The Problem of Beginnings: V. The Background That Wasn't There

A beginning usually has a background.

A match is struck in a room.

A tree grows from the ground.

A building rises on a site.

A conversation begins among people who are already there.

We rarely notice the background because it is already present.

Then we ask about the beginning of the universe.

And almost immediately, we imagine one.

Perhaps there was an empty space.

Perhaps there was a state of nothingness.

Perhaps there was some prior condition from which the universe emerged.

But what if there was no background?

This is harder to imagine than it sounds.

We are accustomed to seeing things against something else.

A figure against a surface.

An event against a history.

A change against a previous state.

An object against a surrounding space.

Even when the background is empty, it is still there.

But if we are asking about the beginning of everything, what would be the background?

There cannot simply be another region of space.

That would be part of the universe.

There cannot simply be an earlier time.

That would be part of the temporal order.

There cannot simply be a prior state.

That would already be something.

And so we face a peculiar difficulty.

We keep trying to imagine the beginning against a background that the beginning is supposed to bring into existence.

Perhaps this is why the imagination keeps producing darkness.

Darkness feels like the absence of everything.

But darkness needs a space in which there can be no light.

Silence needs a world in which sound is possible.

Emptiness needs something that could be absent.

A background is not nothing.

It is one of the conditions under which something can become distinguishable.

And this may be the deeper problem.

We tend to imagine the universe as one enormous thing that appeared within some larger setting.

But if it is the whole of the relevant setting, there is nowhere else for it to appear.

There is no cosmic stage waiting for the universe to enter.

The stage is part of the performance.

Perhaps, then, we should stop asking:

What was the universe in?

and ask:

What made a universe possible as something distinguishable at all?

That is a different question.

It does not ask for a prior object.

It asks about the emergence of the conditions under which objects, events, relations and histories can become distinguishable.

Perhaps a beginning is not always the arrival of something against a background.

Perhaps, at the deepest level, a beginning is the emergence of a difference that creates a background and a foreground together.

If so, there was no empty stage before the universe.

There was no stage.

And that makes the question of the beginning stranger still.

For if there was no background, what could the first difference be a difference from?

We may have reached the point where even the word first begins to wobble.