Being and Existence

For the philosophical movement, see Existentialism.

For the existence of god, see Existence of God.

The questions of existence or being (Greek, "eon" or "ousia"; Latin, "esse"; German "Sein"; French, "étre"), in philosophy, has been one of the central topics of metaphysics; the study of "being" or "existence" is called ontology.

Being or existence has been often inquired into in contrast to its reciprocal concept, and the meaning of being differs according to its paired concept, for example, being and becoming, being and appearance or phenomena, being and thought, being or "is" and ought, being and essence. Philosophers, particularly metaphysicians, implicitly or explicitly, often hold a certain sense of being as primary and his or her understanding of being constitutes the framework or the background of his or her thought, although the philosopher does not necessarily discuss it thematically.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, conceived God as the primary being, from which all other beings in the world receive its existence. Materialists, on the contrary, conceive a material or sensible entity as the primary model of being and identify physical sensibility with the primary sense of being. Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger, are some of philosophers who developed their philosophy with the full awareness that there are diverse senses of being. Although we use the same word "is" or "exists," the meaning of being or existence is different according to its kind such as: sensible material being; values and norms; principles; mathematical objects; time; space; God, and others.

logicians use the symbol ∃ to denote the existential quantifier, which asserts the existence of some object with certain properties.

Multiple senses of being in a paired set of concepts

Being is often paired with another concept and the sense of being differs according to what it is paired with. The pairs listed below are some of those often discussed in the history of philosophy. These pairs, however, often overlap and they are not mutually exclusive.

Being and becoming

Being, when it is contrasted with becoming, means immutability, permanence, or constant. For example, Plato found the primary sense of being in this sense. He asserted that the Ideas are "real" existence and material beings are ephemeral "shadows" of these Ideas for the reason that Ideas are immutable, permanent existence whereas material beings can decay and change. Aristotle's concept of "substance" ("ousia") is also another example.

Some philosophers, on the contrary, found the primary sense of being in change and process. Heraclitus, for example, held this view and symbolized being as "fire." The existence of fire lies in its dynamic process of emission of energy. Likewise, for Heraclitus, being primarily means becoming , change, and dynamic process. Thomas Aquinas also applied this dynamic concept of being to God's existence. Aquinas tried to present God's activity by this active concept of being.

Being and phenomena

Being, when it is contrasted with phenomena, means true reality in contrast to mere appearances or what appears to sense perception. Plato, for example, inquired into the true reality of being in contrast to what appears to our five senses. For Plato, true reality of being are permanent, immutable Ideas. Thing are beautiful, for example, by virtue of the Idea of beauty which is the true reality. What appears to our five senses are less real, ephemeral appearance.

Being and thought

Being, when it is contrasted with thought, means objective reality which is outside of cognitive subject. Thought refers ideas in mind and being does spatio-temporal, extra-mental existence. This contrast was used by modern philosophers who had epistemological concern. The contrast of being and thought appeared within the question of how ideas or thoughts in mind can be a real representation of the objective reality which exists outside of mind.

Is (being) and ought

Being or "is," when it is contrasted with ought, means factuality in contrast to normativeness. Kant, for example, distinguished prescriptive statements in morality, which use "ought" or "should," in contrast to natural, descriptive statements which describes what they factually are.

Being and essence

Being, when it is contrasted with essence, means actual existence. Essence of a being is what it is and whether it in fact exists or not is a separate question. Anselms, for example, argued that God is a unique being whose essence is its existence while essence (what it is) and existence are separable for all beings other than God. He developed "ontological proof of the existence of God" based upon this identity of being and essence in God. Biblical concept of God as "I am who I am" expresses this identity.

Being and beings

Being, when it is contrasted with beings, means existence in the sense of event or fact of to-be. Beings mean particular entities that exist, but being means the fact of existence itself. Heidegger, for example, stressed upon this distinction in order to highlight the concept of being or to-be as a dynamic activity.

Diversity of the sense of being

There are diverse senses of being according to its kind. Material beings exist in the space-time world and they exist in the sense of physical reality which is detectable by physical senses or physical instruments. Ideas and values such as love, justice, good do not exist in the same sense of being as physically sensible material. In which sense do they exist is subject to philosophical discussion. For Plato and Medieval Scholastics, those ideas and values are real existence in non-corporeal realm of the world.

The sense of existence of time, space, numbers, principles are also subject to philosophical discussions.

Some philosophers elaborated the unique way of existence of human beings. Existentialists, for example, explored complex elements involved in human existence , which includes freedom, authenticity - inauthenticity, anxiety, death, good and evil, justice, afterlife, faith, and others.

Heidegger, who took the question of being (ontology) as the primary subject of philosophy in the twentieth century, analyzed how human being interprets the meaning of his existence. Human being does not exist in the same sense as a material thing exits. Man always interprets the meaning of his existence. In his Being and Time, Heidegger developed the analysis of Dasein (human being in a rough sense) as hermeneutic phenomenology.

Existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, Sartre all highlighted unique modes of human existence and tried to explicate them.

