"Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery." -Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Time and time again throughout Holt's "Why Does the World Exist?" the reader is pulled dangerously near to the precipice of meaninglessness or at least non-answerability, but Holt himself shies away from this option instinctually, even in the face of Grunbaum's supposedly "airtight" argument for the incoherence of the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" Holt's reason for rejecting this fatalism is apparently just a "feeling," but I wonder where that feeling comes from and what it's significance is. It made me think of McCarthy's character of Judge Holden, an intensely immoral man who uses cosmic nihilism to justify (or reject the need to justify) horrific acts of violence. At least in Blood Meridian, we see a direct thematic connection between someone believing that life is meaningless and acting evilly. Clearly though, in real life, Grunbaum is not so monstrous, and I doubt that Holt fears becoming a monster himself if he were to embrace the illegitimacy of a meaningful answer. Instead, perhaps his fear lies in our perceptions of how we view those with nihilistic predilections. In McCarthy's novel, Holden's nihilism both informs his evilness and describes it for us as readers (it causes and is caused by); this notion of nihilism as leading toward evil is used by McCarthy to further characterize Holden because McCarthy recognizes in us an innate aversion to nihilism. I counter that nihilism is not the cause of evil actions, but instead a retroactive justification. It is inherently innocent and is nothing more to be feared than any other explanatory reason for an action, and likewise in the search for answers as to "why is there something rather than nothing," it should be regarded without such bias against it (although it goes without saying that using it as an excuse to cease searching is less than desirable).
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