WHICH CAME FIRST THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG - JUD EVANS - THE ATHENAEUM LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY


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Jud Evans



A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is leaning against the headboard smoking a cigarette with a satisfied smile on its face. The egg, looking a cheesed off, grabs the sheet, rolls over and says ... Well, I guess we finally answered "THAT question!"

Seriously though...

For me there is no separation of the mind and the body and they are both existential modalities [ways of existing] of the same body. There has been much philosophical discussion concerning which came first developmentally - the egg of the intentionality, or the chicken of capability - the egg of existence or the chicken of essence?

The truth of the matter is that that which exists, and the "essence" or the way that an entity exists, is precisely the same thing - only the accommodating human linguistic signifier changes (from "egg" to "chicken") in order to keep nominative pace with the concurrently instantaneous partnership of substances and their combinatory existential states which impinge upon the totality of the physical nexus and the anticipatory and supervenery Gesamtsumme which is its temporal landlord.

An entity exists in exact correspondence to the current states and modalities of its essential corporeal molecular-based, constituent variables, together with their currently transmogrifying intrinsic and extrinsic reciprocations

The real or sentential (ideative) extantal subject is that which equates or corresponds with the entitative (considered as pure entity – abstracted from all existential circumstances) object named by the signifier - the name or noun by which it is identified.

The real or sentential entity that corresponds to the definite article and signifier: " the man" is the componential assemblage or conglomerate of human existential constituents as modified and commuted by their ever-changing states and modalities.

That which the physical tradition extrinsically calls the "essence" of man" is intrinsically that which exists as the seething similitude of requisite physical and mental event-based somatic equivalences that occur to the quantum-based, component mini-entities of which the macro entity in its completeness consists.

The ongoing internal and external interactions, and the totality of their dynamic somatic and mental events, and the processes that inhere to their physical entireness is the existential essence, which corresponds to the nominative signifier of the named existent subject entity - the man or the woman concerned.

A human subject's responses and reactions to the inherent dynamic of their own internal aggregate conflicts and processes, and the impingements and effects of the outer environment, constitute the de facto, perpetually accommodating, corporeal and mental architecture of the entity. This existential - essential concordance is so absolute and autocratically consummate, that the sum internal and external activity of an entity indistinguishably incorporates and constitutes the entity itself.

The linguistically expedient 'naming' of the 'perceived' material 'stasis' of a human entity as 'Dan' or 'Bill' also equals [in the mind of those that name] the sum of its existential - essential activities. The processant 'IS' (the BE-word) allows us to sententially discriminate and descriptionally sequestrate certain perceived states and modalities from the totality that is the subject, in order to make challengeable propositions concerning them. Thus I can choose a single behavioural dish from the assemblage available on the Carte du jour of your multitudinous modalities and say of you:

                                         "Why do you say that - how can I be sure it's true?"