Philosophy

De nihilismo

Rev dear Rev: What is the considered Christian response in your parish as standard to the idea now especially current in science departments in schools that we live in a huge universe and are as nothing before it, less than nothing like a Parmenides nightmare or a Dave Allen black cat sketch, thuswise meriting no consideration as a species and no significance? How does your parish respond when it comes across this flavoursome conundrum in the populist science school?

"Elementary my dear Watson", young Daniel Radcliffe might say to his dawdling Hermione Granger, and then proceed to disquisition at some length in response to this Question from a school Year 13 department in Britain. This is the "Argumentum ad Nihilum" or the argument to a state of nothingness, sometimes called the "Argumentum ab Mensura", the argument from the size of the universe to a condition of total insignificance before it, et cetera. It first occurs in modern times in the philosophy books of Pascal, in his book Pensees, when he contemplates the new learning of the Erasmuses of the humanist faculties popping up all over Europe and notes that the sheer size in se of the universe nowadays defeats the old hubris problem of much philosophy since Descartes, and especially of his absurdly egotistical position of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, philosophy after him going the way of all confusion and subjectivism. Science though initially a corrective as Cardinal Schonborn puts it in his article series for the New York Times. Strangely and quite astonishingly, Pascal laments the Argumentum but he does not expose it, preferring instead to launch a sometime arational counter to it called his "Wager" argument, namely that if the sheer size of the universe produces atheism then it is still a safe bet or "wager" to throw in one's lot with the Christians since if it is all true then you have won your soul and eternal life and promise in the next kingdom when you wake up from the long sleep of death, but even if it is all false and there is nothing on the other side, life has not been fruitless since virtue and faith are their own reward - that is the famous Pascalian Wager "Argumentum de Fine", the argument regarding final end.

This was the second most famous deployment of the argumentum de fine in those times, since before Pascal in France, there was in England, the young Jesuit poet Campion, who had produced another Wager argument in his little booklet printed for Oxford called "Ten Reasons" or Ten Arguments for the Restoration of the Old Faith in which he addressed the booklet to the young Queen Elizabeth the First, a former acquaintance before he absconded to the continent and joined the catholics and entered the Venerabile and the Jesuits too in Prague, and invites her to live bravely and restore the old Faith of Jesus and the Apostles to the benighted old islands of Christian Britain and Ireland. So this was a deployment of a "Wager" argument as well and for a long time was called the "Wager Gambit" of Campion since had he been caught, it would have cost him his life, a gamble if not a risk-all gambit. Cheeky and brave since it could have cost him his head, but not altogether unmeritorious and not without its charms, as the young Queen herself said at the time when she was given a copy of the said booklet - her old mysterious friend had turned up in England after all, and this time no longer as just another supine anglican at the royal court but rather more worryingly as a secretive priest in hiding, as one of the feared Jesuit super-brains of the time.

 Not a million miles it is now said in the cool and calm waters of history from the case of Shakespeare too whom the recusants finally revealed long after his death had been a travelling companion to the young Campion above - they knew of each other, and since this was revealed in modern times by the families of the recusants, then appearing in some recent books on the subject, following the different image of the playwright in the Cobbe portrait, then there has been understandably much speculation as to which of the plays of the Bard involved a secret "Wager" argumentum within, a favourite device of the troupe of the Campion. Traces of the "Campion Wager" appear maybe in the characters that are given voices somewhat cynical to the new religion of the German puritans of the time, since Shakespeare though he had avoided all personal questions as to his faith still confided once or twice that he was a "crypto" when push came to shove. The Bardic Wager is not impossible to view, such as the words of the Twins in Twelfth Night, the prenzied maids of Measure for Measure, the figure of Malvoglio also in Twelfth Night, the voices and speeches of the king in Henry V, the famous speech of Brutus at the funeral of Julius the Caesar, and the list goes on, since Recusant Shakespeare Studies have just kicked off into the night that was night in these days - some hope there.

Now clever philosophers will spot a problem. Much like the arguments of the mathematicians to realities of the universe, there is always some small boy in the room who can call out - "But what about the physics equation - maths must fit the universe we actually live in, from which all our maths arises since Euclidean geometry." Logical syllogisms too, these can boast an intrinsic logicality, but as the Prof Broadswords of Sheffield University have shown, without physics to do the actual correcting of the syllogisms, these too can sometimes fail despite being intrinsically logical up to a point. So the cunning and somewhat underhand philosopher of the modern Lublin Thomist kind will spot an early problem - the Argumentum ad Nihilum or rather the Argumentum ab Mensura conceals within itself an intrinsic illogical fallacy, since lo and behold, there are many objects and subjects in the universe that are bigger than mankind such as the native oak tree or the great bull elephant but which are not the more significant just because they are bigger than the humble human subject - the role of the brain is involved in the measurement of meaning in most disciplines that are asked to be applied to this argumentum, and even the science world too regularly deploys the importance of the brain in the human body as a sign of future glory and future brilliance, as per the famous 1970s and 1980s Lectures of Dr Carl Sagan, and the 2010 Lectures on Space for TV also of Dr Sam Neill. So this argumentum fails precisely on the size argument as to meaning quotient. It is not the size of inanimate objects that determines the issue of meaning or significance or even superiority in the universe but the possession of an enquiring mind.

For this reason the grand philosopher of the Catholic Church in our times, John Paul II deploys his devastating critique of Descartes's cogito in the "adaequatio rei et intellectus" argumentum - the subject is there to conform his or her mind to the reality of the objective universe, and not the other way round. Karol like a Karol Sicora deploys the arguments of Edmund Husserl for this reason - when the human subject thinks, it does not simply think tabula rasa without a thought or without a sense impression, it always thinks of something, of some quidditas to put in the elegance of Hopkinsian poetry, something that has been historically received in history, i.e. it is not cogito ergo sum but cogito cogitatum ergo sum. Thus the human subject always connotes an object even when it is thinking with its eyes closed. Mind can encompass many things in the far reaches of space and not be dominated by such a poor argument as the sheer size of a thing. Value then is not an empirical concept - it escapes size issues. Value is defined not by the size of a thing but by the quality of the subject in a thing. The subject is not unimportant in these equations of meaning. A significant other is significant to the extent that he or she loves the other, not because he or she is taller than the other. Love is a philosophical quotient, Prof Tim Jackson of the British mainland, a country which often produces its fair share of genii, which my own work has sometimes benefitted from in Rome, has shown this in his superb book, Post-Growth - Life After Capitalism.