Interdependency of being

Beings can exist in the web of interconnected relations to other beings. The relationship between God and human beings, those among human beings, those between human beings and material things, and those among material things are not the same. Martin Buber, for example, conceptually distinguished God-man relationship as "I-thou" relationship from relationships among material things in the world.

Aristotle viewed the world as teleologically organized organic whole, where all beings are mutually connected by multiple purposes. Medieval scholastics saw the interconnected under creationist perspective. Leibniz also viewed the interconnectedness under the idea of "pre-established harmony," and Heidegger conceptualized the interconnected mode of human existence as "being-in-the-world."

Historical conceptions

Existence can be seen as central to many systems of belief, religions, and myths. Beliefs concerning existence may posit additional properties, such as value or goodness. Divergent conceptions of existence have often resulted in tension amongst communities with differing beliefs about existence, especially when coupled with the related question of worldview.

In the western tradition of philosophy, the first comprehensive treatments of the subject are from Plato's Phaedo, Republic, and Statesman and Aristotle's Metaphysics, though earlier fragmentary writing exists. Aristotle developed a theory of being, according to which only individual things, called substances fully have being, but other things such as relations, quantity, time and place (called the categories) have a derivative kind of being, dependent on individual things.

The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, perhaps following the Persian philosopher Avicenna, argued that God is pure being, and that in God essence and existence are the same. At about the same time, the nominalist philosopher William of Ockham, argued, in Book I of his Summa Totius Logicae (Treatise on all Logic, written some time before 1327) that Categories are not a form of Being in their own right, but derivative on the existence of individuals.

In the Hindu philosophy, existence is only of one object called Brahma. All other forms of existence are manifestation of this unique reality Brahma, due to influence of an agency called Maya. To perceive the existence of the unique reality of Brahma, one has to learn to come out of the influence of Maya.

Predicative nature of existence

John Stuart Mill (and also Kant's pupil Herbart) argued that the predicative nature of existence was proved by sentences like "A centaur is a poetic fiction" or "A greatest number is impossible" (Herbart). Franz Brentano challenged this, so also (as is better known) did Frege. Brentano argued that we can join the concept represented by a noun phrase "an A" to the concept represented by an adjective "B" to give the concept represented by the noun phrase "a B-A." For example, we can join "a man" to "wise" to give "a wise man." But the noun phrase "a wise man" is not a sentence, whereas "some man is wise" is a sentence. Hence the copula must do more than merely join or separate concepts. Furthermore, adding "exists" to "a wise man," to give the complete sentence "a wise man exists" has the same effect as joining "some man" to "wise" using the copula. So the copula has the same effect as "exists." Brentano argued that every categorical proposition can be translated into an existential one without change in meaning and that the "exists" and "does not exist" of the existential proposition take the place of the copula. He showed this by the following examples:

The categorical proposition "Some man is sick," has the same meaning as the existential proposition "A sick man exists" or "There is a sick man."

The categorical proposition "No stone is living" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "A living stone does not exist" or "there is no living stone."

The categorical proposition "All men are mortal" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "An immortal man does not exist" or "there is no immortal man."

The categorical proposition "Some man is not learned" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "A non-learned man exists" or "there is a non-learned man."

Frege developed a similar view (though later) in his great work The Foundations of Arithmetic, as did Charles Peirce. The Frege-Brentano view is the basis of the dominant position in modern Anglo-American philosophy: that existence is asserted by the existential quantifier (as expressed by Quine's slogan "To be is to be the value of a variable." — On What There Is, 1948).

The semantics of existence

In mathematical logic, there are two quantifiers, "some" and "all," though as Brentano (1838-1917) pointed out, we can make do with just one quantifier and negation. The first of these quantifiers, "some" is also expressed as "there exists." Thus, in the sentence "There exist a man," the term "man" is asserted to be part of existence. But we can also assert, "There exists a triangle." Is a "triangle," an abstract idea, part of existence in the same way that a "man," a physical body, is part of existence? Do abstractions such as goodness, blindness, and virtue exist in the same sense that chairs, tables, and houses exist? What categories, or kinds of thing can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition?

Worse, does "existence" exist?

In some statements, existence is implied without being mentioned. The statement "A bridge crosses the Thames at Hammersmith." cannot just be about a bridge, the Thames, and Hammersmith. It must be about "existence" as well. On the other hand, the statement "A bridge crosses the Styx at Limbo," has the same form, but while in the first case we understand a real bridge in the real world made of stone or brick, what "existence" would mean in the second case is less clear.

The nominalist approach is to argue that certain noun phrases can be "eliminated" by rewriting a sentence in a form that has the same meaning, but which does not contain the noun phrase. Thus Ockham argued that "Socrates has wisdom," which apparently asserts the existence of a reference for "wisdom," can be rewritten as "Socrates is wise," which contains only the referring phrase "Socrates." This method became widely accepted in the twentieth century by the analytic school of philosophy.

