Why existence does not emerge as a distinct concept in greek philosophy

lo Coase ad € of COLTA so RPA _ AE Kers vA ! b r® A A] Le Bi RENE 7 453 = Kan ca: Why Existence does not Emerge as a Distinct A Concept in Greek Philosophy* by Charles H. Kahn (Philadelphia) In the extended discussion of the concept (or concepts) of Being in Greck philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle, the theme of existence does not figure as a distinct topic for philosophical reflection. My aim here is to defend and illustrate this claim, and at the same time to suggest some of the reasons why it is that the concept of existence does not get singled out as a topic in its own right. Finally, I shall raise in a tentative way the question whether or not the neglect of this topic was necessarily a philosophical disadvantage. Let me make clear that my thesis is limited to the classic period of Greek philosophy, down to Aristotle. The situation is more complicated in Hellenistic and Neoplatonic thought, for here we find two technical terms corresponding more or less to the notion of existence: the verb hkyparchó, with its noun hyparxis, which renders “existence” in Modern Greek, and the verb hyposténat with its noun hypostasis, which corresponds to the Latin verb subsistere, and is thus a rather close cognate of exsistere. I suspect that a careful study of these Greek terms would reveal that even in their usage we find no real equivalent for our concept of existence. In any case, this later terminology of hyparxis and hypostasis plays no part in the formulation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ontology, and I shall ignore it here. My general view of the historical development is that existence in the modern sense becomes a central concept in philosophy only in the period when Greek ontology is radically revised in the light of a metaphysics of creation: that is to say, under the influence of Biblical religion. As far as I can see, this development did not take place with Augustine or with the Greek Church Fathers, who remained under the sway of classical ontology. The new metaphysics seems to have taken shape in Islamic philosophy, in the form of a radical distinction between necessary and contingent existence: between the existence of God * This paper was originally delivered on March 31, 1976 in a session on Greek ontology in the International Philosophy Conference in New York.

on the one hand, and that of the created world on the other. The old Platonic contrast between Being and Becoming, between the such?) We might summarize the modern concept of existence as the notion for which one analysis is suggested by Quine’s dictum “to be is to be the value of a variable”. This brief survey of discussions of existence from Descartes to 324 eternal and the perishable (or, in Aristotelian terms, between the necessary and the contingent) now gets reformulated in such a way 325 that for the contingent being of the created world (which was originally present only as a “possibility” in the divine mind) the Russell and Quine is intended merely to identify what I mean by the concept of existence that does mot emerge as a theme in Greek philosophy. It might be supposed that this non-emergence could dent”, a kind of added benefit bestowed by God upon possible beings in the act of creation. What is new here is the notion of radical contingency, not simply the old Aristotelian idea that many be explained quite simply by the fact that classical Greek has no distinct verb meaning “to exist'’ and hence must make do with the property of “real existence” emerges as a new attribute or "accithings might be other than they in fact are — that many events might turn out otherwise — but that the whole world of nature might not have been created at all: that it might not have existed? I leave it to the historians of Islamic and medieval philosophy to decide how far my hypothesis is correct and to determine just when, or in what stages, the new concept of existence was formore general verb “to be” (eimi-einai). But this explanation will not take us very far. On the one hand, it is perfectly possible to discuss questions of existence without relying on a special verb “to exist”, as Quine emphasizes in his essay “On what there is”, and as Descartes showed in his phrase ‘Je pense, donc je suis”. And it seems clear that Aquinas has a theory of the existence of created things, although the verb he regularly uses to describe their mulated. But, as far as I can see, it is against the background of existence is simply the verb “to be” (esse). (Similarly, in Ansclm's formulation of the ontological argument the expression for “existconcept of existence gets separated out as a distinct topic for debate. By the modern concept I mean the notion articulated in Descartes’ doubts about existence and in his proofs of his own existence, the existence of God, and the existence of the external ence” is esse in re.) On the other hand, the Greek verb “to be” has (from Homer on) a number of quite characteristic, idiomatic uses which we unhesitatingly recognize as ‘‘existential’?. That is, ancient Greek has a set of idioms corresponding to our use of “there is” in sentences like “There is life on other planets” or “There are no flying