Optimalism and Axiological Metaphysics

Abstract

WHAT IS PERHAPS THE BIGGEST METAPHYSICAL QUESTION of them all was put on the agenda of philosophy by G. W. Leibniz: is there anything at all? This question is not only difficult to answer but poses difficulties in its very conception. After all, it is--or should be--clear that such questions as is there anything at all? and why are things in general as they actually are? and why are the laws of nature as they are? cannot be answered within the standard causal framework. For causal explanations need inputs: they are essentially transformational rather than formational pure and simple. And so, if we persist in posing the sorts of global questions at issue, we cannot hope to resolve them in orthodox causal terms. For when we ask about everything there are no issue-external materials at our disposal for giving a noncircular Does this mean that such questions are improper and should not be raised at all--that even to inquire into the existence of the entire universe is somehow illegitimate? Not necessarily. For it could be replied that the question does have a perfectly good answer, but one that is not given in the orthodox causal terms that apply to other issues of smaller scale. A more radical strategy is thus called for if rejectionism is to be avoided. And such a strategy exists. But before turning in this direction, let us consider more closely of a rejectionism which holds that it is just a mistake to ask for a causal explanation of existence per se; the question should be abandoned as improper--as not representing a legitimate issue. The lines of thought at issue here hold that in the light of closer scrutiny the explanatory problem vanishes as meaningless. Such a dismissal of the problem as illegitimate is generally based on the idea that the question at issue involves an illicit presupposition because it looks for answers of the form Z is the (or an) explanation for the existence of Committed to this response schema, the question presupposes the thesis There actually is a ground for the existence of things--existence in general is the sort of thing that has an explanation. This presumption, we are told, is false on grounds of deep general principle inherent in the logical nature of the Consider the following suggestion along these lines made by C. G. Hempel: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? ... But what kind of an answer could be appropriate? What seems to be wanted is an explanatory account which does not assume the existence of something or other. But such an account, I would submit, is a logical impossibility. For generally, the question is it the case that A? is answered by Because B is the case. ... [A]n answer to our riddle which made no assumptions about the existence of anything cannot possibly provide adequate grounds.... The riddle has been constructed in a manner that makes an answer logically impossible.(1) However, this seemingly plausible line of argumentation has shortcomings. The most serious of these is that it fails to distinguish appropriately between the existence of things on the one hand and the obtaining of facts on the other,(2) and supplementarily also between specifically substantival facts regarding existing things, and nonsubstantival facts regarding states of affairs that are bound to particular things. (Unlike saying the that sun is hot, saying that the day is hot does not ascribe that heat to an object of some sort.) We are confronted here with a principle of hypostatization to the effect that the reason for anything must ultimately always inhere in the properties of things. At this point we come to a prejudice as deep-rooted as any in Western philosophy: the idea that things can only originate from things, that nothing can come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit) in the sense that no thing can emerge from an amorphously thingless condition. …