What is Everything?

Democritus: What is everything?

Socrates: Everything is a thing. Nothing is also a thing.

Democritus: Why is everything a thing?

Socrates: Everything is a thing and are things.

First, let’s tackle how everything is a thing, i.e. how everything is one single thing. Everything contains many things, in fact every single thing. What makes everything one thing is that it is a concept that covers, that encompasses, that is used to conceive of all things, including the concept itself.

This means that everything is a thing, including (the concept of) everything.

Democritus: But isn’t the word ‘thing’ used only to refer to material things?

Socrates: Things can be material things or immaterial things. Material things are physical objects. Immaterial things are non-physical objects such as thoughts, concepts and ideas.

But what are physical objects? We may say that they are things made of atoms and molecules, but then how about things such as energy which are not composed of atoms but are waves? Or will we now say, material things are physical objects and physical phenomena, where physical phenomena are phenomena that has effects on things? But how about thoughts then? Thoughts can also have effects on things since the thought of taking an action on a physical object can lead my body, as a physical object, to take an action on another physical object or make a physical phenomenon such as sound. And you’d surely agree that thoughts are immaterial.

Democritus: Yes, Socrates.

Socrates: This is why we just have this generic concept called thing. To begin systematically to make divisions, for e.g. of the material and the immaterial, we need to have already a most generic concept to address.

One can imagine a creature, say an ant, that might not have the concept of thing, but yet carries on its activities in and around the world of things. The things around it and which the ant interacts with, just are. There are things there, but does the ant, presumably a creature, a thing, without sufficient consciousness, know that there are things there? You would think it does, right, since it interacts with them, avoiding them, climbing over them, picking them up etc? You might say that it acts as if it knows that there are things there, but you might still concede that it does not have sufficient consciousness to have language and hence is unable to formulate concepts, in this case the concept of things.

In the same way, even if we never thought of what things really are, we act as if we know what they are, since we interact with them and act on them. It is when we want to communicate about things, or think about things, that we defer to a concept called thing.

We might explain what something is like, like this: “A hammer is a thing used to put nails into other things.” But even when we do not explicitly use the word ‘thing,’ we are still referring to objects as things. “This is a hammer,” “What is a hammer?” are all instances where we refer to things.

Democritus: But we might try to avoid any reference to things and words that seem to refer to things like ‘this’ or ‘what’ by just saying: “A hammer is used to put nails into wood.”

Socrates: Good point. But when pushed to refer to collectives, when asked: “What is a hammer, nails and wood?”, what would you say?

Democritus: We are likely to say, “They are things or objects used for construction,” for instance.

Socrates: Yes. If pushed further with questions like, “What then are things? What is a thing?” we might explain that they are words used to refer to actual things.

Democritus: But what if we were then pushed further and asked: what are words?

Socrates: Words are sounds used to express concepts. Concepts might refer to things such as spoons or tables. But are concepts things? If we admit that the non-physical, i.e. immaterial objects, can be things, then concepts are things.

Democritus: But are non-physical objects things?

Socrates: How about ‘physical’ phenomena such as energy or a vacuum? Energy is made of waves, which can travel across a vacuum, which means it does not depend on a physical medium to be transmitted. Even if you invoke wave-particle duality or that light is really a string of photons which are particles, what then is a vacuum?

Is it a thing since a vacuum by definition is a space with nothing? Or would you argue that a vacuum is a thing since it refers to the space and not the nothingness contained within the space? But what then is this space? You had just argued that it is a thing but space is not necessarily a physical thing like a room but is a concept of an enclosed volume. So concepts are things.

So everything is a thing including both material and immaterial things.

Democritus: But why can’t we use the word things just to refer to material things and another word to refer to the immaterial?

Socrates: I get what you mean. (He pondered briefly)

But what then shall we call a collection of material things and the immaterial? Is that collective now no longer a thing? What is it then? Let’s try to use the word ‘concept.’ But the collection is not just a concept since it contains material things and not just the concept of material things. How about a material thing that also has immaterial parts, like a human being who has a physical body but also an immaterial soul? Or if you do not admit of the existence of a soul, then a human being with thoughts then. What is that combination? We need a term to refer to that combination, and is not that term thing?

Democritus: Ok, Socrates, I agree with you. How about nothing? Is nothing a thing?

Socrates: Nothing is not a thing, except when it is thought of as a concept which is then a thing, but about (the concept of) nothing.

Democritus: I understand. So nothing is used to refer to no things but if nothing is taken as a concept, then it is something, in this case, a concept, which is a thing.

Socrates: Good. I just thought of something funnier though: can something that is everything be nothing? Can everything be nothing?

Some thing, a thing, cannot be no thing and hence something is not nothing, except if that thing refers to nothing as a concept and hence that thing is a concept (of nothing). Likewise, a thing cannot be all things unless that thing is the collection of all things and hence is everything which itself is a thing. A concept can be used to think about things, to conceptualise things, with some concepts being used to think of multiple things as a set or class of things. For e.g. the concept of thing underlies all things, both material and immaterial things, such as physical objects which we readily call physical things and also immaterial objects such as concepts and thoughts, which are not physical but no less real. The concept of things is a thing.

Democritus: So everything contains all things including nothing?


Socrates: Yes. To state it more effusively, everything contains all things, including the concept of nothing.