saucers’. Such idioms are used by Plato in arguing for the existence of the gods (in Laws X) and by Aristotle in discussing whether or not there is an infinite or a void (in Physics scholastic discussion of the themes just mentioned that the modern world, and further developed after Descartes in the arguments about the existence of “other minds”. The modern concept of existence took a new, contemporary turn as a result of the development of quantification theory in logic. And it was applied to a new set of problems as a consequence of Russell S puzzles about denoting in the case of non-existent subjects like the present king of France”, as well as in the more directly puzzling case of negative existentials, like “Santa Claus does not exist”. (It is ¡interesting to note that although sentences of this form occur in classical Greek philosophy — “Zeus does not exist” or “centaurs do not exist” — their structure is never recognized as problematic. There seems to be little or no concern for the problem of reference as 1 This is the conceptual basis for the intellectual pathos of contemporary Mt tialism”, as expressed for example by Jean-Paul Sartre ina famous passage 0 La Nausée: “Aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer 1 existence: la cantingence n'est pas un faux semblant, une apparence qu'on peut dissiper ; c'est 1 absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite, Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moimême. Personne n'a le droit; ils sont entièrement gratuits, .. : ils n'arrivent pas à ne pas se sentir de trop” (Gallimard, 1938: p. 185 of the Édition de poche). III and IV). So although the presence of a special verb “to exist” may encourage or facilitate the emergence of existence as a dis2 There is an interesting approach to the problem of reference in Aristotle's discussion of the difference between contraries and contradictories in Categories X, where he considers the different consequences for the truth value of sentences about Socrates in the case where ‘Socrates is not at all” (ut, Svros GAs TOU Zwxkpörrous, 139 15—35). In this case it is only contradictories, and not contraries, of which one must be true and the other false. Aristotle’s example is: "Socrates is sick’ will be false in this case, but “Socrates is not sick” will be true (131 32). It is worth noting that he does not distinguish this from the parallel assertion “Socrates is dead”, which I believe he would regard as true. For 1 assume that what Aristotle has in mind here is the temporal existence or duration of individual living things and not existence in general, timelessly understood. See the distinction below, p. 327. 3 T have documented these uses in some detail in Chapter VI of The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek (Reidel, 1973): the Verb ‘Be’ and its Synonyms, Part 6, ed. J. W. M. Verhaar,

tinct philosophical topic, it is neither necessary nor sufficient and given, Just reasons the for ry necessa not pment: that develo not sufficient because the Latin verb exsisiere Was In continual philosophical use (alongside of esse) from the time of Lucretius and Cicero until the end of classical antiquity without giving rise to this notion of existence: I mean, the notion which we find in Anselm and Aquinas without the use of a special verb. ‚Here as elsewhere, the thesis of linguistic relativism, or linguistic deter| ce existen the for nt Since I have just mentioned Plato’s argume minism, tends to obscure more than it reveals. of the gods and Aristotle’s discussion of the existence of the infinite and the void, I must make clear that my thesis about the nonemergence of existence as a distinct topic is not intended as a denial of the obvious fact that the Greek philosophers occasionally discuss questions of existence. My thesis is rather that the concept of existence is never “thematized”: it does not itself become a subject for philosophical reflection. We might say: the notion of existence is used, but never mentioned. Even this statement has to be qualified, since there are several passages in Aristotle where he shows that he is on the verge of isolating off existence as a distinct topic. For example, he distinguishes in passing between the use of “to be in “Homer is a poet” and the “absolute” use of the verb in the sentence “Homer is” (in De Int. 11); and he repeatedly distinguishes in Posterior Analytics 11 between the questions “What is x?” (ti éon:;) and “Whether x is or not?” (el Eotw A un). Since his initial examples of this second question are “whether there is a centaur or not” and “whether there is (a) god” (89° 32), the point of the el ¿om question seems clearly existential in our sense. But such passages are almost the exception that proves the rule. In the first case the sentence “Homer is” ("Oynpös éotiv) is apparently taken to mean “Homer is alive (now) i so that the existential sense is at best very limited and specific. And in the more systematic distinction between types of questions in Posterior Analytics II, it is not at all clear that the question of existence as such (el éoniv), (“whether X is or not”) is carefully kept separate from the question of propositional fact (671 ëori). ‘Whether or not X is Y” or “Whether XY is the case””). As Ross