A Darkness Thus Unknowable
Reason for Being in The World, Chapter 9
If you have been reading me long enough, you know that I write Reason for Being in the World as a kind of memoir, an “experiment in intellectual and spiritual accounting,” of identity, of my life. I began writing last May, amid much other writing, drafting it, as a first draft, as I go. Today’s chapter is the penultimate. This was the first chapter, if you would like to start now at the beginning:
Here is the table of contents to all originally composed chapters, with a provisional listing of earlier essays I plan to incorporate over subsequent drafts.
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To arise
out of such that is
a darkness thus unknowable
descend upon a thing so delivered
a world alighted from within.1
1. To Arise
~ ~ ~
A quantum vacuum. A fluctuation.
And, the Hebrew God, in Genesis, said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light.
But God had, at that point, according to the scripture, already created the heaven and the earth, a duality in human thought suggesting high and low but also here and beyond.
So it wouldn’t be quite correct to say that God speaks the world into existence, as it already existed in the prelinguistic act of creation: the earth . . . without form, and void; and darkness . . . upon the face of the deep.
But before there was the light, our world, the earth, (not the heaven) was “without form” and in “darkness” but, most crucially, “void” — nothing. It was, oddly, according to the old philosophical joke, nothing as something: formless, dark, and void, it somehow did still exist. God had created it. It was something as nothing, before God sheds light on the world — and it was good. Lighting the world was good.
The light, the illumination of the void is good, and it is brought into being through language, and God creates another duality by separating the light from the darkness — and God / divided the light from the darkness — which was, somehow, before God’s act of separation, then, not entirely, meaningfully distinct from the light, requiring their division from each other. A duality.
God speaks the world that is now not formless, dark, and void into existence by shedding light on it. We come to know this, by Rabbinic tradition, through God’s revealed word, communicated to Moses acting as God’s scribe. The world that is not void is created out of God’s spoken word, but it is a world that is knowable, apprehended by us, in part though the written word: the Tanakh, in ancient Hebrew.
(Just a little bit later, in the 1920s, Martin Heidegger, endeavoring, as he presents it, to recover the more original nature of our human existence, our da-sein (there-being) writes that language is the clearing, the lighting (lichtung) of being, through which being is known to us.)
Perhaps a full thousand years before the Hebrew Bible, during the second millennium BCE, the Rigveda is composed, the oldest of the four sacred Hindu texts, in Vedic Sanskrit. In the Rigveda we find the Nāsadīya Sūkta, known as the “hymn of creation.” More overtly philosophical than Genesis — it speculates, expresses uncertainty — the Nāsadīya Sūkta is strikingly similar to Genesis in its imagination, in similar terms, of the nature and elements of creation and what came before. There was “No distinguishing sign of night nor of day,” we are told:
Darkness there was at first, by darkness hidden;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water;
That which, becoming, by the void was covered.
In both texts the “void” is not quite the same thing as nothingness, as philosophy speaks of it. A common English translation renders the first line, “There was neither non-existence nor existence then,” but this is an effort to provide more natural English syntax. A more literal translation reads, "not the non-existent existed, nor did the existent exist then" (ná ásat āsīt ná u sát āsīt tadânīm). I prefer this. Retaining the verbal doubling preserves the confounding nature of the idea being reached after: something before space-time, as we would call it in modern physics. Absent space-time, and coordinates in space and time, common terminology loses meaning: not the non-existent nor the existent. Not something. Not nothing.
Being is in space-time: Heidegger’s’ da-sein, “there-being.”
The big-bang in the cosmology of modern physics presents us with a 13.8-billion-year-old event again quite strikingly — even more so — similar to the speculative imagination of ancient creation stories. And modern physics – astrophysics, particle physics, theoretical and mathematical physics — quantum physics — speculates about astonishingly likenesses to ancient attempts to distinguish “the void” from nothing.
It appears that the original imagineers who over long time conceived our creation stories could make no sense of true “nothing,” so they conceived the “void,” which might be likened to the vacuum state of modern physics.
