Being and Existence

For the philosophical movement, see Existentialism.

For the existence of god, see Existence of God.

The question 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.

Distinction of Being and Existence

Philosophers often distinguish between being and existence, saying that the former is broader than the latter, i.e., that being applies not only to objects that actually exist but to objects that are merely abstract (e.g., qualities, relations, and numbers) and fictitious (e.g., centaurs, dragons, and Pegasus), whereas existence only applies to objects that actually exist.

Another way of distinguishing between being and existence is rather historical. The classical Greek equivalent of the English verb "be" is "einai," but there seems to be 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 does not have any distinct concept of "exist" is 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, when Greek pholosophers 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.

According to Charles H. Kahn, although in late Greek philosophy the old Greek verb "hyparkein" (originally, "to make a beginning") started to be used non-technically to mean "to exist," nevertheless it and its early Latin rendereing "exsistere" still continued somewhat ambiguously to retain the predicative meaning as well until the end of the thirteenth century, when Duns Scotus finally established "existentia" ("existence") as a technical term contrasted with "esse" ("to be") or "essentia" ("essence"), an abstract form of the present participle of "esse." "Thus the modern terminology of 'existence' seems to derive from Scotus." It is usually understood that the development of this position of Scotus occurred under the general influence of Islamic philosophy which radically revised Greek ontology in light of a biblical metaphysics of creation, and more particularly under the influence of Avicenna who distinguished existence (wujud) from essence (mahiat).

With the emergence of modern existentialism, however, the contrast between being and existence became minimal again because existentialism understood the former not in divorce from the latter but in the context of the latter. For existentialists, this means that the former is only meaningful because of the latter which is primary. According to Martin Heidegger, Western philosophy overlooked the question of what being itself really means. Being itself, of course, is the most general property shared in common by all beings; but Western philosophy dismissed the question of being, treating it simply as undefinable or obvious, and established various essentialist theories of knowledge such as logic, epistemology, and ontology, which are detached from human existence. In order to let human beings constantly pursue the question of being, Heidegger defined that kind of human being as "Dasein" (literally "being-there"), who, as a "being-in-the-world" (In-der-Welt-sein) thrown out to the temporal world of beings, is faced with angst and mortality there, but who nevertheless is expected to experince authenticity in the midst of asking about being. In the words of Heidegger in his Being and Time, "The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence."

Plato and Aristotle: Different Realms of Being

As was noted above, being is broader than existence. So, there are different realms of being according to its kind. Concrete, 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. Compared with them, ideas and values such as love, justice, and good seem to be abstract, and they do not exist in the same sense of being physically sensible material. For Plato, however, 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 space-time 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. Thus, to which realm of being we should attribute existence is not an easy question to answer, given the difference of approaches in Platonism and Aristotelianism.

Essence and Existence

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.

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. 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

Being (ens or essens) and essence (essentia) are closely connected because in Latin the latter (essentia) is an abstract form of the former (essens), which is the present participle of the verb (esse). 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. Anselm argued that God is a unique being whose essence is its existence (being), while essence and existence (being) 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. The biblical concept of God as "I am who I am" expresses this identity.

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.

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

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 process information about real people. An 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 mathematician 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
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ISBN 0060638508
• 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. On What There Is. Washington, DC: 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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