says (in commenting on II. 1) “the distinctions become blurred in the next chapter”. Aristotle’s interest seems to shift, inevitably and almost imper4 See Ross’ edition of Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics, pp. 610—12, Existence in Greek Philosophy 327 ceptibly, from the existence of individual substances like centaurs or gods to the “existence” of states of affairs, like the moon being eclipsed. Now the interpretation of these chapters in the Analytics is extremely difficult, und I am not at all sure I know just what Aristotle has in mind. What does seem clear is that our difficultes of interpretation are in part due to the fact that Aristotle does not consistently regard the “Whether-X-is-or-not” question as a question about the existence or non-existence of individual entities of a specified kind, such as centaurs or gods. Even in this passage, then, which seems to be the nearest thing to an explicit distinction of the topic of existence in Aristotle, the distinction does not quite come off. The upshot is that, although we can recognize at least three different kinds of existential questions discussed by Aristotle, Aristotle himself neither distinguishes these questions from one another nor brings them together under any common head or topic that might be set in contrast to other themes in his general discussion of Being. The three kinds of questions (which have been carefully catalogued by G. E. L. Owen)? are (1) questions of individual existence over time, in the sense in which we say that a man or a block of ice comes into existence and goes out of existence (i.e. that the man dies or the ice melts), (2) questions of sortal existence, timelessly understood: whether there are such things as centaurs (which Owen identifies with the modern use of the existential quantifier), and (3) more abstract or conceptual questions of existence in connection with items like the infinite, the void, and the subject matter of geometry: in what sense we want to say that such things do or do not exist. What is important to note for our purposes is that, although these three topics may quite reasonably be grouped together from the point of view of the modern notion of existence, there is nothing in Aristotle’s own conceptual scheme that serves to bring them together. The closest correlate to the notion of existence within Aristotle’s own scheme is the concept of potency and act. And that, I suggest, is not very close. What is true for Aristotle is true a fortiori for Parmenides and Plato. And here I will turn from documenting the absence of existence as such to the more constructive task of identifying the decisive concept that in fact dominates the view of Being in classi5G, E. L. Owen, ‘Aristotle on the Snares of Ontology,” in New Essays on Plato and Aristotle, ed. R. Bambrough (New York, 1965), pp. 69—95.

cal Greek ontology. More precisely, I want to point to the concept that determines the meaning or sense of “Being” (ro öv) when the term is first introduced into philosophic discussion, in the poem of Parmenides and the early statement of Plato’s theory of Forms. My claim, then, is that the concept of Being in Parmenides and Plato — and to some extent in the later tradition as well — is use are (1) that its understood subject is propositional in form — a fact or a state of affairs asserted to obtain, and not an object or concept whose existence is affirmed and (2) it is typically construed 328 understood primarily by reference to the notion of truth and the 329 (without any predicate) in a clause of comparison with verbs of saying or knowing (verba sentiendi et dicendi): “Tell it like it is”. Thus the canonical form of the veridical construction of “to be” in Greek, from Homer on, is as follows: “Things are (in fact) as corresponding notion of reality. The question of Being is first of all the question of the nature of reality or the structure of the world, in the very general sense of “the world” which includes you say (or think or know) them to be” ¿om tata ott dotrep où whatever we can know or investigate and whatever we can describe in true or false statements. The question of Being, then, for the Greek philosophers is: how must the world be structured in order for inquiry, knowledge, science, and true discourse (or, for that matter, false discourse) to be possible? In linguistic terms, this means that the decisive usage of the verb in the creation of Greek ontology is what I call the veridical usc, in which the verb ests means “is true” or “is the case”. Before pursuing this thesis I must pause for a few linguistic remarks. Plato and (even more) Parmenides have often been accused of confusing or conflating the copula and the existential uses of “to be”, and hence of producing the pseudo-concept of Being by the mistaken assumption that the verb had a single meaning when used for predication and for statements of existence. I do not wish to deny that such confusions sometimes arise in Greek philosophy: I insist only that they play no essential role in the creation and articulation of the concept of Being by Parmenides and Plato. They play no essential role because both predication (with a copula use of “to be”) and statements of existence (with an existential use of the