Was sollen wir tun? Was dürfen wir glauben? - bei DuEPublico ...

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION 101
– though related – reason. The Principle of Sufficient Reason, or the notion of metaphysical
or ontological grounding, underlies the principles that lead us to say that there is some
fundamental level of reality. They are the principles that seem to prevent us from saying, “It’s
turtles all the way down..” Therefore, denying the Principle of Sufficient Reason or the idea
that there must be an ontological ground for any being undermines the idea that allowed us to
admit the finite, concrete objects of premise (1). In other words, if the metaphysical nihilist
accepts some kind of grounding thesis to motivate his intuitions about finite, concrete objects
in premise (1), then he should likewise admit of a grounding thesis in premise (3). If he denies
a grounding thesis in premise (3), then he cannot have the finite, concrete objects that he
wants for premise (1).
A conciliatory (or purposefully ambiguous) conclusion would be that the Subtraction
Argument proves nothing. But I should like to be more blunt: in my view, the Subtraction
Argument fails. Its explicit and implicit premises rest on tendentious and question-begging
assumptions about ontological dependence and the grounding relation. 8 For example, the
crucial premise (“the non-existence of any of the concreta does not necessitate the existence
of any other concrete object”) assumes that there is no ontological dependence of one
concrete thing on another. The argument assumes that abstract objects are not grounded in
concrete objects – which might be taken as a reason to reject the argument prima facie. And
the argument assumes that a world is not grounded in or dependent upon concrete objects.
While the Leibnizian intuition that nothingness is more natural than something and that
therefore there must always be a reason or ground for the existence of something, the
Subtraction Argument assumes that its empty worlds, constituted presumably by abstracta,
can exist and can exist so simply by fiat. Or rather, it is assumed that there is no reason or
ground for the worlds’ So-sein – which may be as metaphysically presumptuous as anything
Leibniz dreamed of. Thus, questions of fundamentality in metaphysics reveal the
fundamental question of metaphysics to be ill-formed and arguments purporting to show the
possibility of nothingness invalid.
4. The Fundamental Question Forsaken
A lot is riding on the outcome of this dispute. If we can show that metaphysical nihilism is not
possible (that is, that it is not possible that there be nothing), it seems that we can undercut
the motivation of the fundamental question of metaphysics. For it is only when nothingness is
possible that we need to address the question why there is something rather than nothing.
Naturally, if the fundamental question loses its force, so too does any form of the
cosmological argument for the existence of God. If, on the other hand, it is impossible that
there be nothing, something must exist. Therefore, either we need give no explanation of the
fact that something exists – it’s a brute fact – or we say, as Spinoza and Russell did, that the
world is, as it were, a causa sui. Of course, one could demand why things are this way and not
some other way, but that is a different question, answerable in large part (perhaps
completely) by natural science. Thus, if metaphysical nihilism is impossible and if we
recognize that the Leibnizian prejudice that nothingness is simpler and easier than being is
simply a prejudice, then the fundamental question of metaphysics can no longer be sensibly
asked.
In this paper, I have not shown that metaphysical nihilism is impossible, only that one of the
contemporary arguments for it is wanting. But the Subtraction Argument’s weakness should
also alert us to some problematic aspects of any argument purporting to show the possibility
of nothingness, and my analysis should also lead to a scepticism with respect to the
fundamental question of metaphysics itself. For example, it is unlikely that an argument for
8
On these matters, see Correia (2008), Fine (2010), and Rosen (2010).