The vacuum state is one way we sometimes conceive of nothing; empty space. Truly, completely empty space. There is nothing there. Not even subatomic particles or radiation or fields of energy of any kind, none of which describes what we commonly refer to as “outer space.” Outer space is not a vacuum; it is crowded with all the above.
It turns out (so far) that there is no such thing as that kind of vacuum, a zero-point energy state. At the coldest possible temperature, with total obstruction of radiant energy in or out, there always remains some small degree of positive-point energy. Something.
A zero-point state would not really be “nothing” anyway, since empty space is still a “space,” a contained area that can be described as empty. Contained by what, where? Whatever — that’s not nothing.
Nothing, outside of space-time occurs to us as a metaphysical mental construct, but something arising out of nothing — ex nihilo — may be no more than that, a mental construct: it defies any understanding we have of the laws of space-time, which is far more advanced, to say the least, than when the notion of God arose — as the original deus ex machina — partly as a solution to the problem.
But getting back to the low positive-point energy we always find in a vacuum, that is called a quantum state vacuum.
In a quantum state vacuum, there are continuous minute, random, and brief fluctuations in the quantum energy field, of subatomic particles, matter and antimatter, and forces, arising into being and in less than an instant disappearing. In the metaphorical language common to particle and theoretical physics, these evanescent appearances and disappearances are likened to the ocean foam atop a wave and thus called quantum foam. The presence of this “foam” is not merely theoretical. The effect of it has been measured and its presence coordinates with other known conditions of our physical universe.
One longstanding speculation is that our universe arose, explosively, out of one of these quantum fluctuations at the low positive-point energy vacuum that preceded the Big Bang. (With a zero-point energy vacuum, there’s no-thing to bang and come into being.)
What to make of this more philosophically? A key concern of natural philosophy and metaphysics from the start, in addition to something versus nothing — being and nothingness — has been the actual versus the potential, and these days more so the possible.
Aristotle focused on actuality and potentiality, and he distinguished kinds of potentiality. An acorn has the natural potential to grow into an oak tree, though, given circumstances, it might not. In contrast, I have the potential to be stronger and more aerobically fit than I am (I’m in the gym regularly, I swear), but there is nothing naturally, inherently a matter of course about it. I have to work to make it happen, to make the potential actual. On the other hand, I had the genetic potential to go bald. Had my life ended prematurely, that potential would never have been actualized. As it happened, my balding did not begin, slowly, to be actualized until my twenties, but it was an irresistible force, and by my late thirties I greeted the actual with bold acceptance and began coming back my hair.
When we wonder why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe came into being rather than nothing persisting in its no-thing-ness, whatever that is, we approach the subject of actuality and potentiality. Our universe does exist, and we in it — it is actual. Thus, logically, there was, pre-existent to its existence, the potential for the universe to exist. That potential was actualized in the universe’s creation, its coming into being. But there is a point, whatever your creation story — I’m going with modern physics — when it didn’t exist yet, when it hovered, vacillated, in that unlocatable state of potentiality, when it wasn’t simply nothing and never to be, yet it wasn’t already actual.
What is the nature of this thing we call “potential” — how does it reside in the nature of things when it isn’t actual? What is going on when it hovers (and where) between unfulfilled and fulfilled potential — when it vacillates at the event horizon between being and not being?
Is it possible that nothing is a senseless notion, after all, that if it cannot be empty space, and if it cannot be something that takes the place of empty space, then this world was always possible — while within that possibility resided potentiality — and that, some gigayear along the way, it randomly fluctuated into existence?
For the existence, the actuality of our universe, should we, then, look to those almost imperceptible, long immeasurable uprisings into almost-matter-but-not-matter, almost being but not, that is the quantum foam?
