Name: Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
Rating: 3.708333333333333 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9780871404091

Jim Holt

Expands the search for the origins of the universe beyond God and the Big Bang theory, exploring more bizarre possibilities inspired by physicists, theologians, mathematicians, and even novelists.

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

'Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?' remains the most curious and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated essayist Jim Holt now enters this fascinating debate with his broad, lively and deeply informed narrative that traces all our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. With sly humour and a highly original personal approach Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective. Suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God and the Big Bang, he tracks down, among others, an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Nobel Laureate physicist, a French Buddhist monk, and John Updike just before he died, to pursue this cosmic puzzle from every angle. As he pieces together a solution - while offering useful insights into time, consciousness, and eternity - he sheds fascinating new light on the meaning of existence. A New York Times bestseller on first publication, this new paperback edition provides a much-needed new take on history's greatest conundrum, in the vein of previous bestsellers like Michael Brooks' 13 Things that Don't Make Sense.

One Man's Quest for the Big Answer

Why Does the World Exist?

Tim Pendry

This review of contemporary thinking on the question of existence represents the best of North American intellectual journalism where the writer tries to represent the intelligent 'ordinary joe' in his search for knowledge. Of course, it has its irritations. The American literary style is almost defined by its narcissism - the fact that Jim Holt is sitting in the cafe that was patronised (or matronised) by Sartre and De Beauvoir is of very little interest. We want to get to the meat but that's just how they do things over there and he is possibly the least narcissistic of American literary types that I have come across in a long time. At least he does not spend ten pages describing the snow in Nebraska as if it was a creative writing class. What is of interest is the selection of well edited interviews with various leading academics and intellectuals on the meaning of existence, interspersed with some excellent guidance notes from Holt himself. When he stops being fascinated by local colour, his own personal reactions to such fundamental matters as death are well written and thoughtful. I am averse to sentimentality over animals but he helps me to 'get' why the death of his 'pooch' actually matters. That is quite an achievement. Indeed, death is the existentialist sub-text - a close call on the road with Professor Grunbaum, the atheist, and the interview with Updike just before his death, the death of the dog and the death of the author's mother. The dog and the mother seem to be strikingly equalised in death. Holt's final conclusions are mine because there seems to be no other conclusion. Rarely, I won't reveal what that conclusion is because, equally rarely, the 'detective story' structure of the book would make that a spoiler. What I can say is that this highly readable book will give an intelligent lay person an insight into the general trends in modern thought on the question of existence with plenty of solid background on the history behind such thinking that is necessary to get a sense of what is going on here, especially for those with no significant philosophical background. This really should work as a book for the general reader. We have the aggressive Jewish-atheist secure in his lack of interest in the big questions, the outre theories of physicists and cosmologists as well as their more measured responses, the rather soppy theism of Swinburne and the unconvincing aestheticism of the mathematical Platonists. I rather liked the idea of the universe coming into being as the accidental by-product of some alien lab experiment where the alien universe continued to exist quite happily with us having no way of knowing who our absent-minded and disinterested creators may have been. But it is just an idea. We then have the completely unjustified insistence on prior ethical meaning of Leslie (talk about 'wishful thinking'!), the response of Parfit to the question of existence as the contribution to the book of traditional analytical philosophy and a humane if perhaps philosophically unconvincing coda from the very type of the American liberal litterateur, John Updike. Any one of these interview-essays would be a stimulating article in itself in 'The New Yorker' (Holt's journalistic home) but, taken together with the excellent introductions, explanations and personal experiences, they all create a book that will inform, educate but, best of all, make you think. My own non-spoiler conclusion on the book is that it helps to bring these extremely clever people down to earth for us. There are some questions where, for all their intelligence, they know no more than we may know. The intellectual legerdemain and intense and complex constructions of theoreticians and moralists all end up eventually where we all end up - making our own choices about meaning on the basis of our own stance in relation to the world. The interview with Swinburne on his theism perhaps brings this out most clearly but it is a theme throughout the book - even the Platonists who seem to have at least Number on their side fall at the last gate on the possibility that we cannot know that number does not break down beyond our own comprehension of it. Mathematics may describe our world but not the world - which may be unknowable. One senses the long shadow of ultimate unknowability over the book and the resort to belief of anyone who goes beyond the somewhat rigid and closed-in world of Grunbaum. It is as if we are all engaged in a sentimental 'best bets' strategy based on preferences and that rather does throw one back on to classic existentialist views of our relationship to meaning and to the world. Certainly, the book is a corrective to the enthusiasm of those who think higher mathematics and cosmology necessarily rather than possibly describe the ultimate nature of existence. Nevertheless, the sheer pleasure, aesthetics and excitement of trying to understand the world and making discoveries on the way (since philosophy gives us a scientific approach of sorts to language and phenomena as well as to science itself) come out of this book. It shows us that philosophy is what (intelligent) humans do. Perhaps this is best expressed by the severely analytical Oxonian Derek Parfit who must be regarded as the thinker's thinkers in terms of rigour. This does not mean that he is the most right but only the most committed to the method: indeed, one suspects that his rigour can often 'miss the point' even where his actual argumentation stands up but that is another matter. In a lovely passage, Parfit(who is rather obviously being very patient with his slightly less capable interviewer) comes to a view of the self (which I happen not to share) that might depress others but says: "My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness." He felt himself liberated from the self by dint of analysis and "the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air" [Page 260] Others will recognise the sentiment though it is just sentiment. The point is not whether Parfit was right or wrong in his analysis of the self but that, ultimately, his stance (in his case, the virtue of analysis as enabling description of the world) led to a 'way of seeing' that made him happier or more whole or more integral (whatever!). This is what philosophy does - not necessarily make people happier or more integral but it changes them and enables them to become more aligned with who they are (with the risk that who they are is something that wants not to be). The power of the intellect (as is shown in almost every example in the book) is placed at the service of a stance towards existence. We do not understand existence so much as invent it. And the ending of the detective story (which will not be revealed) tells us more about Holt (and probably me) than it does about the world.

rumbledethumps

Filled with facile analogies, stoner arguments, and philosophical word games, this was definitely not a book for me. 

But if the title strikes you as a question worth pondering outside the confines of a college dorm room, then perhaps you’ll like it better than I did.

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

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