At some stage in my life I stabbed myself with a pin. It hurt in the then present. Consciously or sub-consciously I asked myself why, and the reason was easily forthcoming: the pin had a sharp and hard end to it, my finger had a round and soft end to it. Hard and sharp end beats soft and round: Pin 1 Me 0. Why did I ask myself why? Was it to avoid stabbing myself with the same pin again? Not so. I don‘t need to ask why to avoid stabbing myself with the same pin. All I need is “this pin = pain” and I won‘t do it again. I asked myself why to avoid stabbing myself with any one of the other pins I have and will come across, or any one of the other myriad sharp metal objects I could pierce myself with. We ask ourselves why to try and do better than “this pin = pain”, as “this pin = pain, that pin almost certainly = pain, and that pair of scissors probably = pain” will help me improve my general well-being.

This is by no means only a negative thing. I ask myself why a particular night out was so good, in order to judge how to spend my nights in the future. I ask myself why a particular meal was so good, in order to judge which dishes to have in the future. I ask myself why I felt so good last Tuesday, in order to find a way to achieve the same feeling in the future.

We cannot affect the past, because it is already gone. We cannot affect the present, because the present is the situation as it already is. All we can affect is the future, as it inevitably becomes the present.

There is of course another reason for attempting to answer a question. We also ask ourselves why in order to enjoy the process of answering. There is an infinity of questions to answer (what is 1+1?, 1+2?, ... to name but an infinite number), and so there are more questions than any of us can ever find answers to. Given that we only have a finite amount of time to think about this infinity of questions, we must make choices about the ones to answer. There is immense pleasure to be had in the pursuit of knowledge, but, in my opinion, even more to be had in the pursuit of happiness through knowledge, whereby not only is the pursuit pleasurable, but the knowledge also. Consider the two questions:

It seems to me that neither of these questions lays automatic claim to a greater amount of pleasure in the pursuit, yet there is only one that is worthy of thought.

There can be no definite answer to the question “Why do we Exist?” I would argue that the simplest and best way to deal with this question is with “we will never know”. This is not a practical problem, for why would we need to know? The question clearly rests on the underlying “Why does anything Exist?” There are some very good reasons suggested by evolutionary biologists as to why we and particularly we exist, and I don‘t imagine anyone who has taken the time to consider them (bar some moronic creationists) is in any real doubt as to their general validity. Let us assume that “Things Exist” is true, and “Nothing Exists” is not. Suppose someone came to you with a reason why “Things Exist” is true and “Nothing Exists” is not. What would you do with this reason?

There are two options. Either the reason that “Things Exist” is true is an entity, or the reason is not an entity.

  1. If the reason is an entity, then what is the reason for the entity‘s existence? There can be no answer to this chain of reasoning, save saying “The entity is caused by something else”, or “it is its own cause”. Surely if you are interested enough to ask the question “Why does anything Exist?” then, if your response is an entity, you must be interested enough to ask yourself why this entity exists. This obviously takes you back to square one, meaning we have achieved nothing in attempting the question, and can do nothing with the non-answer.
     
  2. If the reason is not an entity, then what possible use can it be? Imagine, for argument‘s sake, the reason is chance (whatever you take that to mean.) All this leaves us with is the fact of our existence, which we were assuming from the beginning. At this stage a religious mind might claim that god is not an entity, so can justifiably satisfy this second option. If not an entity, what the hell is it? Given that I can repeat the argument with any word in place of ‘entity’, (try ‘existent being’ or ‘mind’) this leaves the proposed ‘god’ as nothing. If the reason why “Things Exist” is not an entity, then we have achieved nothing by attempting an answer to the question.

I would claim therefore that the only pleasure to be had in asking the question “Why do we Exist?” is the pleasure of the pursuit, and there is no pleasure to be had in the knowledge gained. For me this diminishes the value of the question considerably.

The second question: “How Do We Exist?” is a beautiful one, and infinitely more worthy of attention. Not only can this question offer us endless pleasure in its pursuit, but our attempts to answer it can colour every decision we make with the wisdom of consideration. It leads us to a multitude of wonderful sub-questions:

to name a few, and, more importantly:

It is not fear that should lead us away from “Why do we exist?”, but the fact that there are much better questions. There can be no valid answer. We exist. Live with it.

Giles Hayter
London
February 2009