Concerning Possibilities: The Critique of Pure Nothing

Why is there something rather than nothing? This letter argues that, on two openly declared premises, there could never have been nothing at all. It is the third in a series of letters that build a metaphysics one premise at a time: Letter I secured by retortion that something is occurring and that the act which tests this draws a distinction; Letter II took one premise, that to be is to be some way. Before giving its proof, the letter makes five attempts to reach nothing: by imagination, by logic and mathematics, by physics, by the doctrine of creation from nothing, and by the picture of one's own death. Each lands on something: the one imagining, the empty set, an empty time, God, an edge like that of dreamless sleep. The letter is careful to say that this shows something about our pictures of nothing, not yet about reality. The proof rests on two premises: that every possible situation is a way some actual thing would itself be in that situation, a strong requirement the letter states and prices; and that a thing has ways only where it exists. Together they exclude absolute nothing and imply that every possibility contains something actual, without establishing that any one thing exists in every possibility, and so without reaching a necessary being. The letter tests the premises against "I could never have existed," grants that truth at a situation blocks one argument against nothing, distinguishes the impossible "never" from a possible "stop," and argues that if death ends experience, it does not end it in darkness. Every claim carries a mark of its status, and a closing table states what would overturn each.