2. Such That is
~ ~ ~
Nine and a quarter billion years then pass before the Earth forms from the gas and stardust residue of our Sun’s formation in the Milky Way galaxy of stars like the sun, and the most recent estimate is that there may be as many as 20 trillion galaxies. A billion more years pass before the first microbial life forms appear on Earth. Another two billion years pass (roughly 500 million years ago) before the “Cambrian Explosion” of life forms on the planet that provides the origin of almost all current animal types, or phyla, along with the foundation for the Earth’s ecosystems today. Another 175 million years before the fossil evidence of Tiktaalik, a transitional fish between sea and land creatures, was deposited.
250 million years, (roughly 75 million years ago) before primates evolve.
Hominids split from the chimpanzee lineage about another 68 million years on. The first tool maker, Homo habilis (“handy human), appears 1.8-2.6 million years ago. About 300 thousand to 1.8 million years in the past brings the larger brained Homo erectus, the first hominid that can control fire and who migrates out of Africa. Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) emerges between 40 and 400 thousand years ago, coexists and competes for a time with modern humans, and like other hominid species, becomes extinct. Modern humans, having interbred with Neanderthals, carry 1-4 % Neanderthal DNA.
It is somewhere between 200-300 thousand years ago that those modern humans, Homo sapiens, (wise human), arrive.
Thus begins the long procession to you and me.
The many evolutionary anatomical developments that emerge in modern humans, from our larger brains, enabling language and abstract thought, to the dexterity that permits fine and varied tool making, and thus the vast development of technology and symbology, are what make the human story a saga in the advance of social cooperation, natural philosophy (science), and cultural expression, including art, philosophy, and religion.
It is only in the past 12,000 years, with the rise of agriculture and the shift from hunter-gathering to settled communities, that human civilization as we can begin to recognize it develops. To draw a clear connection from where we’ve come to where I’m headed, it takes another 10.5 thousand years — after the emergence of written language systems roughly 1500 years earlier — before the Rigveda is inscribed.
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But for how many years — hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands — had the human experiences, feelings, and thoughts that inform the Rigveda and all the other sacred and discrete, culture-grounding texts that finally receive permanent record and found our world civilization today — for how many years had they been thought about, shared, and discussed repeatedly by human beings among themselves, just beginning to seek and draw meaning from their existence before the effort at permanent inscription, a written record, began?
Before I would try to make sense of my own father’s life in the life of the world – and the life, very different from his own, he gave to me?
For how long in their continuous and gathering responses to the mystery of their presence in the universe had the vessel of humans’ ancestral inheritance been under construction, to be carried and passed on, bearing its load of accumulated wisdom and tragic apprehension from those before to those now living and those to come?
We forget. We forget. We forget. Remember.
Along the way, over long time, humans had begun to represent their experience. Cave paintings, along with Venus and other figurines appear in the archaeological record at least 40,000 years, now, back in time. Prior to written language, they are early abstractions of thought reformulated symbolically. Were they a kind of animistic religious ideation intended to invoke or propitiate animal spirits? Were there aesthetic considerations at work?
“It’s off.”
“Huh?”
“The mammoth’s left hind leg. It’s out of proportion with the others. And the musculature doesn’t work — the lines.”
“So what?”
“Isn’t Shakespeare going to say we should hold the mirror up to nature?”
“Yeah, but I’m mot a realist. I’m going for something here. I can’t quite put it into words …”
Soon enough (or not) we would put it into words, and it would be an outpouring, a stream of consciousness that carried us all in common. Stories told around the campfire or walking to the hunt, later, working in the fields. The things that people had done, including to each other. Things we did ourselves that day in our labor or told to us by a traveler. Stories of long ago, of gods and people, songs passed down in long chains of rhythmic, repetitive, rhyming verse. Oh, the memory of it all. Who we seemed to be, unchanging. What this world is, a mystery to us, and our place in it. Why? Why? Tell it, tell it. So we know, so we remember. The lessons. There must be lessons. Is it ever thus? Somewhere we must go?
“Lessons” imply meaning. What does it all mean? What does it mean for me in my life? How should I live?