verb) may be regarded as special cases of the more general and more fundamental use of “to be” to express the content of a-truth claim as such: the so-called veridical use to affirm a propositional content or an objective state of affairs. Since I have illustrated this use in detail elsewhere, and have pointed to its languages) involves some kind of correlation or ‘‘fit’’ between what is said or thought, on one side, and what is or what is the case or the way things ave on the other side. Let us call this the correlation between assertion and reality, where “assertion” is used neutrally archaic origins in the pre-historic use of the Indo-European parti- A€yets. As this locution shows, the pre-philosophic conception of truth in Greek (and in Indo-European generally, if not in all both for saying that it is so and thinking that it is so; and “reality” is used simply as a convenient abbreviation for the fact that it ts so or what happens to be the case. My claim, then, is that in the formation of the Greek concept of Being, the key notion is that of truth — the goal of science and the proper aim of declarative speech. If we bear in mind the structure of the veridical use of the verb, we will easily see how the philosophers’ interest in knowledge and truth, taken together with this use of “to be”, immediately leads to the concept of Being as reality. I repeat, I am using “reality” here not in any large metaphysical sense but simply as a convenient term for the facts that make true statements true and false statements false, or for whatever it is “in the world,” for whatever “is the case,” that makes some assertions and some judgments correct and others mistaken. If I assert — either in thought or in speech — that the sun is shining, and if what I assert is true, then the corresponding “reality” is simply the fact that the sun is shining. So far I have said nothing about be as verb of existence or as copula. I have shown only that, starting from the veridical locutions and the notion of Being as truth we immediately get to the related notion of Being as reality, in a suitably loose and generalized and the Sanscrit forms sat and satya, I need here only remind you sense of “reality”. Of course, we can easily see how the existential and copula uses of be will also turn up, if we think of the reality in question as expressed by a subject-predicate sentence — for instance that this prehistoric idiom is alive and well in colloquial American by the sentence “The sun is shining.” For if this sentence is true, ciple *sant- (corresponding to Greek dv, óvtos), in the common Indo-European usage represented in the old English word “sooth” English today, in the locution “Tell it like it ¿s”. The “is” here is then its subject (the sun) must exist. And the sentence uses the a pure veridical. The peculiar grammatical features of the veridical copula verb is to predicate something of this subject, namely that

it is shining, or that its light reaches us. So when we are talking about truth and reality, the existential and copulative uses of be are never far away. But I insist that if we begin to interpret the concept of Being by looking for existential or copula uses of the verb, we will not only make unnecessary trouble for ourselves; we may miss the real point. We will fail to grasp the essential features of the Greek concept of Being. Consider now what Parmenides says about Being or what is, TO &öv. He introduces it (in fragment 2) as the object for knowledge and the territory or homeland of truth. “These are the only ways of inquiry there are for knowing (or “for understanding”, noésat): the one, that it 1s ... the other that t is not”. The former he calls “the path of Persuasion, for she follows upon Truth”; in other words Being, or what is, is what we can and should believe (be persuaded by), because it leads to (or is identical with) truth. The other path (that st is not) he rejects as ‘‘unheard of” or “uninformative” (panapeuthés) a way that cannot be trusted, “for you cannot know what is not... nor can you point it out”. Parmenides’ explicit reason here for rejecting what is not, Td un tóv is that it cannot be an object of knowledge, (gnônat), a path for understanding (noësai), or a topic of informative discourse (phrazein). Since in Greek the expressions 16 uh 6v and T& ph ôvra Parmenides’ theory of Being has many other aspects which are not directly accounted for by the veridical sense of the verb: its contrast with Becoming, for example, that is to say, its eternal and perfectly static character as an entity that cannot change or move; and also its spatial extension and indivisible bodily mass. My aim here is not to offer a complete account, not even a general sketch, of Parmenides’ ontology, but simply to identify the concept that gives meaning to his quest: the concept that can permit us to understand what the Greek project of ontology was all about. Now aside from the properties of spatial location and bodily mass, the Eleatic attributes of Being are all preserved in the ontology which Plato develops for the Forms in the middle dialogues. A brief look at the Phaedo (65—66) where the general doctrine of Forms is introduced for the first time by a systematic use of the terminology of Being (ôv, obola)®, or