[lit-ideas] Re: Thingness and existence (was Movies without Guns)
- From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 12:33:28 -0700
Le 16 sept. 05, à 21:38, Robert Paul a écrit :
I hope who said what will be more or less typographically clear.
M.C. Thanks to Robert for this message, a fine example of genuine
philosophical debate (N.B. no irony intended).
M
Mike is a good guy, but no such thing is implied. I think that in many
cases, to know what a word means is to know how it's used; the
contrapositive (?) seems even more true (there are many degrees of
truth, just as there are many degrees of being): To not know how a
word is used is to not know its meaning.
M.C. Fair enough, although this still seems to me somewhat reductionist
account of meaning. But perhaps we can leave that for another thread
<snip>
Nowhere in the paragraph Mike quotes above do I mention the word
'thing'; in fact, in the first sentence, I try to show that each
reference to a 'thing' can be dispensed with. I'm not sure which
question I dismiss; if it's the question 'Is a thing the same as an
existent?' then, yes, I do dismiss it insofar as I admit I can't
answer it because I don't understand it. Is it the same question as
'Do things exist?' Even if it were I have no idea what would count as
an answer to it. The word 'thing' has no univocal meaning, and
neither, if I understand what Mike says below, do the words 'exist'
and 'existence.'
M.C. That indeed was my point. Since both 'thing' and 'exist' are
ambiguous, it is not yet informative to say, as R. Paul did in the post
that unleashed this thread, that beauty, truth, justice and so forth
are not things, without explaining what one means by that.
> M.C. 'Fraid not. I suspect Robert knows perfectly well what this
> question means, phrased as it is in reasonable simply English.
here's > paraphrase : is "being-a-thing" coextensive with "existing"
? Here's
> another version : Is it possible, yes or no, for something to be
> non-existent and still be a thing?
This depends on what you mean by 'non-existent' and 'thing,'
expressions which have a metaphysical fascination for Mike that I
don't share. This is not said dismissively.
M.C. Fair enough. Du gustibus...
Here's a try at an answer: I believe there are fictional characters; I
do not believe they can be encountered in the ordinary sublunar sphere
we inhabit. That they cannot be encountered here is not a test of
whether or not there are any. (Numbers cannot be encountered here
either, yet there are some numbers between one and nine, e.g. If
someone said, 'There really are no fictional characters, you know,' I
would be extremely puzzled.
M.C. Fair enough. I'm interested in the mode of existence of such
fictional characters, and in what respects this mode of existence is
different from the mode of existence of rocks. You, apparently, are
not. No big deal.
I'm additionally puzzled at being asked to answer yes or no to a
question I've already admitted I don't understand. The question seems
to imply that there are things that are just things, without their
being things of a certain kind, as if 'thing' were on all fours with
'animal.' But immediately upon writing this it strikes me that
although there are animals there are no animals simpliciter, no
animals that are not certain sorts of animals. (Linnaean ontology.) I
apologize for my denseness here.
M.C. There is no question of any denseness here. One of the points I
was trying to insinuate is that the current debate is, among other
things, very relevant to the question of whether or not there *are* or
are not any *animals simpliciter* (and hence, whether or not there are
Truth, Beauty, Justice, etc.). As a self-proclaimed nominalist, you
want to claim there are not. I am less sure.
<snip>
> M.C. Now we're getting somewhere. If a tree falls in the forest,
> according to Robert, makes no noise if there is no one around.
This is a wretched analogy and in no way follows from anything I've
said. Do you think that there would be Love (not just the word, or the
concept) even if no one were or ever had been in love?
M.C. I'm not sure. It certainly does not seem to me impossible that
Love might exist without being instantiated. When we talk about the
existence of numbers, we are not necessarily concerned with whether or
not they are instantiated. Why should existence depend on instantiation
in the case of Love, and not in the case of numbers?
<snip>
M.C.: In other words, far from failing to understand the question, you
> now affirm that [1] "being a thing" *is just* "existing" : [2]
thingness and
> existence are coextensive ; [3] all things exist and [4] all
existents are
> things; [5] there are no non-existent things. Are any of these
illegitilmate
> inferences from what you've said ?
RP's present self: The words 'thingness' and the word 'existent,' used
as a noun, are pieces of jargon I don't know how to use. If Mike wants
to translate what I said this way, then, I will have to say that [2]
and [4] are indeed illegitimate inferences from what I've said. As for
[1] I again must apologize for not understanding what it is to _be_ a
thing (as opposed to being a chair or a thought or a whiff of perfume)
all by itself; so again, I don't accept this as an inference from what
I said.
