The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Nothing at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

11. Optimalism and the Rationality of the Real: On the Prospects of Axiological Explanation

217 Nicholas Rescher 11 S Optimalism and the Rationality of the Real On the Prospects of Axiological Explanation I. Is the Real Rational? Is the real ultimately rational? Can we ever manage to explain the nature of reality—the make-up of the universe as a whole? Is there not an insuperable obstacle here—an infeasibility that was discerned already by Immanuel Kant, who argued roughly as follows: The demand for a rationale that accounts for reality-as-a-whole is a totalitarian demand. As such it is illegitimate. All explanations require inputs. Explanation always proceeds by explaining one thing in terms of something else. There thus is no way to explain Reality, to give an account of everything-as-a-whole. For this sort of thing would evade neither a vitiating regress nor a vicious circle. So goes Kant’s reasoning. And there is much to be said for it. After all, in the realm of a factual explanation we always have recourse to factual premises to substantiate our factual conclusions. And so an allencompassing explanation of the facts is clearly impossible—or so it seems. But here appearances are deceiving. In the present, genuinely extraordinary case of totalitarian explanation, another very different option stands before us. For here we can—and in the final analysis must— shift the framework of explanation from the descriptive/factual order of explanation to the normative/axiological order. But what would such an explanation look like? This essay served as my March 2005 presidential address to the Metaphysical Society of America. On relevant issues see also my books The Riddle of Existence (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), and Nature and Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 218  Nicholas Rescher II. The Turn to Axiology From its earliest days, metaphysics has been understood also to include “axiology,” the evaluative and normative assessment of the things that exist. And just here lies the doorway to another mode of explanation— an explanation of facts in terms of values, and of reality in terms of optimality . Accustomed as we are to explanations in the mode of efficient causality , this idea of an axiological explanation of existence on the basis of an evaluative optimalism has a decidedly strange and unfamiliar air about it. Let us consider more closely how it is supposed to work. The approach rests on adopting what might be called an axiogenetic optimality principle to the effect that value represents a decisive advantage in regard to realization, in that in the virtual competition for existence among alternatives it is the comparatively best that is bound to prevail.1 Accordingly, whenever there is a plurality of alternative possibilities competing for realization in point of truth or of existence, the (or an) optimal possibility wins out. (An alternative is optimal when no better one exists, although it can have equals.) The result is that things exist, and exist as they do, because this is for the (metaphysically) best. No doubt it will be a complicated matter to appraise from a metaphysical /ontological standpoint that condition X is better (inherently more meritorious) than condition Y. But, so optimalism maintains, once this evaluative hurdle is overcome the question “Why should it be that X rather than Y exists?” is automatically settled by the circumstance of X’s superiority, via the ramifications of optimality. In sum, a Law of Optimality prevails: value (of a suitable—and still unspecified—sort) enjoys an existential bearing, so that it lies in the nature of things that (one of) the best of available alternatives is realized.2 1. The prime spokesman for this line of thought within the Western philosophical tradition was G. W. Leibniz. A present-day exponent is John Leslie for whom see especially his Value and Existence (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979). See also the present author’s The Riddle of Existence (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). 2. To make this work out, the value of a disjunctive-alternative has to be fixed at the value of its optimal member, lest the disjunctive “bundling” of a good alternative with inferior rivals so operate as to eliminate the good alternative from competition. Optimalism & the Rationality of the Real   219 III. Abandoning Causality Optimalism is certainly a teleological theory: it holds that reality’s modus operandi manifests a tropism toward a certain end or telos, namely optimalization . Such an axiology represents a doctrine of “final causes” in Aristotle’s...