One of the central questions of modern and contemporary philosophy is “What exists?” Do I exist? Does the material world exist? Does the soul exist? Do universals exist? Do numbers exist? Does God exist? Ancient and medieval philosophy, however, was not very concerned with these sorts of questions. Although these sorts of questions were raised and discussed on occasion, the Platonic and Aristotelian outlooks that dominated ancient and medieval philosophy in the West generally granted existence (or more precisely, being) to anything about which true and false statements could be made. The questions with which ancient and medieval philosophy were most concerned were not questions of existence, but rather questions of grounding, of which beings were more fundamental, and on what it means to be a being.1 In this essay, I want to reflect on one facet of this basic difference in orientation between modern and pre-modern notions of reality. I want to focus on the difference in the way that the ancients and medievals, on the one hand, and us moderns, on the other, tend to think about what it means for something “to exist” or “to be.” While I will mainly talk about how “existence” or “being” is employed in the philosophical thinking typical of the pre-modern and modern West, I think reflecting on these issues will help us better understand key differences between pre-modern and modern worldviews in general.
Recent scholarly work on the history of philosophy has highlighted the contrast between the notions of existence or being found in ancient Greek philosophy and those found in modern philosophy.2 Perhaps the simplest way to characterize the difference is to say that the ancients and their medieval followers had no concept of “existence” at all, but instead a concept of “being.” Such a claim is certainly an oversimplification, but I think it’s a good starting point. And it is this starting point that I want to develop in this essay. Hence, in this essay I will contrast what I will call the “modern notion of existence” with the “pre-modern notion of being.” Although there are modern philosophers who have a notion of existence closer to the pre-modern notion of being and pre-modern philosophers who have a notion of being closer to the modern notion of existence, contrasting the two, and calling the pre-modern notion “being” and the modern notion “existence,” is helpful for getting one’s bearings and for sketching a basic, albeit oversimplified, outline of this topic, as I hope to do in this essay. I have divided this essay into two parts. In the first part, I outline the modern notion of existence. In the second part, I discuss the pre-modern notion of being.
1. Existence
The concept of existence we are familiar with in the modern world is generally a binary concept. A given thing either exists or does not exist. Horses, for example, exist, while unicorns do not exist. Wolves exist, but werewolves do not. What we generally seem to mean by claiming that horses and wolves exist, whereas unicorns and werewolves do not, is that horses and wolves are present in the natural world we perceive around us, while unicorns and werewolves are not. In other words, horses and wolves are the sorts of animals we can find living in the spatial and temporal world we perceive, while unicorns and werewolves are not. On the basis of this analysis, then, we can say that to claim that something exists is to claim that it is present (i.e., can be found) in some place and at some time in the world we perceive around us. Thus, to claim that dinosaurs existed is to claim that they can be found in the past in various places on earth. To claim that centaurs do not and never did exist, in contrast, is to claim that they cannot be found now and cannot be found in the past in any location in the world we perceive around us.
Although the concept of existence just outlined is coherent enough, people seem to want it to do more than the limits just described will permit. This tendency to take the concept of existence beyond its initial limits is and has always been widespread within modern culture. One obvious case in which we use the notion of existence beyond the limits described above is in claims like “God exists” and “God does not exist.” We generally think that both make sense, but one is true and the other is false. But if to exist is to be present in the world of space and time we perceive around us, then God, at least as traditionally understood, by definition would not exist. God, as traditionally understood, is not a being that can be found in space and time, but rather the very source and creator of space, time, and all the beings within them. So when those holding traditional religious views say “God exists,” they seem to be using a concept of “to exist” whose meaning includes more than presence in the space and time of the world we perceive around us. Something like this wider sense of “existence” also seems to be at play when we say that unicorns exist as fictional creatures or that other things, such as ideals or concepts that don’t have a clear location in the space or time3 of the world we perceive around us, exist in some sense. Thus, the modern notion of existence is problematic. On the one hand, we have the narrower sense of “existence,” where “to exist” means to be present in the space and time of the world we perceive. On the other hand, however, we frequently feel the need to go beyond this narrower sense of “existence,” when we ask whether God exists and when we speak about things that don’t exist in the world we perceive, but nevertheless want to say that they exist as fictional creatures, as ideas, as social constructs, and so on.
