence is what makes things real. But in my view the real question is always: what domain or field is relevant and only then can we ask whether in that domain or field the thing in question appears. Any world-view (include the natural scientific one) is an overgeneralization or overextension of rules that work in some field over an imagined all-encompassing sphere. It’s a bit like this: if you work in a restaurant, you will see many things through the lenses of your job and what you have learned there about people; if you work in a laboratory, you will also be inclined to take this with you all the time and so on. We tend to generalize on the basis of our given experience of how things are and then believe that we hooked up with the fundamental level of reality. This is how world-views are generated and they are always provincial. I believe that metaphysics, the activity of creating world-views, is certainly not limited to (professional) philosophy, but a widespread tendency to overestimate one’s local and provincial experience.
You suggest that the desire for a unitary worldview is natural. How has that desire been realized so far and with what should we replace it when abandoning such a worldview? Will this desire simply vanish altogether?
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