Plato, Power, and Existence

The return of the Eleatic Stranger.

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Theme music:  Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger

EmmyLou Harris, Hello Stranger

Comments

[john doran]

Well said, and for whatever it's worth, I agree with you.

My own philosophical predilections lead me to answer the question "what is it to exist?", with "to be willed to do so by God."

My go-to on the subject has always been (perhaps unsurprisingly) Aquinas' De Ente et Essentia.

The late Fr. Joseph Owens also wrote with great depth and beauty on the subject.

Reading the writings of the usual Analytic suspects has always left me hungry; like surviving on MRE's, breakfast, lunch, and dinner: the basics are mostly there, but there's definitely something missing.

[EG]

Hi Bill,

As usual, you like treading deep waters.

Some quick remarks, you write:

"For an item to be capable of acting or being acted upon it must 'be there' or exist! 'Before' it can be a doer or a done-to it must exist. (The 'before' is to be taken logically not temporally.) The nonexistent cannot act or be acted upon."

At first impression, I want you to further clarify about your parenthetical constraint. There is, of course, the clear sense that logic (simpliciter) does not depend directly on the temporal order of propositions,. But I'm not clear that order and sequence as used comparatively here, indeed I defeasibly hold the position that comparing any (existing) thing at all does not make sense outside of Time; I am proposing that this is a human (epistemic/perceptual) constraint on our Being (as we are in Space-Time, or that thing so labeled, at least as far as we know/understand/perceive.)

Second, you state that the "nonexistent" cannot be acted upon, but I would suggest that genuine creation and invention are just this effective acting upon the non-existent. Said differently, and perhaps not too far from your position, the existential referent for say a 'winged-horse' is empty--it is a fictional [an ad-hoc conceptual assemblage -- and here we might have a whole separate discussion about Imagination and what it is picking out] propositional existent and thus not in the same kind of existing thing as the chair I am sitting in right now. And yet, this is also not the same thing as saying that it is nonexistent (simpliciter) or nonexistent by logical impossibility.

At any rate, I am inclined to believe the story goes much deeper than merely existence and non-existence, which I think you (in part/spirit) agree with with your conclusion about the basicness of existence. If this is as proposed, we can now better understand Plato as trying to convey a deeper truth with his story about the Forms, and then later explorers like Kant too in his distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal.

(One wonders, or at least I do, whether at these heights/depths/limits there is a kind of lensing that make these insights simply invisible or distorted in some critical way that makes it hard to hold in ones head, in the way that some concrete physical hunk of stuff impresses you when it smacks you in the face, and so invisible or distorted it has less Reality and Existence than the chair you sit in or food stuff you consume or that feeling from a cherished loved, etc.)

[EG]

Also, are you ever going to publish a revision and update on your book? I know there have been many nuances and details that have evolved in the years and following discussions and arguments that are no longer accurately represented in the text as published...this is perhaps that advantage that blogging brings, but in an ironically(?) less durable form.

[Dmitri]

Hi Bill

I'm trying to understand this point: "Existence, therefore, is a necessary condition of an item's being a causal agent or patient."

Let's say Bob sees a shadow which he mistakes for a patch of dirt. Or hallucinates that there is a patch of dirt. These two types of cases seem to contradict the logical necessity of existence for causing effects. Saying that seeing the shadow is necessary for the belief that there is a patch of dirt isn't correct, the actual patch of dirt could have caused it. In the case of hallucinations, such as Macbeth seeing a non-existent dagger, it is not clear what causes the perception.

Where am I wrong?

[BV]

Dmitri,

If a thing either acts or is acted upon, it must exist to act or be acted upon. In that sense, existence is a necessary condition of an item's being a causal agent or patient.

I am not following you. Suppose Macbeth hallucinates a dagger. Macbeth exists, and the hallucinatory experience exists, but the dagger does not exist. I hope you are not saying that the dagger causes the hallucinatory experience. The dagger is a merely intentional object immanent to the halluncinatory experience.

Now suppose Macbeth kicks a dagger. In this case Macbeth and the dagger must both exist for the first to kick and the second to be kicked.