My acceptance of the famous reply 'Everything,' to the question 'What
is there?' might seem to commit me to [3], but I'm by now wary of
Mike's own ontological commitment to what he calls things…still, I'll
accept it with reservation, because I'm a semi-nice guy. As for [5],
the sentence is ambiguous between something like an assertion about
amphibious tigers, of which there are none, and an assertion about
Chasean 'things,' regarded as divorceable from the variously many
items that we might refer to as 'things.'
M.C. As you suspect, I think 1-5 imply one another mutually. You've
also noted where this is all going : the question of the ontological
status of fictional beings and other beings/things that do not have a
concrete, material, tangible, spatio-temporal existence.
<snip>
My easy-going self:
>> There are ideas. Are they things? Well, do you understand the
>> sentences 'There are, after all, such things as ideas,' and 'Ideas
are
>> things which are implanted in us by hypnosis,' or do you only
>> understand them when the word 'things' is removed, as in 'There are
>> ideas'? ('And what sort of thing is an idea?')
> M.C.:
Although I'm not terribly sure of my ground here (whatever happened
> to answers like "yes" or "no"?) I'm going to assume Robert is saying
> "yes, ideas are things" here. From what we've seen above, that means
> ideas exist. And since Robert has not say anything different,
despite my
> request that he clarify whether or not there are different types of
> existence, one has no choice but to conclude that, for Robert, ideas
> exist in precisely the same ways as rocks, chairs, and the current
> President of the U.S.
Me, now:
To say that you have no choice is disingenuous. I don't follow talk
about 'the ways' in which things exist, or talk about 'kinds of
existence.' What will one have discovered if one discovers that
(ordinary) ideas are 'things'?
M.C. Gosh, I don't know : why don't we think about it and try to find
out : our as Socrates might have been made to say by Plato : why don't
we follow the logos and see shere it takes us ? If ideas are things,
for one thing, then we will have enlarged our category of thingness to
include at least some elements that are non-concrete, i.e.
non-spatio-temporal and immaterial. That may not seem like much, but
it's quite a bit better than nothing.
I've said there are ideas. ('Are there ideas? Answer yes or no.'
'Yes.')
M.C. Great. Things therefore exist, and hence they are existents. And I
take it we can at least entertain the possibility that they are things.
<snip>
Dear Amateur Philosophailleur,
Of course there is love and there is anger and there is laziness and
there are lapses of intention and there are misspellings and uncrossed
t's and gleams in a young girl's eye. What I am denying is that they
can, that any of them can, be set aside in such a way that they
persist, subsist, exist, or be, or para-exist, or reside somewhere,
either in logical space, Newtonian space, or Riemannean space,
independently of their instances. There is love, but there is no Love.
M.C. Thanks, Robert, for a very clear statment of your position.
> M.C. My own thoughts? I would say that there are, like the Greeks
> thought, probably different types of existence. I would say that
rocks, chimaeras, the current King of France, and Justice, all of
which the Greeks could have called *pragma*, "thing" - all exist, but
they exist in *very* different ways than rocks and the current
President. I believe that the relations between thingness, existence
and ideas are extremely difficult and philosophically important, as is
witnessed by the entire history of philosophy in general and the
thought of someone Avicenna in particular. I also believe that Robert
has not answered any of my questions.
Me: Thanks. I will, to the extent I understand it, have to disagree
with Mike on the first point about different types of existence. I
think that in Russell v. Meinong, Russell won, and won neatly and
fairly.
M.C. I hope I may be permitted to disagree. Russell had Meinong on the
ropes in the early rounds, but Meinong kept going to the body and using
his jab effectively. Late in the fight, as Russell tired, Meinong hit
him with several combinations followed by a straight right that clearly
hurt his adversary and opened a nasty cut above his left eye. In
between rounds, Russell's corner was able to stop the bleeding, but
when the bell rang for the 12th round his legs were rubbery. Russell
was able to clutch and grab for the rest of the fight, but in my view
Meinong's determination and grit won the day. To be sure, the
scorecards gave Russell a slight advantage at the end of the day, but
since the judges were all Oxford dons, the result may be viewed as open
to question.
But I wouldn't want to appeal to authority, and in any event I would
have said what I said even if I hadn't read 'On Denoting.' Again, I
would have to disagree about what 'the entire history of philosophy'
reveals about the 'relations between thingness, existence, and ideas,'
but this is a scholarly point, and Mike is the scholar here. (It's
obvious I know nothing, even second hand, about Avicenna.) It is
interesting though that scholarship seems to inhibit one from dealing
with philosophical issues in plain words, and disheartening to find
one's own attempts at clear expression transmuted and transformed by
the insertion of references to 'thingness,' 'existents,' into
paraphrases of them. So,
I clearly have failed at saying anything.
