Journeying Through The Unworld
Why does the modern world feel empty?
“This is the world of the Flight: not the world of necessity but that of possibility.” —Max Picard in The Flight from God
In the movie adaptation of the book, The Neverending Story, the enchanted world of Fantasia finds itself gradually being taken over by The Nothing: a mysterious, dark force swallowing up the land and leaving absolute emptiness in its wake. Two characters discuss it’s impact on their realm:1
"Near my home, there used to be a beautiful lake. But then... then it... it was gone." "Did the lake dry up?" "No. It just wasn't there anymore. Nothing was there anymore. Not even a dried up lake." "A hole?" "A hole would be something. No, it was nothing! And it got bigger, and bigger."
I would like to start off this year with a cheery post saying that this is actually what is occurring in our world today! Or at least something very close to it is. The malevolent force in our world today does differ in one important aspect from that of the movie. Whereas The Nothing in the film eliminates everything it encounters, the force in our world today—which we may call The Unness—is reducing our world to a sort of intermediate state. The world today is not being erased, but it is being emptied. Our world is gradually being turned into an unworld.
We can describe an unworld in philosophical terms as a world of ens (existence) but no essentia (essence). Here, with no intrinsic essence, things no longer have any inherent nature or identity. They can become anything. But, being able to be anything means they really are nothing in particular. Our world today—our unworld—is made up of these things which do exist but are themselves nothing in particular. We may call these unthings. 2
Unthings are tricky. They outwardly look like true things, but they are in fact hollow and may be anything else. In a world, a warehouse is a building where businesses produce and store goods. In an unworld, a warehouse may be used in this way—but it may just as readily be used in any other way, say, as a church or an apartment building. Its outer form no longer corresponds to any fixed, intrinsic essence. It has become an unwarehouse. In an unworld, everything is like this. We increasingly live in a world of uncities, uncultures, unlanguages and unwords, unwars, unfestivals, and we are at risk of ourselves becoming unmen (to use the C. S. Lewis term).3
Whereas in a real world where essences are discovered, in an unworld, essences are constructed. We no longer believe things have pregiven essences. Instead we believe it is up to us to assign an essence to everything. This makes our world not one of being but of becoming. Not a world of things-as-they-are but of things-as-they-may-be. The world of actuality is transformed into the world of possibility, and here everything in every circumstance “keeps its options open” and never fully commits.4 Unthings, in this way, are like particles always in superposition. And the more they fill our world, the more our world becomes neither fully dead nor fully alive but rather a strange something in the middle (to reference a Walker Percy concept!).5 In place of art, we produce content. In place of representatives, we get politicians. In architecture, we build spaces, and not true places. And so forth.
This world has become so empty today, one is tempted to wonder if there is an Emptier. The Unness has spread so far and become so big, it carries us all along with it, whether we know it or wish to go along. Even if one disagrees with The Unness and believes for themselves that essences are real and knowable, this person is like one swimming against a riptide. In each moment they have to reclaim essences which are continuously being drained from things. This is like filling a cup with a hole in the bottom! In a true world, real things—real food, real places, real words—are the default and unthings are the exception. Today this has reversed. Unthings have become the default and real things the exception. It is like we are creatures on a rogue planet, drifting through interstellar space not connected to any star system, where, instead of basking in sunlight from a nearby star, we have to produce our own warmth and light all the time. We can live this way, perhaps, but it requires so much constant effort.
So what are we to do? Do we have to continue living in an unworld? Did we ever live in a true world? Is it asking for the moon that we might actually live in one? The premoderns indeed lived in a true world (which, to be sure, had many faults of its own). But they did not have to invent everything from scratch. Things not only existed but they also had pregiven essences, which God made and man discovered. The premodern true world, as it were, came pre-made by God. The modern unworld in turn has been self-made by man. My hope is that there is in fact a true world on the far side of our current unworld, which is neither merely a return to the true world that came before it nor merely a staying in our unworld as it is. If there is another true world around the corner, I wonder if it is not too rosy to ask if it might be co-made by God and man? If the world feels empty today—if there is in fact an Emptier—maybe there is also a Filler?
And that is an encouraging thought!
The NeverEnding Story. Warner Bros, 1984.
Krier, Léon. The Architecture of Community. Island Press, 2011.
Lewis, C. S. Perelandra. Vol. 2, Scribner, 2003.
Picard, Max. The Flight from God. Edited by Matthew Del Nevo and Brendan Sweetman, St. Augustines Press, 2015.
Percy, Walker. The Second Coming. Picador USA, 1999.