[Dmitri]

Hi Bill

I am trying to apply the type/token distinction that's crucial in general but especially for mental causation theories. In your criterion: existence as a necessary condition for the item -- I guess the item is meant as a token here -- to be a causing agent or an affected item. Now in the case of misrepresentation, Bob sees a cow but believes he sees an elephant, we have a situation in which we can't, IMHO, justifiably claim that this particular existing "cow-token" was a necessary condition for Bob to see an "elephant-token". Bob could have seen an actual elephant and have the same belief token described as "There is an elephant under the tree.".

If you meant the criterion to be applied at type level -- that is to say that some existing items are necessary for there being cause-effect relationships between things at all -- it's worth specifying that explicitly for there are distinctions between token level and type level discourse as just illustrated.

No I don't think that a non-existent dagger (immediately/in an unmediated way) caused Macbeth's hallucination.

[BV]

Dmitri,

A while back you kindly brought to my attention John Cottingham's New Blackfriars article in which he makes mention of my work on existence. If you study that article you may acquire a better idea of what I am about in my Substack piece. The latter is a preliminary exercise as part of a larger response to Cottingham.

[BV]

John Doran,

Good comment. Your answer is essentially the same as the one I propose in A Paradigm Theory of Existence. My way to that answer, however, is non-Thomist. I have of course read a lot of Thomas and Joseph Owens.

>>Reading the writings of the usual Analytic suspects has always left me hungry; like surviving on MRE's, breakfast, lunch, and dinner: the basics are mostly there, but there's definitely something missing.<<

I agree. If you knock on Quine's door and ask for bread, you receive a stone: "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." I demolish that and cognate views in the early chapters of my existence book.

[Dmitri]

Hi Bill

I'll read that article thoroughly & will do my best to understand better. Still, if you have a moment to spare on the simple cases I mentioned (or at least one simple case of a cow causing an elephant-tokening thought), it would be very helpful. You are usually very good with illustrating complex thoughts with clear examples or counter-examples. Applying the necessary condition -- at a token level -- I genuinely can't see how a sight of a cow can be a necessary condition for eliciting a thought about an elephant. The fact that this situation is not only possible but frequently actually happening, like many other cases of misidentification, is undeniable.

[BV]

Dmitri,

Why are you bringing epistemology into this ontological discussion?

Consider a world W in which there are no minds and no mental representations. In W there are only concrete physical individuals. What is it for such an individual to exist? The answer I am rejecting is that the existing of x consists in x's being causally active/passive.

I am rejecting it because no x can causally interact with any y unless both x and y already exist. (Of course, 'already' here is to be understood logically-ontologically and not temporally.) Therefore, what it is for a causally active/passive thing to exist cannot be explicated in terms of its power to cause changes in another thing or to suffer a change caused by another thing.

Cottingham makes essentially the same point but in a more complicated way.

[Dmitri]

Thanks Bill. I understand the explanation as it applies in W without minds & mental representations. The misrepresentation problem I was talking about arises only with minds/intentions. The reason I brought it up: I thought that a comprehensive account of existence and causality would need to say something about epistemological puzzles that arise when minds/intentions are considered.

[BV]

>>I thought that a comprehensive account of existence and causality would need to say something about epistemological puzzles that arise when minds/intentions are considered.<<

There is sense in which that is right, Dmitri. But I still don't understand what are driving at. You say @9:05:

>>Now in the case of misrepresentation, Bob sees a cow but believes he sees an elephant, we have a situation in which we can't, IMHO, justifiably claim that this particular existing "cow-token" was a necessary condition for Bob to see an "elephant-token".<<

What does this have to do with the question that Cottingham and I are posing?

The question is whether one can provide a non-circular explication of what it is it is for an existing item to exist. It may be that you don't understand this question. But assuming you do, one answer is that to exist = to be causally active/passive. Cottingham puts it like this: "the actual existence of an object" is for it "to be capable of affecting and being affected by other objects." (6) But that answer is no good because it presupposes that the items actually exist. The explication is no good because it moves in an explanatory circle.

Winged horses and unicorns are spatiotemporal entities capable of affecting and being affected by other objects. You can easily imagine a winged horse colliding with a unicirn, thereby having a causal impact on it. But winged horses and unicorns don't exist. And yet they satisfy the explication/definition of what it is to exist. This shows that the explication/ definition fails to provide a non-circular account of what it is to exist. Cottingham uses the merely possible planet Vulcan to make the same point. (6)