Dr. William F. Vallicella  - Independent Philosopher - Gold Canyon, Arizona, USA.

Loyola University of Los Angeles (B.A. 1972, minor in Electrical Engineering); University of Salzburg, Austria; California State University at Los Angeles; Boston College (M.A. 1975); Boston University; Husserl Archives, University of Freiburg, Germany, 1976-1977; Boston College (Ph.D. 1978).  National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars and Institutes at Brown University (1981), Indiana University (1984), University of Hawaii (1986), University of Virginia (1995).

Does existence exist? A decidedly strange question, but one to which we can readily attach sense. No doubt I exist, if only as the thinker of these thoughts. But if anything exists, then it presumably ‘has existence,’ and exists in virtue of its ‘having existence.’ How then can existence fail to exist? As Reinhardt Grossmann insists, “If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist.”[i] For if things exist in virtue of having existence, but there is no such ‘property’ as existence, then nothing exists. A similar view is held by J. P. Moreland: “Whatever existence amounts to, one thing is clear; it makes a real difference in the world and it must itself exist to make such a difference.”[ii] But penetrating minds have denied that existence itself exists and have made of this denial a central pillar of their own ontologies. Could they have simply blundered? Or do they have an insight that somehow must be accommodated? I suspect that the latter is the case.

First among the dissidents is Heidegger whose ‘mantra,’ early and late, is that Being is not itself a being. Das Sein selbst ist kein Seiendes! This is the famous Ontological Difference, the axis – an axis of obfuscation some might call it – about which the whole of his thought revolves. Closer to analytic precincts we find Roman Ingarden, student and associate of Edmund Husserl, and no slouch of a philosopher in his own right. He is quite sure that

Existence... is not something of which it might properly be said that ... it ‘exists’ or ‘does not exist.’ In other words, a ‘category’ of being cannot be applied to existence. It can be applied only to what exists.[iii]

This implies that existence itself cannot fall within the category of relations: existence cannot be the exemplification relation as Moreland maintains. Surely it does sound strange to say that Being is itself a being in the category of relation. Finally, there is our outstanding contemporary Panayot Butchvarov. He writes:

... whatever Being may be, it is not itself a being. It is not an individual, whether material or immaterial. But neither is it a property, monadic or relational, even though it may be expressed with a grammatical predicate that, if the Meinongian is right, applies to some objects and fails to apply to others. To begin with, the concept of existence would be, presumably, applicable to that property itself, and even if there is no logical difficulty in the idea of a property exemplifying itself, surely saying that existence exemplifies itself would be mere verbiage.[iv]

It seems to me that these dissenting philosophers have a certain insight that we must take into account, namely, that existence, as common to everything that exists, cannot be just one more thing that exists. Existence cannot be a member of an extant category that admits of multiple membership. Thus existence cannot be a member of the category of relations.

Those who insist that existence exists and those who insist that existence does not exist cannot both be right, but they can both be wrong: their respective theses are logical contraries (not contradictories) of one another. Each is aufgehoben in the following synthesis which my paradigm theory of existence recommends: Existence exists as a paradigm existent, one whose mode of existence is radically different from the mode of existence of the beings ontologically dependent on it.[v] I cannot exfoliate this paradigm theory here. But I can provide some motivation for it by way of an examination of Butchvarov’s transcendentally nihilistic approach.

Butchvarov’s Transcendental Nihilism

The epithet ‘nihilistic’ is justified by Butchvarov’s claim that “There is nothing in reality that is existence.”[vi] I maintain the exact opposite: There is something in reality that is existence. But Butchvarov’s nihilism is softened by his transcendentalism. Although existence does not exist in reality outside the mind, existence is a transcendental concept, and so is not a mere nothing, a nihil negativum, or what Heidegger would call ein nichtiges Nichts. A transcendental concept is one that has classificatory application “but does not stand for anything in, of, or between the things to which it applies....”[vii] Thus existence is not a constituent in a thing, or a property of a thing, or a relation between or among things. That existence cannot be a constituent or a relation we may readily grant; but it is less obvious that existence is in no sense a property of individuals. Butchvarov is of course right that existence is not an observable or empirically discriminable property, and it is also demonstrable that existence can be neither instantiated by individuals, nor inherent in them in the manner of an Aristotelian accident. So if you define properties in terms of instantiation or inherence, then I will be the first to insist that existence cannot be a property of individuals. I would also insist that existence cannot be one of a thing’s properties, but must somehow enfold or encompass all of a thing’s properties and constituents. These necessary concessions being made, one could take ‘property of individuals’ in a broad sense to cover anything that belongs or pertains to an individual intrinsically. In this broad sense, existence is arguably a property of individuals. Thus I take it to be practically a datum that existence belongs to individuals as it would not belong to them if it were a property of concepts (Frege) or propositional functions (Russell). Since Butchvarov will agree with me on this ‘anti-Fressellian’ point, I won’t argue against the Fressellians here having done so ad nauseam elsewhere.[viii]

But whereas I hold that existence is intrinsic to individuals, Butchvarov maintains that it is extrinsic to them as it must be if existence is a transcendental concept that we impose on them.