a glance at the even more Parmenidean passage in Republic V (478—80), where TO Óv as stable object of knowledge is contrasted with the many sensible particulars that are object of doxa, would suffice to show that here too the initial clue, the key to the concept of Being in Plato as in Parmenides is provided by the notions of truth and knowledge, and by the very general concept of reality or what is so that is required by these two notions. In the first instance, then, Being for Plato is characterized as the reality which is sought after in intellectual inquiry, apprehended in noetic cognition and described or defined in true discourse. But when we pass from these general ‘‘veridical’’ contours to a more detailed analysis, the copula construction emerges as the primary formula for the articulation of the concept of truth and its grounding in the reality of the Forms. Every truth for Plato can properly be expressed in the copula form “X is Y”. Even the existential proposition can be so expressed: ‘Justice exists’’ is expressed as “ Justice is something (t2)”. Now the copula proposition in turn is to be interpreted ontologically in terms of participation: “X is Y” is true only if and because X participates in Y-ness or in the Y. In the last analysis, I suggest, Plato’s concept of Being is the being-of-a-Form, or the being-related-to-a-Form by way of partici- 330 would normally designate the content of lies and false belief, it is obvious why these labels will not signify an object of knowledge or reliable information. The peculiarly Parmenidean touch is to identify “the thing that is not”, as the content of falsehood and error, with nothing or nonentity (undév at Parmenides 8.10: cf. 6.2). I submit: The guiding thought at the outset of Parmenides’ poem, the thought which motivates his articulation of the concept of Being, is the idea of Truth as the goal of knowledge and inquiry. But of course the “being” which is known and truly asserted must be a “reality” in the very general sense indicated earlier. So for Parmenides the veridical notion of Being leads directly to the concept of Reality as opposed to Appearance or false Seeming: Being and Truth — fo eon and Alétheia — are explicitly contrasted with the exroneous Opinions (or Seemings, doxai) of mortals. By setting this contrast between true Reality and false or mistaken Appearance at the center of his doctrine, Parmenides passes beyond the commonsense, pre-theoretical notion of “reality” implied by the ancient locutions for truth, and articulates for the first time a metaphysical concept of Beine. Kasie 331 8 See, for example, Burnet’s comments on Phaedo 65 c3 and 65 c9 (in his edition of the dialogue), and my own fuller statement of these remarks about Parmenides and Plato in ‘Linguistic Relativism and the Greck Project of Ontology,” forthcoming in The Question of Being, ed. by G. M. C. Sprung (Pennsylvania State University Press).

pation. The concepts of truth and predication, which concern statement and knowledge, are grounded upon these more fundamental notions of Being which concern the nature of things: Forms and participation. Summarizing our positive results so far, we can say: in Greek ontology, from Parmenides on, the question of Being is a question as to what reality must be like — or what the world must be like — in order for knowledge and true (or false) discourse to be possible. It is, in effect, the first question which Wittgenstein set out to answer in the Tractatus: how must the world be structured if logic and scientific language are to be possible? Since for Plato knowledge is assimilated to discourse, and discourse is analyzed in the predicative form “X is Y”, the problem of knowledge and true discourse becomes, in part at least, the problem of predication: What must reality be like if predications like “X is Y” are to be possible, and sometimes true? What will X be like? What will Y be like? And how can the two be related to one another ? In Aristotle the concept of Being becomes more complex — too complex for summary statement here. We would have to begin by analyzing the doctrine of the categories, and go on to consider the concepts of potency and act. Let me remark only that the scheme of the categories, which is formulated as a device for distinguishing types of predication, serves in effect for analyzing types of existence as well. To the various forms of predication recognized by the division into categories correspond so many different modes of existence. The most fundamental mode is of course that of the primary category, the being of substances, that is to say, the existence of individual entities of a definite kind; which in the paradigm 333 compound of matter and form, body and psyche; but the matter itself is determined by the essence, the tó TÍ Av elvan for man, the being-what-it-is. Socrates’ being or existence in his being-human, his being-what-a-man-is, that is to say, his being that particular kind of thing that is specified in the definition which answers to the question: what is X? What is a human being (ti gotiv &vOpatros) ? Thus for Aristotle as for Plato, existence is always elvai ti, being something or other, being something definite. There is no concept of existence as such, for subjects of an