BACK TO HOME PAGE
BEING
and the Explanation of Everything
Source: ‘God and Creation’ a sermon by Herbert McCabe O.P., published in God Matters.
Transfiguration by Gerald M. Somerville 2003-5.
Text in complete, and editorial notes put in square brackets.
To assert that Being exists (that there is an explanation of everything) is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, that of engaging in the question of Being, that of striving to explain everything. To prove that Being exists is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.
To prove that Being exists, then, is to prove the validity of Philosophy – not Philosophy as a body of established doctrines set out in textbooks etc., but as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on (debates, etc.); and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of Philosophy, the venture into the unknown.
It is possible to deny the validity of this. It is possible to say we now have the philosophia perennis (we didn’t have it before Aristotle, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. All the really great advances in Philosophy have come about by questioning just that, by questioning, let us say, whether Aquinas’ system is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what every scholastic came to take for granted. But there can as easily arise today an attitude to Philosophy which discourages such radical questioning. In the Twentieth Century we have seen philosophies which have been very keen on improving their logic/concepts and answering detailed questions within the accepted framework of their culture, but openly hostile to the kind of radical thinking I am envisaging. This same effect can be produced in very subtle ways too. (The sincerity with which people claim themselves open, radically questioning, etc., does not prove such claims, and may, in its complacency, prove the opposite.) And it was notoriously produced in the Church when confronted by modern philosophies. The asking of radical questions is discouraged by any society that believes in itself, believes that it has found the answers that matter, believes that only its authorized questions are legitimate.
Faced with such hostility or such incomprehension, you can say, "Well, wait and see; you will find that in spite of everything, Thomism will make startling and quite unexpected changes, that its whole world view will shift in ways we cannot now predict or imagine." But that is just to assert your belief. And this is parallel to asserting that there is an explanation of everything. A belief that there is an explanation of everything – in the sense of a belief in the validity of the kind of radical question to which an explanation of everything would be the answer – is a part of the flourishing of human understanding and that a philosophy which closes itself off from it is to that extent deficient. For this reason I welcome such belief that there is an explanation of everything, but what I am asking myself now is not whether I believe so, but what grounds I have for such belief. How do we show that there is still a long and probably unexpected road to travel in Philosophy? By pointing to anomalies between philosophic theory and the fact of its exposition. For instance, if it is always necessary to make a distinction between the body and the soul of Joe Bloggs when we talk about him, then it is also necessary that the distinction be made in a true account about Joe Bloggs. But what a true account, for Aristotle or Aquinas, says is is, and what it says is not is not. So, for a true account, the distinction is not just for the purposes of discussion (in ratione), but in Joe Bloggs (in re). In general, arguments for there being an explanation of everything can arise from pointing out anomalies in a philosophy which excludes the question of Being, the search for an explanation of everything. Indeed it is anomalous to hold that while it is legitimate and valid to ask "How come?" about any particular thing or event in the world, it is illegitimate and invalid to ask it about the whole world. To say that we aren’t allowed to ask it merely because we can’t answer it is begging the question. (It is not begging the question to argue that any supposition that some one has the answer is a contradictory supposition – such arguments concern the manner in which the explanation of everything can be grasped and pinned down in words.)
There are many different kinds of explanation and many levels too, and the deeper the question you ask about a thing the more it is a question about a world to which that thing belongs; there is finally a deepest question about a thing which is also a question about everything. Let me explain this enigmatic remark by using an example.
Supposing you ask "How come Herbert McCabe?" You may be asking how he got the name ‘Herbert’ when he joined the Dominicans (Order of Brothers Preachers), or why he did not go back to being called John, the name he was given at his baptism, after the Dominican Order relaxed its rules about using religious names. Perhaps, at the time he was joining the Order, he was given a stark choice, ‘Herbert’ or ‘Hyacinth’ because no other names were available at the time, and he chose ‘Herbert’. Perhaps later, when it was suggested that he go back to being called ‘John’, he had no strong feelings one way or the other, and inertia and convenience meant that the name ‘Herbert’ stuck. I don't know precisely what the answers are to such questions, but it is certainly imaginable that satisfactory answers can be found, even though Herbert himself is dead. (Likewise the question, ‘How come Herbert is dead?’)
