Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split.  Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence.  Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller.  Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory?  Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth.   They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things.  Bereft of  a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension.  Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence.  A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins.  The analysts, of course, will not  admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory.  They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic.  (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling.  Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue.  I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist.  I aim at clarity, not agreement.  I will be happy if I can achieve  an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing.  When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea.  The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard)  logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery.  Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s).  To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.'  If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen -- the head honcho of the thin theorists -- want to avoid 'exist(s)'?  Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity.  He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble?  Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake.  He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory:  existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root  -- but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts.  That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself."  This invites mockery from the thin theorists.  What?  Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?!  [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.]  To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying.  But  of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark.  Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent.  But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items.  The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden,  in 'The sea is green.'   'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more.  The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence.  Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists.   The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists.  This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence.  We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things.  Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift.  But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist  does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic.  Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.  

Comments

[Billy]

When you say "The sea is green", by "the sea", are you referring to a single sea, or to the ideal object Plato talks of? A particular sea that one can point to of course exists, but the abstract idea of a sea, although it can be said to have properties, doesn't really exist, does it?

[Bill Vallicella]

I am referring to a concrete body of water, not to a Platonic object.

[Malcolm D. Chisholm Ph.D., M.A. (Oxon.)]

Dear Mr Vallicella,

When you say "that existence is real not merely logical", what do you mean by "real"? This is a big problem in my work, which is data management in the financial services industry (Wall Street). I work with databases that manage mortgages, claims, insurance policies, credit default swaps, etc. These are all non-material objects that only seem to exist insofar as they are represented in the data I have to manage. My colleagues are very uneasy about this, as they equate "real" with material objects. I have sometimes heard my colleagues say "none of this is real" and "it's all a shell game", and I think this affects their attitudes about what is ethical in financial services - i.e. if something is not "real", then ethics are irrelevant.

Thank you for any help.

Malcolm Chisholm

[Edward Ockham]

You parse 'The sea is green' into "the sea exists & the sea (is) green". Where the bracketed 'is' signifies the 'pure copula' presumably not the impure copula signified by the unbracketed 'is'.

Why would the thin theorist have a problem with that? On the contrary, that is exactly what the thin theorist is saying. He is saying that the (impure) copula doesn't only join concepts together (as the pure copula does), but that the concepts thus joined are instantiated.

[Edward Ockham]

@Malcolm: "These are all non-material objects that only seem to exist insofar as they are represented in the data I have to manage."

The transaction data in your database represents contracts (say, a contract or promise by one institution to pay out to another on default of a credit instrument). Insofar as a promise or contract is real, the data represents something real.

If these people are arguing that it is OK to renege on a promise because a promise isn't real, then that indicates to me a serious defect in their logic.

[Account Deleted]

Malcolm,

You are raising a wonderful question, one which packs many serious issues. I hope Bill will address some of them. I hope I can also contribute something in the near future.

[Edward Ockham]

@Peter - I don't see any serious philosophical issues raised by Malcolm. As I said above, a promise is real - even the promissor does not intend to keep it. Indeed, the fact of not having kept 'it' proves its reality.

A contract is a promise or agreement that is legally enforceable. Usually by means of evidence of the contract, but we shouldn't confuse the evidence (a physical document which writing on) with the contract itself. If the representation of the contract (again, not to be confused with the contract) is deleted, accidentally or maliciously, from the database, there still remains the notes and records of the other party. If the other party loses the evidence as well, then of course there is no evidence of the contract any more. But its reality and existence remains unchanged, until legally terminated.

[Bill Vallicella]

Mr Chisholm,

Thanks for your comment/question. First, of all I agree with what Ed Ockham says above.

Second, it would be a mistake to identify the real with the physical or material. Certainly one should not just assume ab initio that real = material. There are any number of putative counterexamples. Consider the original score of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, or any copy of it. Those are just pieces of paper with marks on them, and thus physical. But the symphony itself is an ideal or abstract object that cannot be identified with any of its paper representations, nor with any of its performances. I don't have the time to spell this out in detail, but perhaps you catch my drift.

The same holds for contracts and other financial instruments.

Or consider a mental state. If I am thinking about the contract I just signed, that mental act, if physical, would have to be identical to some complex brain state. But there are very powerful, and in my opinion irrefutable, arguments to show that no mental state can be identical to any physical state. This yields a second example of something real that is not physical/material.

And then there are mathematical sets. The set {Earth, Moon} has two members each of which is a massive physical object. But the set is not a physical object. Now my friend 'London Ed' Ockham, nominalist that he is, disagrees with me about math. sets -- but this is at least a putative counterexample to the identification of the real with the physical.

There are other examples as well.

There are fascinating questions about the ontology of mortgages, insurrance policies, and other financial instruments. In some sense we create these nonmaterial objects, but once created they have a status independent of us. They come to reside in K. Popper's World 3.

One mistake to avoid is the fallacious inference from 'X is an immaterial object' to 'X is not real.'

YOur question can be exfoliated in about twenty different directions. It would take a series of separate posts to even start to get clear about all the issues. I take it you are not primarily interested in the ontology of financial instruments so much as the underlying ethical questions insofar as these are affected by our understanding of the nature of financial instruments.

What do I mean when I say the existence of the sea is real as opposed to merely logical? I mean that the existence of the sea is not a 'property' it has only relative to us and our language as it would be if the existence of the sea were merely the being-instantiated of our concept *sea.*

[Bill Vallicella]

Ed,

In my response to Chisholm i said I agreed with what you said, but now I have to disagree with you. There are all sorts of phil. questions alluded to, if not explicitly posed, by Malcolm's remarks.

