Maverick Philosopher

The Fictional and the Merely Possible

"To be or not to be, that is the question."  Or at least that is one question.  Another is whether Hamlet, that very individual, might have been actual.

It is a mistake to conflate the fictional and the merely possible. Hamlet, for example, is a fictional individual, the central character and eponym of the Shakespearean  play.  Being fictional, he does not actually exist.  But one might be tempted to suppose  that while there is no man Hamlet in actuality, there could have been, that Hamlet is a possible individual.  But far from being possible, Hamlet is impossible.  Or so I shall argue.

First we need to agree on some definitions.

D1. x is impossible =_df x cannot exist, i.e., x  is necessarily nonexistent.

D2. x is incomplete =_df  there is a property P such that x is indeterminate with respect to P, i.e., it is not the case that x instantiates P and it is not the case that x does not instantiate P.

The Main Argument

1. Hamlet is an incomplete object.  He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name.  It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't. 

2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.

Therefore

3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)

Therefore

4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)

The reasoning is correct and premise (1) is surely true.  If you are inclined to reject (2), claiming that it does not hold for quantum phenomena, I will simply sidestep that whole can of worms by inserting 'macroscopic' or 'mesoscopic' or some other suitable qualifier between 'an' and 'incomplete.'

Note that Hamlet is impossible even if the properties he is ascribed in the play are members of  a logically consistent set.  One could say, with a whiff of paradox, that Hamlet is impossible despite the fact that his properties are compossible.  His impossibility follows from his incompleteness.  What this shows is that not every impossible object harbors internal contradiction.  So there there are at least two types of impossibilia, those whose impossibility derives from inconsistency and those whose impossibility derives from incompleteness.  To be admitted to the elite corps of the actual, one must satisfy both LNC and LEM.  That the impossible needn't be internally contradictory is an insight I owe to Daniel Novotny who kindly sent me a free copy of his excellent book on the scholasticism of the Baroque era entitled, Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel (Fordham 2013). I am indebted in particular to his discussion on p. 108.

Objection: "Hamlet is possible; it is just that his actualization would have to consist in his completion. Surely God could actualize Shakespeare's Hamlet (the prince, not the play) by appropriately supplementing his property set."

Reply:  Suppose God were to try to actualize Hamlet, the very same individual encountered in the play.  To do so, God would have to supplement Hamlet's property set, bringing it to completeness.  For only that which is wholly determinate can exist in (macroscopic) actuality.  But there is more than one way to effect this supplementation.  For example, if the fictional Hamlet is indeterminate with respect to whether or not he takes his eggs with hot sauce, an actual Hamlet cannot be. He either eats egggs or he doesn't, and he either takes them with hot sauce or he doesn't. 

Let AH1 be hot-sauce Hamlet and AH2 non-hot-sauce Hamlet.  Both are complete.  Let FH be the incomplete fictional individual in the play.

We may now argue as follows.

If God brings about the actuality of  both AH1 and AH2, then, since they are numerically distinct, neither of them can be identical to FH. But God must actualize one or the other if FH is to become actual. If God actualizes one but not the other, then it is possible that he actualize the other but not the the one.  But then the actualization of either is contingent.  Thus if God actualizes FH as AH1, then, since he could just as well have actualized AH2 as FH, the identity of FH with AH1 is contingent.  But identity cannot be contingent: if x = y, then necessarily x = y.  Therefore, God can actualize neither and fictional Hamlet is impossibly actual, i.e., impossible.

Here is a third consideration.  It seems to be part of the very sense of the phrase 'fictional individual' that such individuals be, well, fictional, that is, irreal or unreal.  Now the real includes not only the actual and the necessary, but that which is really possible albeit unactual.  Thus real possibilities cannot be made up by minds and so cannot be fictional.  Therefore Hamlet, as a fictional being, is not a possible being.

According to Novotny, "Suarez and other Baroque scholastic authors seem to assume without question that consistent fictions, such as Hamlet, might become real beings. This implies that Hamlet is a possible being and  that therefore he is a real being. [. . .] For several reasons I do not think that a consistent fiction as such is a real possible being." (108)

I agree, and the arguments above are my way of fleshing out Novotny's misgivings.

Addendum (21 November)

The original main argument above is invalid as a commenter points out.  Here is

The Main Argument Repaired

0. Necessarily, for every x, if x is a fictum of a finite mind, then x is incomplete.

0*. Necessarily, Hamlet is a fictum of a finite mind, Shakespeare's.  (That very fictional individual could not have been the fictum of any other mind.)

