Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I share Holt’s enthusiasm for his subject matter, and admire how far he was willing to go to answer the question. What I found increasingly frustrating about this book, though, was his lack of explanation as to why something did or did not make sense. For example, he gave 5 pages (I think) to talking about Hegel, half of which was atmospheric. The last page and a half were simply to dismiss it as being nonsensical without explaining why. I can appreciate quoting philosophers and other thinkers to buffer one’s argument or give a different (sometimes radical) perspective on issues, but assuming that something makes sense or doesn’t make sense doesn’t explain what sense or non-sense is… nor does it justify dismissing anything.
Holt is definitely more in the analytic tradition of philosophy than he is in any other — and while he appreciates the content area of philosophy — he falls short of really examining why or how the assumptions of language itself impacts the kind of answer he is willing to accept. This is of course, very common to analytic philosophy. So, one assumption that is simply to question is why is logic outside of reality? The proof he gives relies very much on the consistency of terms entailed by logic.
So rather than to go on, I’ll simply state that I found his questioning to be willfully based mostly (as his initial questions) on a feeling he has about nothing vs something… so it remains then, that his own feelings on things that determine what answers are acceptable or not.
If Holt went about his question by examining how the various formalizations inherent within his or any other philosopher’s discourse constructed arguments, I believe he would have found the ways in which meaning are made, and why philosophers who often try and tackle [nothing vs something] often run into the problem of spouting nonsense to support sense. How one discourse creates the limitations of its own inherent reality is simultaneously how that discourse grounds itself as reality and maintains its consistency and coherency. Another way of putting this objection I have is to say that Holt gives too much attention to the content of the words others use and not enough attention to how context deploys those words… additionally while he contemplates many different positions, he ends up rejecting most of them for reasons he does not explain… which makes it frustrating to read because whenever he fails to explain why he rejected a position, Holt will resort to a story or a narrative to invoke feelings… As if the horror of one philosopher is the same horror of another… and that’s how we equate them. So if one set of words doesn’t jive with him, then he seems to assume it won’t jive with us either.
I suppose though that it makes sense that he starts his journey with a feeling and he ends it also on another feeling… in the end, philosophy for him may be a way of coping (as it can be argued that all things are ways of coping) but the real weight of his argument lies in whatever gives him the (feeling of) satisfaction he is looking for… though I suspect that this satisfaction is based on some hidden assumptions as to what kinds of moves are allowed rather than radically being a philosopher and allowing all any kind of move, and eliminating those that self cancel. Truth may be another way of saying what feels warm like home, but that’s still based off the naive idea that in the end, words mean the same thing to different people and that language can be used with precision lacking ambiguity… which is an obviously willful denial that analytical philosophy (along with many philosopher-scientists) have adopted in their pursuit of making meaning for everyone… when really they at most only make meaning for themselves instead of describing it for everyone (for everyone else, this productivity is a kind of prescribing because of how they assume language is a stable mediator).
In this sense, this book is less of a book of philosophy than a book about philosophy. Still, he put much effort to go to these places, and meet all these people I haven’t read before and that’s impressive.
Comments (0)