2. Being
Let’s move now to the pre-modern notion of being. By the “pre-modern notion of being” I mean the notion of being found in the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition that dominated pre-modern Western philosophy. That notion of being is non-binary, in contrast to our modern notion of existence. In other words, being has no opposite.4 Non-being is not the opposite of being but a kind or mode of being. Moreover, being is an analogical concept: things are or have being in different ways, such that something can be a being in one way and not a being in another way. Perhaps the easiest way to get a sense of the pre-modern notion of being is to think of it as what we mean whenever we say the word “is.” Anything that “is” something is a being of some sort. Since we can say “is” of literally anything about which we can make true or false statements, anything about which we can make true or false statements is a being in some sense. This is why being has no opposite. Instead, as the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides famously argued, “you can neither know what is not nor speak of it, for it is not possible [to do either].”5 Anything that is something is, and anything that is is something.
If we go back the entities discussed above—horses, unicorns, wolves, and werewolves—all of them are and are beings. We know they are beings because we can speak of them and say true and false things about them. The important question, therefore, is not whether they are, but what kind of beings they are. Are horses a kind of animal we can find living in the world of space and time we perceive around us? Or are they fictional creatures invented by the human imagination? What about unicorns? Are they a kind of animal we can find living in the world of space and time we perceive around us? Or are they fictional creatures? What about God? Is God the creator and source of all beings? Or is God an idea created by human beings? Or is God neither of these, but instead something else? We can take that God is as a given.6 The question is what God is.
If we want to translate the pre-modern notion of being or is using the verb “to exist,” then we must understand “to exist” as “to exist as something.” If we want to use the word “exists,” then we can say that unicorns, for example, exist as fictional creatures, while horses exist as a kind of mammal we find living in the world of space and time that we perceive around us. If we want to use the phrase “to exist” to translate the pre-modern notion of “to be,” then everything we can conceive of or speak about at all exists. Hence, the question becomes not whether something exists, but what that something exists as.
3. Conclusion
I think the pre-modern notion of being has a number of advantages over the modern notion of existence. The most obvious, perhaps, is that the pre-modern notion of being would enable us to escape from the intractable and interminable arguments about whether or not things like God, souls, ideals, abstract objects, universals, natures of things, goodness, evil, and so on exist. These arguments plague modern philosophy and culture. But they don’t need to. Instead of arguing about whether or not such things exist, we could have a much more promising and fruitful dialogue about what things (like God, souls, ideals, and so on) are, or what they exist as.
Notes:
1. Cf. Jonathan Schaffer, “On What Grounds What,” in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. David Manley, David J. Chalmers, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 347–383.
2. See esp. Charles Kahn, “Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy,” Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 58, no. 4 (1976): 323–34; Lesley Brown, “Being in the Sophist: A Syntactical Enquiry,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 4 (1986): 49–70; Lesley Brown, “The Verb ‘to Be’ in Greek Philosophy,” in Language, ed. Stephen Everson, Companions to Ancient Thought 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Charles Kahn, The Verb “Be” In Ancient Greek (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003); Charles Kahn, Essays on Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Paul DiRado and Michael Wiitala, “In What Sense Does the One Exist? Existence and Hypostasis in Plotinus,” in Platonic Pathways: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, ed. John F. Finamore and Danielle A. Layne (Gloucestershire, UK: The Prometheus Trust, 2018), 77–92.
3. For instance, propositions, numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, et al.
4. See esp. Plato Sophist 257b-c; Aristotle, Categories 5.3b25-30.
5. This passage is taken from fragment 2 of Parmenides’ poem. The translation is my own. For the Greek text on which it is based, see A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides, revised ed. (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2009), 57.
6. When St. Thomas Aquinas asks “whether God is” (an Deus sit) in Summa Theologica I.Q2.A3, I take him to be asking whether or not there is some one determinate being that “everyone calls God” (quod omnes dicunt Deum; Aquinas ends each of his famous five ways with some variant of this claim). In my view, translating an Deus sit as “whether God exists” is misleading given the binary nature of the modern notion of existence. The translation “whether God is” is both more literal (sit is a form of the verb “to be”) and more accurate.