Being and Existence

Being and existence in philosophy are originally not synonyms, although with respect to their meanings, they are related and somewhat overlapping. In the Middle Ages, perhaps under the influence of Islamic philosophy that recognized the contingency of the "existence" of the created world as compared with God, the word "existere" in Latin ("to exist" or "to appear") was distinguished from "esse" ("to be") or "essentia" ("essence"), an abstract form of the participle of "esse."

The relationship of being and existence is somewhat complex, but it can be better understood when being is contrasted with its paired concept, as in being and becoming, being and appearance or phenomena, being and essence, or being and thought. The meaning of being slightly differs according to its paired concept. The philosopher, implicitly or explicitly, holds a certain sense of being as primary, and his/her understanding of being constitutes the framework or background of his/her thought, although he/she does not necessarily discuss it thematically.

Modern existentialism and analytic philosophy revolted against the essentialism of the Medieval tradition that treated existence as basically contingent. But these modern revolts did not entirely ignore being or essence. Existentialism, for example, can be regarded as the existential appropriation of being or essence, which suggests a new integration of being and existence whereby we can experience being or essence or even God in a more profound way.

Relationship of Being and Existence

History shows a rather complex relationship between being and existence. The classical Greek equivalent of the English verb "be" was "einai," but there seems to have been no classical Greek equivalent of the English verb "exist." It was only in the Middle Ages that the Latin word "exsistere" was made from a combination of "ex" ("out of") and "sistere" ("to cause to stand") to mean "to exist," "to appear," or "to emerge." The reason why classical Greek did not have any distinct concept of "exist" was that in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle the primary project was a veridical one of articulating truthfulness in reality through copula sentences of the form "X is Y." The theory of predication was central, and the theory of existence peripheral. So, even when Greek philosophers wanted to express the concept of existence, they did so only in the predicative form; "X exists" was expressed as "X is something." Thus, the word "einai" ("be") had to be used more widely than its predicative meaning. It was in the context of this wider use of "einai" ("be") that Aristotle referred to the concept of existence as "hoti esti" ("that it is") as distinguished from "ti esti" ("what it is"), which would mean essence.

Of course, in late Greek philosophy the old Greek verb "hyparkein" (originally, "to make a beginning") started to be used non-technically to mean "to exist"; but, it and its early Latin rendering "exsistere" still continued somewhat ambiguously to retain the predicative meaning as well, and furthermore the use of the noun exsistentia ("existence") was not popular yet.

Eventually, however, the concept of "existentia" ("existence") was established amongst Christian philosophers of high Scholasticism such as St. Thomas Aquinas as a technical term contrasted with "essentia" ("essence"), an abstract form of the presumed present participle of "esse" ("to be"). While essence apparently meant "what a thing is," existence meant "that a thing exists." According to Charles H. Khan, this development of the modern sense of existence occurred under the influence of Islamic philosophy, which distinguished existence (wujud) from essence (mahiat) in its radical revision of Greek ontology in light of a biblical metaphysics of creation within Islam which distinguished the created world (contingency) from God (necessity). Thomas adopted this, maintaining that the essence and existence of each and every contingent, finite creature are distinct, while essence and existence are identical within God, who is therefore preeminent over the world. According to him, God causes each and every finite creature to "exist" with its "essence."

What is interesting is that Thomas indicated this causal relationship of difference between God and the world in terms of the "analogia entis" ("analogy of being"), referring to God and each finite creature as "ipsum esse subsistens" (Self-subsistent Being) and "ens" (being), respectively. This means that in spite of the development of "existentia" ("existence") as a new word with a distinctive meaning in the Middle Ages, still the term "esse" ("to be") was used more generally to cover the meaning of existence as well.

The Thomistic distinction between essence and existence was criticized by later theologians and philosophers for various reasons. Critics included Duns Scotus, Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The most notable critic, however, was Martin Heidegger, who challenged Thomas' metaphysical theory of the causal relationship of difference between God and the created world, upon which the distinction between essence and existence in the world was based. According to Heidegger, Thomas' theory of the difference between God and the world through the analogy of being was far from answering the fundamental question of the meaning of being, which was not answered in the long philosophical tradition in the West anyway because being itself was taken for granted as self-eveident or undefinable. Therefore, in order to let the human being constantly pursue the question of "being" (Sein), Heidegger referred to that human being as "Dasein" (literally "being-there"), who, as a "being-in-the-world" (In-der-Welt-sein) thrown out to the temporal and phenomenological world of "beings" (Seiendes), is faced with angst and mortality there, but who nevertheless is expected to experience authenticity by standing in the openness of "being" in the midst of "beings." Here, the sense of "being" to be experienced is pre-conceptual and non-propositional in the everyday situation of human life; and the causal relationship of difference between God as "Self-subsistent Being" (ipsum esse subsistens) and the created world of "beings" (ens) in Thomas' metaphysics is superseded by the distinction between "being" (Sein) and "beings" (Seiendes) in Heidegger's phenomenological ontology in pursuit of the meaning of "being." For Heidegger, the word "existence" (Existenz) is simply synonymous with Dasein: "The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence."