indeterminate nature. To return now to the question with which we began: why existence does not emerge as a distinct concept in Greek philosophy? In principle the answer is clear. My explanation is that in Greek ontology in its early stages, in Plato and Parmenides, the veridical concept was primary, and the question of Being was the question of “reality”, as determined by the concept of truth. Since this conception of reality is articulated in Plato by copula sentences of the form “X is Y”, it turns out that even the concept of existence gets expressed in this predicative form: as we have seen, Platonic Greek for ‘‘X exists” is “X is something”, elvaf rı. In the scheme of categories which Aristotle takes as the starting point for his own investigation of being, this same predicative pattern serves as the primary device for analyzing tà övra, what there is, and for showing how the various kinds of being are related to one another. So it is naturally the theory of predication, and not the concept of existence, that becomes the central and explicit theme of Aristotle’s metaphysics, as it was the implicit theme of Plato’s discussion of Being in the Sophist. man or animal. Thus the general tendency of this Aristotelian If we conclude, now, by raising the question whether it was a philosophical disadvantage for Greek ontology to begin with the concept of truth and reality (as object of knowledge and the content of true statement), and whether it was a mistake to proceed by developing a theory of predication and neglecting the concept of existence as such, we cannot hope to answer such a question with any brief statement. I will simply hint at the line which a defense of Greek ontology might pursue, Let us imagine Parmenides, Plato method in ontology is for the existential idea to be absorbed into and Aristotle responding as follows. the theory of predication, and to be expressed linguistically by “Granted that our starting-point in ontology does not provide a theory of reference or denotation, and hence does not confront the problems of negative existentials or statements about nonexistent subjects. After all, a discipline in its initial stages cannot hope to deal with all of the problems. But by articulating our own case means the existence of a living organism belonging to a definite species: a human being, or a horse, or a pine tree. For Socrates to exist is for him to be a (living) man, to live a human life; for a particular tree to exist is for it to be a living oak or a chestnut. For white to exist is to be a color, that is, a quality, belonging to some particular substance. For walking to exist is to be an action performed by some copula uses of the verb. So we find that the key ontological formula of Aristotle’s metaphysics, the tó TÍ fiv elvan, defines the mode of existence for any subject whatsoever, but it does so without any existential use of the verb. The concrete being of Socrates is a

doctrines of being around the topics of truth and predication we pointed to the notions of propositional analysis and truth for sentences or statements (Aóyos) that provide the conceptual framework within which a theory of reference and a clear account of existence becomes possible. It is scarcely necessary to defend our achievements by pointing to the contemporary relevance of a Platonizing ontology for the discussion of universals and the theory of mathematical objects (numbers, sets, etc.), or to the obvious role which Aristotelian ideas about individuals, predication, and natural kinds continue to play in modern work in ontology, logic, and theory of language. We should perhaps emphasize what is less obvious: that the veridical starting-point for Greek theories of Being or reality anticipates in a rather striking way the contemporary standpoint which (following and developing certain ideas of Tarski) takes the notion of truth for sentences as basic in any theory of meaning and knowledge. (Consider the view of Donald Davidson in his presidential address “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’’’, or the parallel doctrine which Henry Hiz calls ‘‘aletheism’’.) Above all, we would insist that the articulation of Greek theories of reality around the topics of truth and predication or Adyos guarantees that philosophical speculation — as long as it is faithful to this starting-point — will remain in close contact with genuine problems of knowledge in the sciences and with careful work in logic. “Now we must admit (these philosophers will conclude) that our neglect of the topic of existence as such does leave us without any ready means of formulating Cartesian doubts about the existence of the external world, just as it also leaves us without the concept of existence that provides the nerve of Anselm’s ontological argument. From the standpoint of our ontologies, no one could ever have formulated either Anselm’s argument or Descartes’ radical doubts about existence. But, depending upon one’s view of the value of the ontological argument and the philosophical importance of scepticism concerning the external world, these deficiencies in our standpoint could perhaps be counted as assets rather than as liabilities”. 7 Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973— 74), esp. pp. 16ff.