Therefore

1. Necessarily, Hamlet is an incomplete object.  He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name.  It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't.  (from 0, 0*)

2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.

Therefore

3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)

Therefore

4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)

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Some Favorable Citations of Suárez by Schopenhauer

During a delightful rural ramble outside Prague, I mentioned to Daniel Novotný that Arthur Schopenhauer had a high opinion of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617).  Daniel said he had heard as much but wondered where Schopenhauer had indicated  his high regard for the scholastic philosopher.  Here are some passages, though I have the sense that I am overlooking a more striking quotation than any of the ones I have just now managed to locate.

1. There is a place in the early On the Four-Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason where Schopenhauer is speaking of the four causes mentioned by Aristotle at Analyt. Post., II, 11.  Schopenhauer describes the Metaphysical Disputations of Suárez as diesem wahren Kompendio der Scholastik, "this true compendium of scholasticism."  (Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, Zweites Kapitel, sec. 6, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, p. 15.)

If the index to Schopenhauer's magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (two vols., tr. Payne, Dover) is to be trusted, there are exactly six references to Suárez all of them in the first volume.

2."It was known even to the scholastics [note 24: Suarez, Disputationes metaphysicae, disp. III, sect. 3, tit. 3.] that, because the syllogism requires two premisses, no science can start from a single main principle that cannot be deduced further; on the contrary, it must have several, at least two, of these." (p. 63)

3. "Consequently, time and space are the principium individuationis, the subject of so many subtleties and disputes among the scholastics which are found collected in Suárez (Disp. 5, sect. 3)." (p. 113)

4. "That which for man is his unfathomable character, presupposed in every explanation of his actions from motives, is for every inorganic body precisely its essential quality, its manner of acting, whose manifestations are brought about by impressions from outside, while it itself, on the other hand, is determined by nothing outside it, and is thus inexplicable.  Its particular manifestations, by which alone it becomes visible, are subject to the principle of sufficient reason; it itself is groundless.  In essence this was correctly understood by the scholastics, who described it as forma substantialis. (Cf. Suárez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, disp. XV, sect. 1.) (p. 124)

5. P. 152, fn. 21: "The scholastics therefore said quite rightly: Causa finalis movet non secundum suum esse reale, sed secundum esse cognitum.  See Suárez, Disp. Metaph., disp. XXIII, sect. 7 et 8. ('The final cause operates not according to its real being, but only according to its being as that is known.' [Tr.]"

6. The following excerpt is from "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy," an appendix to the first volume of WWR, pp. 422-423, emphasis added):

We may regard as the third point the complete overthrow of the Scholastic philosophy, a name by which I wish here to denote generally the whole period beginning with Augustine, the Church Father, and ending just before Kant. For the chief characteristic of Scholasticism is, indeed, that which is very correctly stated by Tennemann, the guardianship of the prevailing national religion over philosophy, which had really nothing left for it to do but to prove and embellish the cardinal dogmas prescribed [pg 013] to it by religion. The Schoolmen proper, down to Suárez, confess this openly; the succeeding philosophers do it more unconsciously, or at least unavowedly. It is held that Scholastic philosophy only extends to about a hundred years before Descartes, and that then with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such investigation, however, is in fact not to be attributed to Descartes and his successors,  but only an appearance of it, and in any case an effort after it. Descartes was a man of supreme ability, and if we take account of the age he lived in, he accomplished a great deal. But if we set aside this consideration and measure him with reference to the freeing of thought from all fetters and the commencement of a new period of untrammelled original investigation with which he is credited, we are obliged to find that with his scepticism still lacking in true earnestness, and thus abating and passing away so quickly and so completely,  he has the appearance of wishing to discard all at once all the fetters of the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation; but does so only apparently and for a moment, in order to assume them again  and hold them all the more firmly; and it is just the same  with all his successors down to Kant.

7. "The word 'Idea,' first introduced by Plato, has retained ever since, through twenty-two centuries, the meaning in which he used it; for not only all the philosophers of antiquity, but also all of the scholastics, and even the Church Fathers, and the theologians of the Middle Ages, used it only with that Platonic meaning, in the sense of the Latin word exemplar, as Suárez expressly mentions in his twenty-fifth Disputation, Sect. 1." (p. 488)

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