Identity of Being and Existence in Analytic Philosophy

Many analytic philosophers in the twentieth century such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and W.V. Quine, believed that being and existence are identical. According to them, every predicative proposition can be translated into an existential one without changing meaning. For example, 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 to say "Some man is wise." So, the "exists" of the existential proposition takes the place of the copula. This view is the basis of the dominant position in modern Anglo-American analytic philosophy: that existence is asserted by the existential quantifier. If there are any notable differences of opinion amongst those analytic philosophers who believe that being and existence are the same, at least one of the differences concerns whether or not existence is a property. Scholars such as Quine believe that existence is a property, whereas theorists such as Frege and Russell do not believe so.

Of course, there is a school called "possibilism," which distinguishes between being and existence, i.e., between what there is and what exists, saying that the latter comprises a relatively small portion of the former. According to this, although there are things that actually exist, there are also things that do not exist: they are what there merely are, not having existence or actuality, which only things that actually exist have. Such things are non-existent possible things such as unicorns, Aliens, and people that were never born. They could have actually existed, but as it happens, they simply do not. To this possibilist realm of the non-existent, some of the followers of Alexius Meinong such as Terence Parsons would add impossible objects such as square circles and wooden iron.

But, scholars such as Quine, for whom there is no distinction between being and existence, have critiqued possibilism, by saying that we cannot embrace non-actual possible objects since there is no real criterion of identity for them: "No entity without identity." This critique from Quine has given rise to an adjusted version of possibilism, which now agrees that being and existence are identical, saying that everything there is exists, but which nevertheless insists that not everything that exists is actual, i.e., that there exist things that fail to be actual. This, however, looks like a word game, just renaming being as "existence" and existence as "actuality." Thus, a more advanced version of possibilism, which takes Quine's objection more seriously, has been developed by David Kellogg Lewis.

Lewis — while agreeing with the adjusted version just mentioned above that being and existence are identical, but that actuality is to be distinguished from existence — has a new understanding of actuality, treating it in terms of relation. Thus, according to Lewis, when we say that there are things that exist but are not actual, it means that there are things that are spatiotemporally unrelated to our world, although they exist in a full-fledged sense in other worlds than ours. The word "actual," then, is an indexical, whose reference on any given occasion of utterance is determined by the context or world in which the utterance occurs. So, when I, for example, utter, "New York City is actual" (or more naturally, "New York City actually exists"), its truthfulness is made not because actuality is some intrinsic property of New York City but rather because New York City occupies the same world as I who utter. Lewis' version of possibilism is sometimes called "modal realism," and it is quite Quinean.

The issue on whether or not differet worlds or realms of reality exist is not new. Ancient Greek philosophy observed that concrete, material beings exist in the spatiotemporal world in the sense of physical reality which is detectable by physical senses or physical instruments, while ideas and values such as love, justice, and good do not exist in the same sense of being physically sensible material. For Plato, those ideas and values in an incorporeal realm of the world are real existences because they are self-existent and immutable, while material beings in the corporeal world are merely their ephemeral "shadows" far from being real existences. For Aristotle, by contrast, only individual things called substances in the spatiotemporal world are fully existent beings, and other beings, called categories, such as relations, quantity, time and place, and Plato's ideas and values, have a derivative kind of being, dependent on those individual things.

This Plato-Aristotle tension was echoed in the Medieval controversy between realism and nominalism. The approach of realists was to argue that the sentence "Socrates is wise," which contains a noun reference only for "Socrates," can be rewritten as "Socrates has wisdom," which apparently proves the existence of a reference for "wisdom" as well. This argument, however, was inverted by nominalists such as William of Ockham in arguing that "Socrates has wisdom" can be rewritten as "Socrates is wise," which contains a reference only for "Socrates." The nominalist method has basically been inherited in analytic philosophy, which does not distinguish between being and existence.