Now you could go on to ask, ‘How come Herbert McCabe was a Dominican?’ Here again answers may be found, though not so easily, whether the focus is on how he first became a Dominican, or on the turmoil of the late 1960s, when he was even suspended from the priesthood for a few days. The answers do not just require getting into the mind of Herbert, so to speak, but into the mind of the Dominican community of which he became a member, and remained a member. He could be a Dominican only by Dominicans accepting him as a brother, just as dogs are only dogs by being born of other dogs. (Dominicans are indeed, through a Latin pun, dogs – dogs of the Lord.)
The question, ‘How come Herbert McCabe was a Dominican?’ I regard as a deepening of the question, ‘How come Herbert McCabe?’ because there is a sense in which for Herbert to be was for him to be a Dominican. Indeed this is what is symbolized in taking a religious name on joining a religious order.
[More stuff to go here.]
Now it is always possible to stop the questioning at any point; one may refuse to ask why there are Dominicans. One may say there just are Dominicans and perhaps it is impious to enquire how come. Similarly it is possible to refuse to ask this ultimate question, to say as Russell once did: the universe is just there. This is just as arbitrary as to say: Dominicans are just there. The difference is that we are familiar with, or at least historians are familiar with, ways of getting some sort of answer to the question, how come there are Dominicans? We have not familiarized ourselves with the answer to the question, ‘how come the world instead of nothing?’ but that does not make it any less arbitrary to refuse to ask it. To ask it is to enter on an exploration which Russell was simply refusing to do. It is right to point out the mysteriousness of a question about everything, to point to the fact that we have no way of answering it, but that is by no means the same as saying it is an unaskable question. As Wittgenstein said, ‘Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.’
[Relativity of concepts of ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’.]
As Wittgenstein says, what we have here is the mystery. If we have an explanation as something simply given to us complete in a neat package, then whatever the explanation is, it is not an explanation of everything.
We can grasp onto, but cannot have completely, an explanation of everything; we can be answering, but cannot have a final answer to, ‘How come anything instead of nothing?’ Note that in this latter negative claim I am saying something about the explanation of everything, and thereby contributing to the answer, to the explanation of everything. Indeed any explanation, in its truth, has its part to play in the explanation of everything – the explanation of any particular thing is not alongside the explanation of everything, as if there could be an explanation which was not part of the explanation of everything.
An explanation of everything adds nothing to other explanations; I mean by this that we do not appeal specifically to the explanation of everything to explain why something is this way rather than that, for this we need only appeal to explanations closer to the context in which the question arises. For this reason there can be no specific feature of a thing which indicates that it is explained in the explanation of everything. The explanation of everything must include in itself the explanation of itself. It is possible to say without manifest contradiction that there might not be an explanation of everything, but that is because when we use the phrase ‘explanation of everything’ we do not understand what we mean, we have no conception of how such an explanation might be; what governs our use of the phrase ‘explanation of everything’ is not an understanding of what an explanation of everything is but the validity of striving to explain everything. That is why we are not protected by any logical laws from saying ‘There might not be an explanation of everything’ even though it makes no sense. What goes for our rules for the use of the phrase ‘explanation of everything’ does not go for the explanation we try to name with the phrase. (And a corollary of this, incidentally, is why an ontological argument for an explanation of everything does not work.)
What I have been saying may seem to make the explanation of everything both remote and irrelevant. Such an explanation is not part of our world and postulating that there is such an explanation adds nothing to it. It is therefore necessary to stress that the explanation of everything must be in everything that happens and everything that exists in our world. Every explanation is an explanation, not just by being a part of the explanation of everything, but by its explanatoriness deriving from it.
Back to TOP