M.C. There may be times, I suppose, when what one interlocutor
considers as "attempts at clear expression" may appear to the other
interloctuor to be attempts to avoid answering certain questions that
are not, in fact, all that hard to understand. Bit who's to say? We
are, to some extent, operating in different language-games here, which
may or may not be ultimately commensurable.
The charge that I have not answered any of Mike's questions stems from
his putting words in my mouth and allowing these substitutions to
behave in ways that distort my meaning and make it difficult to know
which way to proceed.
M.C. Putting words into your mouth, of attempting to deduce the
implications of what you in fact said? Granted, the line is a thin
one, and we may once again have to do here with what is mainly a matter
of perspective.
I have answered the questions I understood.
M.C.:
The questions remain, although they are easily dismissed as silly :
what does it mean for something to exist, or to be a thing? What is the
ontological status of non-existent and/or physical objects ? If they
are
simply "no thing", then how can we make true statements about them ? Do
universal ideas exist? Why or why not, and in what sense? What
precisely
*is* the difference between the mode of existence of something like
beauty and that of a rock?
Me, in the arms of Metamorpheus:
What sort of answer would you accept to your own questions?
M.C. Any kind, as long as they're in good faith. And throughout this
post, they clearly are.
The question of what it is to exist seems to be allied with the
question of what it is to be a thing.
M.C. Yes, very much so; I believe this is key.
To the former, I would say that to say that something exists is to say
that there are things answering a certain description
(a sober use of 'things,' not meant to do any ontological lifting).
That is, to me, the question 'Do x's exist?' is just the question:
'Are there x's?' So that, e.g., 'Do fictional characters exist?' has
(for Mike, I think), the unexciting answer, 'Yes, there are fictional
characters.'
I must leave questions about 'modes of existence' to the experts. The
hoary question of how we can speak of that-which-is-not, was solved
decisively by Russell, nearly 100 years ago. I think that this
entitles Bertie to be considered a figure in the history of Western
philosophy, if that matters at all.
M.C. Clearly, Russell was a figure in the history of Western
philosophy. That does not mean that he exhausted the sum total of
everything interesting that can be said on the subject. It does not
even mean he was right.
M.C.:
> I don't claim to have the answers : all I claim is that the answers
> are neither self-evident nor, at least potentially, uninteresting.
Me:
Of course the answers aren't self-evident; the answers rest on
argument and and meaning and evidence. No genuine philosophical
problem is uninteresting.
M.C. Couldn't have said it better myself
I believe by now it is bedtime in Paris. I thank Mike for provoking me
to think.
M.C. Thanks to Robert for doing likewise.
I still no doubt owe him an explanation of why this kind of stuff
interests me as a historian of philosophy. In the debate between Plato
and Aristotle, Porphyry (the dude I'm most interested in) appears to
have attempted to reconcile both Platonic-Realist and
Aristotelian-nominalist approaches to the problem of universals,
combining an abstractionist-conceptualist approach with some version of
realism. This is pretty hard to pull off, and we know little about it,
especially since most of P.'s work is now lost. I now think some of
P''s thought may be recovered by means of the philosophy of Avicenna,
who may be developing and/or developing Porphyrian ideas. The main
problem with abstractionism is, of course : if we get our universal
ideas by abstraction from sensible particulars, then whence do we get
our ideas of, say, the Phoenix, other fictional characters, or, even
more troubling, of things like infinity which can never exist in
actuality. To answer these questions, Avicenna developed the idea of
the indifference of essence to existence : for him, something like
infinity has a perfectly well-defined notion, and this notion is a
thing : and yet there is no existent that is infinite (i.e; nothing
that exists is infinite). In other words, Essences (like "Infinite")
can "exist" without being existent(s) , i.e. without having a concrete,
material, spatio-temporal existent. In other words, love, like
infinity, can indeed exist independently of whether it/they have any
instantiations, and yet this doctrine avoids making Love or Infinity
into Platonic forms.
Is this doctrine true? I don't know, but I think the issue remains
open. Did it have historical influence? Most definitely ; from Duns
Scotus to Deleuze in his Logique du sens, not to mention Meinong, whose
head is bloody but unbowed.
It is unlikely anybody reading this will be inspired to learn more
about the question. If they are, I recommend Alain de Libera, La
querelle des universaux: De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge, Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1996, with the luminous review by Daniel
Heller-Roazen in Modern Language Notes Volume 113, Number 5, December
1998 (Comparative Literature Issue), pp. 1193-1196 (which I'll be happy
to send to interested parties).
Best, Mike.
P.S. What is thought? I dunno, and it's lunchtime. Primum fari, deinde
philosophari.
Michael Chase
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76
7, rue Guy Moquet
Villejuif 94801
France
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