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. Parmenides considered being to be the first principle of reality, believing that only being is, and that non-being is not. Also, everything is one, and the one is being, which is continuous, all-inclusive, and eternal. For him, becoming is illusory and impossible. By contrast, Heraclitus regarded becoming as the first principle, maintaining that everything is in a state of flux.

Plato is considered to have reconciled between being and becoming by integrating the immutable world of Ideas and the transitory world of material beings through the notion of participation.

• 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, the 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 is a less real, ephemeral appearance.

• 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.

• Being and existence

See above.

• Being and essence

Of course, being (ens or essens) and essence (essentia) are closely connected linguistically because in Latin the latter (essentia) is an abstract form of the former (essens), which is the present participle of the verb esse ("to be"). However, when being is contrasted with essence, it means an actual existence, whereas the essence of a being is that which makes what it is. So, the contrast of being and essence is that of existence and essence. This may be confusing a little because the aforementioned contrast of being and existence basically treats being as essence. In any case, Medieval philosophers such as St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas argued, perhaps following Persian philosopher Avicenna, that God is a unique being whose essence is its existence, while essence and existence are distinct for all beings other than God. The biblical concept of God as "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14) expresses this identity of essence and existence in God.

• Being and thought

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

Assessment

Greek philosophy was primarily interested in the predicative approach, dealing with the given reality of "being" through copula sentences, and it had no independent concept of "existence." But, when Islamic philosophy appropriated the biblical doctrine of creation, it realized the importance of the notion of "existence" related to the contingency of the created world. Medieval Christian philosophy adopted this from Islamic philosophy and contrasted "existence" with "being" or "essence." ("Essence" is linguistically related to "being" as its participle in Latin.) But then, modern existentialism was dissatisfied with this contrast of essence and existence, feeling that it still gave a special status to essence, not appreciating existence enough. Existentialism, therefore, wanted to go beyond the contrast of essence and existence by understanding essence only in terms of human existence which was considered to be primary. Modern analytic philosophy is another approach, which is a linguistic approach, to go beyond the difference of the predicative and the existential with the latter as primary.

From this, we can observe that history seems to have experienced a transition from essence to existence, starting from Greek philosophy and going through Islamic philosophy and Medieval Christian philosophy to reach existentialism and analytic philosophy. The destination of this transition, however, seems not to be the total estrangement of existence from essence but rather the reappreciation of essence in the context of existence, as can be seen especially in existentialism. So, history seems to have been flowing toward a point of destination at which essence and existence are to be integrated, going beyond their contrast that once emerged.

This leaves us an important question: What does it really mean to go beyond the contrast of essence and existence to reach a point of their integration? Does it mean to lead us to experience more about God because according to the Medieval formulation God has no distinction of essence and existence whatsoever within himself? Essentialists would respond that going beyond the distinction cannot lead to any more experience of God, since we finite creatures, who should anyway stay with the distinction, no matter how much we may strive to go beyond it, are qualitatively different from God, who alone enjoys the identity of essence and existence. The existentialism of Heidegger, too, would respond negatively about the experience of God albeit for a different reason — for the reason that it does not believe in God as understood in objectified form within the traditional framework. This is why Heidegger is usually considered to be an atheist. On the other hand, many observe that this atheism of existentialists such as Heidegger does not deny God in every sense but suggests a new, profound way of knowing God through authenticity, "a renewed possibility of experiencing God" This new awareness of God in Heidegger's project of reappreciating essence in the context of existence is somewhat echoed in Paul Tillich's eschatological notion of "essentialization" in one's eternal life beyond the estrangement of existence from essence. Whether this can also heal the cleavage in the realist-nominalist controversy is yet to be seen.

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
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ISBN 0060638508
• Hemming, Laurence Paul. Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of Theological Voice. University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. ISBN 0268030588
• Heraclitus, Fragments. Translated by Brooks Hexton. New York : Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN 0142437654
• Kahn, Charles H. "On the Terminology for Copula and Existence." In Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: Essays Presented by His Friends and Pupils to Richard Waltzer on His Seventieth Birthday, edited by S. M. Stern, Albert Hourani, and Vivian Brown. London: Bruno Cassier, 1972.
• Kahn, Charles H. "Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy?" In Philosophies of Existence: Ancient and Medieval, edited by Parviz Morewedge. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. ISBN 082321060X
• Loux, Michael J. Ockham's Theory Of Terms. 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
• Prior, Arthur Norman. "Existence." In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967. ISBN 0028949900
• Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. ISBN 0231033079
• Quine, W.V. "On What There Is." In From a Logical Point of View. New York: Harper, 1953.

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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