One of the ways early humans showed they were now inferring some meaning to their lives is when they began to bury their dead. For a long time, just like lower order animals, even primates and earlier hominids would have simply abandoned the dead. Zoologists and biological anthropologists do not, as a practice, infer mental and emotional states in the animals they observe. They do note disturbed responses and even ritualized behaviors in reaction to a dead conspecific, what they call a fellow member of the same species, but they do not venture to say the chimpanzee, for instance, feels grief. They can’t know this so don’t claim it.
A primate’s disturbed reaction certainly denotes, however, recognition of the de-animated state of a conspecific, and I – not constrained by a specialist’s professionalized practice – will venture to say the primate feels, at least, bereft. But lower order primates do not bury their dead or do so via symbolic ritualized practice. Humans began to do so, at least as early as 100 thousand years ago, in the Qafzeh Cave, in modern-day Israel. Burial suggest belief in the value of the life lost and belief in the significance of the loss. Symbolic, ritualized practice around the burial suggests a form of communication – to whom? – and a further belief in the life’s significance beyond death. Meaning. Meaning to a life. Meaning to life.
Both the fear and a consequent contemplation of our mortality appear original to the rise of spiritual thinking, which comes many times across the earth to organize as foundational religion. By foundational here I mean both the founding of organized systems of belief and practice but also an awed response to thinking about the foundations of the world and human existence. This seems to have led to creation myths like Genesis, the Nāsadīya Sūkta, and so many others.
It is remarkable to consider how the very broad overview I’ve been offering of human development, within the vastly broader outline of universal time, leads to an eruption of recorded spiritual and philosophical thinking within so concentrated a period of time of time across the earth. After hundreds of thousands of years of species development, it is over a mere two thousand years that almost all of the world’s great sacred and contemplative textual traditions take shape. Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Shinto, along with the Western philosophical tradition beginning in Ancient Greece, and the many revered spiritual figures and thinkers among them all, from Moses to the Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, Jesus, Socrates and more all appear in that brief time frame. Islam might appear an outlier among the larger groups, at 500 or so years later but only the minutest adjustment of our lens brings it into the era or origination. Sometimes, in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, for example, attendant philosophical, as much as religious traditions are developing.
Broaden our scope within the same concentrated time period and we find not the origins, but a first flowering of art, science, and mathematics. What are the evolutionary conditions, after the biological, in material culture and mental development that lead to it all happening, seemingly in a great outpouring, then? Humans begin to offer an account of the world passed down to them, and still lived each day, both in their ideal imagination of great spirits and a God, with their ideal, hopeful selves imagined through them, and also of human frailty, corruption, and transgression.
At the center of these long-told tales, also reflected in the daily life of the now, and the now again, and again, is a story of suffering and transgression. Sin, in disobedience to God, separation from God, in simple harmful, wrongful acts of one human against another, repeatedly over the life of the world, inherent it seems in human character and interaction. If the transgressive state is not one categorized under the label of sin, not in relation to a God, it is conceived as inherent to human being and to existence itself – samsara, the veil of illusion, the wheel of karmic birth and rebirth, until, it is hoped, moksha is achieved, liberation from the cycle, our Buddha natured is recognized, and enlightenment, to the Four Noble Truths: life is suffering; suffering is caused by craving; suffering can have an end; there is a path that leads to the end of suffering.
All this arrived to our eyes and to understanding two to four thousand years ago, after tens of thousands of years of learning.
And here we are today.
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
from “There Being,” in Waiting for Word.
This is brilliant. Such a concise and insightful thesis. It is so emblematic for us quantum fiction writers. The Quantum Friction Section of the Friction Section thanks you.
Yes, it all does come down to this, that "[. . .] life is suffering; suffering is caused by craving; suffering can have an end; there is a path that leads to the end of suffering." Could there be a more cogent explanation than yours, Jay, for the place in which we find ourselves today, too many "craving" and so creating suffering. Still, I want to think there might be a heaven to be found on earth.