About the Universe

In the beginning, there was the Monad.

Of course, we are not claiming that the Monad really existed at some point in the past, and that everything that exists subsequently sprang from it. As far as we know, the universe owes its existence to none of the philosophical concepts invented by the beings who live in it. And yet, for our purposes, we will suppose that it was indeed there in the beginning.

The Monad is unity, a whole, indivisible. It contains everything, and therefore holds nothing that could be set against anything else. Where there is only one, there can be no distinction, no relation, not even a way to point to the existence of that one, since doing so would require something capable of pointing to it.

But then the Dyad appears.

The Dyad is difference. It separates one thing from another, creates opposition, and thereby makes relation possible. The one becomes two, two become many, and the many become an infinite variety of combinations and interactions. Structures arise; some structures form others, which in turn enter into new relations. Thus, from the interaction of the Monad and the Dyad, the universe is born.

At least, that is one way to imagine its birth. In reality, we do not know why there is something rather than nothing, much less do we have evidence that two abstract entities ever produced matter. For us, the Monad and the Dyad are neither deities nor physical forces. They are two principles that are useful for describing the unity of what exists and the diversity of its manifestations.

Out of this diversity, the world we know takes shape.

It contains stars and planets, mountains and oceans, living beings, machines, structures, and countless other things. They occupy space, interact with one another, come into being, change, and disappear. Human beings are things of this kind, too, though for some reason we tend to think ourselves far more important than the rest.

At first glance, this seems a perfectly satisfactory description of reality. We see objects, touch them, make new ones from existing ones, and sometimes even destroy them. All it takes is a sustained effort applied to something to convince us of its materiality. The existence of the objects around us seems so self-evident that even asking the question may seem pointless.

And yet we propose that you doubt it.

Take some completely ordinary object, a table, for example. What is it made of? Wood, metal, or some other material. The material is made of molecules, the molecules of atoms, and the atoms of even more fundamental constituents. At every level, what we find is not so much the table itself as something else, arranged in a particular way.

One might object that the table is the sum of all these constituents. But what grounds do we have for assuming that the existence of several things necessarily entails the existence of another thing that is their sum? When we bring several stones together, does a new, independent object actually come into being, or does the arrangement of things that already exist simply change?

We lean toward the latter.

In philosophy, this position is known as mereological nihilism. According to it, strictly speaking, composite objects do not exist. Only simple entities, which have no parts of their own, exist; everything else is a particular configuration of these entities. A table, a person, and a planet turn out not to be independent objects, but names we give to certain ways of organizing matter.

Even so, a difficulty awaits us here.

We do not know whether absolutely indivisible constituents exist at all. Perhaps the fundamental entities known to us really are the last ones, beyond which there is nothing. Perhaps they have an internal structure of their own that we do not know about. It is also possible that division can continue forever, in which case there is simply no final level of reality. If so, even the familiar formulation of mereological nihilism would need to be revised.

We cannot even be sure that the structure of the world has to conform to our intuition of particles contained within other particles. Modern physics has already moved a long way beyond this picture.

So we have just stripped almost everything around us of its existence, without discovering what exists in its place.

Wonderful.

Still, it would be unfair to lay all the blame for this state of affairs on the universe itself. A considerable share of it belongs to us.

Human beings do not perceive reality directly in all its diversity. Our senses receive limited information about what is happening, and the nervous system processes it, compares it with previous experience, and forms a more or less coherent picture of the world around us. Colors, shapes, the boundaries of objects, distances, and many other features of our immediate experience depend not only on external stimuli, but also on the nature of the perceiving being itself.

This does not mean that there is no external world. On the contrary, the existence of a reality independent of us seems to us the most convincing explanation of what is happening. But the world we experience and the world as it is in itself are not necessarily one and the same.

The brain does not create the universe, but a representation of it.

And since this representation took shape through evolution, it would be strange to expect it to be primarily designed for the flawless philosophical contemplation of truth. It mattered far more to distinguish food from poison, friend from foe, a safe path from a precipice. To achieve such aims, there is no need to know the ultimate nature of things. A description that allows us to act successfully is enough.

And here we will have to do something that may seem like a retreat.

We will restore the table’s existence.

And the person’s, and the planet’s, and that of all the other objects whose existence we have just called into question.

Not because our previous arguments were useless, but because existence in the everyday sense need not coincide with existence in the strictest ontological sense. A table may not be a separate fundamental entity, but that does not stop it from being a stable structure with certain properties. You can put a book on it, work at it, and, under certain circumstances, even use it as a weapon.

The universe need not be made of tables for tables to be useful to us.

We live within our own picture of reality. It is incomplete, mistaken in places, and largely shaped by the nature of human perception. But it is precisely thanks to this picture that we can find our way in the world around us, predict events, and change the state of things according to our intentions.

So giving it up would be not only inconvenient, but foolish.

Our task is not to destroy the familiar world and replace it with some other, supposedly true one. We want to understand where useful convention ends and misconception begins, where a description helps us act and where it quietly turns into a limitation.

In this sense, the total liberation of the soul does not at all require liberation from matter. Above all, it requires freedom from the power of our own ideas, insofar as such freedom is possible. A person who understands that their concepts are conditional can use them without becoming their prisoner. They can reconsider their beliefs, change their ways of thinking, and ultimately transform the world around them in accordance with their own aims.

But it would be premature to declare even this picture final.

Much of what we have said rests on current scientific views about the physical structure of the world, the workings of the nervous system, and the formation of conscious experience. We find these views highly persuasive, but not sacred. Scientific theories change and are refined, and sometimes give way to others. The philosophical conclusions we draw from them are even less infallible.

Perhaps we are wrong about the fundamental nature of matter. Perhaps we misunderstand the very concept of existence. Perhaps consciousness has properties that we are not yet able to explain.

Finally, it is even possible that the soul exists in the most literal, mystical sense of the word — as something irreducible to the physical processes known to us. We do not have sufficient grounds to claim this, but it would be presumptuous to declare all questions about the nature of consciousness definitively settled.

After all, if the soul really does exist, it too is part of the reality we have yet to understand.

So here we are faced with a world in which things exist that perhaps do not exist; with consciousness that creates its own picture of reality while itself being part of that reality; and with a universe that may have neither a final constituent nor an ultimate depth.

We do not think we need to resolve all these contradictions before we go on living.

But we do think we need to remember them.

The world exists.

What exactly that means is an open question.