You don't like the word 'ontology,' but I'll use it anyway. One question concerns the ontology of financial instruments. What exactly is a mortgage, for example? They can be bought and sold. What exactly is being bought and sold? Not something physical. What then? How describe it properly?

Then there are ethical questions. When the government prints money -- money that is not 'tied' to any such standard as gold -- is it counterfeiting its own currency?

[Bill Vallicella]

Ed,

You rightly say that the evidence of a contract should not be confused with the contract. Of course. Even if all the physical evidence of the contract ceases to exist, there is still the contract. Surely one can reasonably ask what the status of that contract is given that it is not the status of a physical object or objects. Does it have a merely mental existence? And how account for its intersubjective character? Does it have a Popperian World 3 status, or a even a full-blooded Platonic status?

You say that a contract is legally enforceable. Right, but how can it be legally enforceable if all the physical evidence has been destroyed? Solve this aporetic triad:

1. Every contract, by its very nature, is legally enforceable.
2. No contract is legally enforceable if the physical evidence thereof does not exist.
3. Every contract is distinct from all of its physical embodiments.

You have committed yourself to all three limbs, but they can't all be true.

So at seems that here is one philosophical problem!

[Edward Ockham]

1. Every contract, by its very nature, is legally enforceable.
2. No contract is legally enforceable if the physical evidence thereof does not exist.
3. Every contract is distinct from all of its physical embodiments.

Something for the weekend, I think.

[Alfredo]

@Edward Ockham: Suppose the thin theorist accepts Dr. Vallicella's analysis where 'a is F' is analyzable in terms of 'a exists and a (is) F.' How would you understand singular existentials like the 'a exists' here? In terms of some further predication like 'a is A', where A refers to the haecceity of a? It seems you must do this to preserve the instantiation account. For existence is reducible to instantiation, instantiation is expressed by the copula, so existence statements like these should be reducible to copulative statements. But in that case, doesn't the thin theory turn out circular, in spite of all the protestations to the contrary thus far? For, accepting Dr. Vallicella's parsing, 'a is A' would have to be explicable as 'a exists and a (is) A'. So we appear to end up explicating 'a exists' as 'a exists and a (is) A'. But we were trying to give an informative analysis of 'a exists' in terms of 'a is A'. And thus we have the circularity.

On the thick theory on the other hand 'exists' is a genuine first-order predicate, so no circularity here. This might be one way in which Vallicella's analysis is congenial to the thick theory but not the thin.

[Alfredo]

Or am I confused here about instantiation?

[Bill Vallicella]

Hi Alfredo,

You are not confused at all. I think what you have said is exactly right.

The point I am making is that 'exists' cannot be eliminated by replacing it with a purely predicative use of the copula. The equivalence of 'Socrates is white' and 'White Socrates exists' presupposes that 'is' expresses both existence and predication.

Ed might respond by saying that 'is' expresses only predication, but that existence comes in via the fact that 'Socrates' has a referent.

To which I respond: if 'Socrates' has a referent, then it has an existing referent, in which case it is true that Socrates exists.

It is also worth noting that 'White Socrates exists' involves copulation -- it is just that the copulative tie is expressed by the immediate juxtaposition of 'white' and 'Socrates.'

A trickier question is whether 'Human Socrates exists' involves any copulation given that it is of the essence of S. to be human.

[Edward Ockham]

@Alfredo – this problem has been discussed here more than once. I have argued that there are only two options for the thin theorist. (1) Classical 'direct reference' – we assume a fundamental difference between subject terms and predicate terms. Predicate terms like 'dodo' can be satisfied or not, and so it is appropriate to attach an existence predicate to the predicate, e.g. 'dodos exist', meaning that the predicate 'dodo' is satisfied. But subject terms cannot be meaningful without an existing subject, and to 'a exists' is either trivial or meaningless. (2) Admit singular concepts, so – as with your example – we allow 'A exists' as true when the singular concept signified by 'A' is satisfied, otherwise not.

Bill and I are broadly agreed that these are the only options. I support (2) but Bill disagrees, and we have argued about it for ages.

[Edward Ockham]

Returning to the actual topic of the post (novelists attempting to do philosophy) I have a splendid post here about what is proper to philosophy, and what is proper to poets and novelists and other visionaries.

[David Brightly]

Bill,

Rather than a temporary aphasia---an inability to speak---I think we could see Roquentin's experience as an episode of an agnosia---an inability to recognise. For he says that the diversity of things, their individuality, melts away. Root, gate, bench, etc, 'disappear', though he is not left seeing nothing. It is as if he becomes unable to distinguish objects one from another and recognise what they are. Instead he sees undifferentiated stuff---he actually uses the bulk term 'masses'---normally 'clothed' in individuality but now 'naked'. I imagine that this could be a quite disturbing, possibly nauseating, experience. And, of course, if he cannot recognise objects he cannot say what they are. If this is right then Roquentin hasn't gained any deep insight into the nature of existence. He has merely lost an ordinary cognitive function.

[Bill Vallicella]

David,

Thanks for introducing me to the term 'agnosia.'

One time I was waiting for an elevator and I was staring at the word 'Up' and repeating it to myself. It lost its meaning and became a mere physical sign. I didn't lose my ability to speak or understand but what occurred is something analogous to aphasia.

Before the quotation I gave, there is this: "The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface."

But 'agnosia' may be better.

It may be that certain absnormal mental conditions do in fact reveal truths normally hidden.