However, this argument may be inverted by realists in arguing that since the sentence "Socrates is wise" can be rewritten as "Socrates has wisdom," this proves the existence of a hidden referent for "wise."

A further problem is that human beings seem to process information about fictional characters in much the same way that they proceess information about real people. For example, in the 2008 United States presidential election, a politician and actor named Fred Thompson ran for the office of president. In polls, potential voters identified Fred Thompson as a "law and order" candidate. Thompson plays a fictional character on the television series Law and Order. There is no doubt that the people who make the comment are aware that Law and Order is fiction, but at some level, they process fiction as if it were fact. Another example of this is the common experience of actresses who play the villain in a soap opera being accosted in public as if they are to blame for the actions of the character they play.

A scientist might make a clear distinction about objects that exist, and assert that all objects that exist are made up of either matter or energy. But in the layperson's worldview, existence includes real, fictional, and even contradictory objects. Thus if we reason from the statement Pegasus flies to the statement Pegasus exists, we are not asserting that Pegasus is made up of atoms, but rather that Pegasus exists in a particular worldview, the worldview of classical myth. When a mathematicians reasons from the statement "ABC is a triangle" to the statement "triangles exist," she is not asserting that triangles are made up of atoms but rather that triangles exist within a particular mathematical model.

Modern approaches in the analytic philosophy

According to Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions, the negation operator in a singular sentence takes wide and narrow scope: we distinguish between "some S is not P" (where negation takes "narrow scope") and "it is not the case that 'some S is P'" (where negation takes "wide scope"). The problem with this view is that there appears to be no such scope distinction in the case of proper names. The sentences "Socrates is not bald" and "it is not the case that Socrates is bald" both appear to have the same meaning, and they both appear to assert or presuppose the existence of someone (Socrates) who is not bald, so that negation takes narrow scope.

The theory of descriptions has generally fallen into disrepute, though there have been recent attempts to revive it by Stephen Neale and Frank Jackson. According to the direct-reference view, an early version of which was originally proposed by Bertrand Russell, and perhaps earlier by Gottlob Frege, a proper name strictly has no meaning when there is no object to which it refers. This view relies on the argument that the semantic function of a proper name is to tell us which object bears the name, and thus to identify some object. But no object can be identified if none exists. Thus, a proper name must have a bearer if it is to be meaningful.

To adapt an argument of Peter Strawson's, someone who points to an apparently empty space, uttering "that's a fine red one" communicates nothing to someone who cannot see or understand what he is pointing to. Variants of the direct-reference view have been proposed by Saul Kripke, Gareth Evans, Nathan Salmon, Scott Soames, and others.

Existence in the wide and narrow senses

According to the "two sense" view of existence, which derives from Alexius Meinong, existential statements fall into two classes.

1. Those asserting existence in a wide sense. These are typically of the form "N is P" for singular N, or "some S is P."
2. Those asserting existence in a narrow sense. These are typically of the form "N exists" or "S's exist."

The problem is then evaded as follows. "Pegasus flies" implies existence in the wide sense, for it implies that something flies. But it does not imply existence in the narrow sense, for we deny existence in this sense by saying that Pegasus does not exist. In effect, the world of all things divides, on this view, into those (like Socrates, the planet Venus, and New York City) that have existence in the narrow sense, and those (like Sherlock Holmes, the goddess Venus, and Minas Tirith) that do not.

However, common sense suggests the non-existence of such things as fictional characters or places.

See also

• Cogito ergo sum
• Cosmological argument
• Existence proof
• Gödel's ontological proof
• Meaning of life
• Metaphysics
• Ontology
• Solipsism
• Three marks of existence

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Aristotle, The Metaphysics, translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London ; New York : Penguin Books, 1998. ISBN 0140446192
• Arnauld, Antoine and Pierre Nicole. Logic, or, The art of thinking : containing, besides common rules, several new observations appropriate for forming judgment, Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 0521482496
• Eagleton,Terry. The Meaning of Life. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 0199210705
• Heraclitus, Fragments, translated by Brooks Hexton. New York : Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN 0142437654
• Loux, Michael J. Ockham's Theory Of Terms Notre Dame ; London : University of Notre Dame Press, 1974. ISBN 0268005508
• Magee, Bryan. The Story of Philosophy. New York : DK Pub., 1998. ISBN 078943511X
• Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic London: Longmans, green, and co., 1884.
• Plato, The Republic, translated by Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee. London ; New York : Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN 0140449140
• Quine, W.V. On What There Is Washington, D.C. : Catholic University of America, Philosophy Education Society, 1948.

External links

All links retrieved November 12, 2007.

• Existence on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Existence. Definitions from leading philosophers
• A documentary project about the meaning of life.

General Philosophy Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved December 7, 2007.
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved December 7, 2007.
• Philosophy Sources on Internet EpistemeLinks. Retrieved December 7, 2007.
• Guide to Philosophy on the Internet. Retrieved December 7, 2007.
• Paideia Project Online. Retrieved December 7, 2007.
• Project Gutenberg. Retrieved December 7, 2007.

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