Here then is a crucial difference between our positions. It is the difference between a transcendental-phenomenological approach to ontology and an unabashedly metaphysical or onto-theological approach. Although Butchvarov and I make common cause against the Fressellians in holding that existence is predicable of individuals, we differ over whether existence is intrinsic to individuals or imposed on them by the mind. But why does Butchvarov deny that existence is intrinsic? He deploys arguments from Aristotle, Kant, and Meinong. Suppose we take a look at them.

Aristotle: Being is not a Summum Genus

At Metaphysics 998b22, Aristotle argues that being cannot be a highest genus. A genus is divided into species by its differentiae specificae. To do their job they must come from outside the genus: the genus cannot be predicated of them. But being is predicable of everything in that everything, and thus every specific difference, is. Hence being cannot be a genus. Existing things are not a kind of thing. This negative result can be taken to support a number of different positive theories.

By my count, there are five such theories that can be arranged on a scale running from maximally deflationary to maximally inflationary. The most deflationary of the positive theories infers from Aristotle’s negative result that being, as subsuming everything, is the emptiest of all concepts and so is equivalent to nothing. This radical nihilism about being is found in Nietzsche, R. G. Collingwood,[ix] Sydney Hook,[x] and Donald C. Williams.[xi] It issues in a sort of radical ontological pluralism: there are beings, but no Being. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the extreme monism of Parmenides. Given that Being cannot be a genus, but nonetheless subsumes everything, it is inferred that Being alone exists, and that plurality is mere appearance or worse, illusion: there is Being but no beings. These extreme theories must be rejected. Radical nihilism makes the mistake of assuming that the only way for Being to have content is for it to be a quidditative determination. It is also unable to accommodate the obvious fact that there is a drastic difference between the existence and the nonexistence of a thing. Extreme monism must also be rejected for its inability to allow genuine plurality.

An adequate theory of the relation between existence and existents must somehow accommodate the non-generic and non-quidditative commonality of existence while also respecting the diversity of existents. The Frege-Russell theory may appear to fit the bill. But I cannot see that Fressellian theory is an adequate positive construal of Aristotle’s negative thesis. If existence is a property of first-level properties, the property of being instantiated, then the idea that existence is non-generic or non-quidditative is upheld. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Fressellian theory, by ‘kicking existence upstairs,’ divorces existence from its primary vehicles, individuals. The idea that the existence of the massive concretum Venus is identical to some abstract or conceptual or linguistic object’s being instantiated is impossible to accept. That leads straight to vicious circularity since no property can have the property of being instantiated by Venus unless Venus exists. One can avoid the circularity by construing the Fressellian doctrine in an eliminativist way as sanctioning the outright elimination of singular existence (as opposed to its identification to something better understood), but then one has eliminated the very datum that we need to understand, namely, singular existence, the existence of individuals.

Having rejected radical nihilism, extreme monism, and Fressellianism, we are down to two options for attaching a positive sense to the Aristotelian doctrine that Being is not a highest genus. On both of these remaining options, the non-generic nature of Being is taken to show that Being is transcendental; but whereas Butchvarov takes the transcendentality of Being to mean that it is extrinsic to beings (as nothing more than a concept that we impose on them), I take the transcendentality of Being to be consistent with its being an intrinsic (nonrelational) determination of beings.

The term ‘transcendental’ surfaces with the medievals who held that being (ens) along with such other determinations as unum, aliquid, verum, bonum, res, pulchrum, are transcendental in that they transcend genus, species, and difference. Butchvarov takes this to imply that transcendentals such as being and unity “correspond to nothing.”[xii] For if the categories “contain everything,”[xiii] then there is nothing in the world that corresponds to being and unity. In one sense this is trivially true: if each thing in the world falls under some category or other, there are no things that are just beings or just unities. If I show you instances of every kind of thing there is, you would have to be terminally benighted to demand: But where are the beings? Someone who grants this triviality might nonetheless maintain that being is intrinsic to individuals. But Butchvarov intends something nontrivial: he takes the transcendentality of being to imply that being is not an intrinsic determination of individuals, but a concept we apply to them.

Although Aristotle’s argument proves that being cannot be a genus, I would urge that Butchvarov’s further inference is a non sequitur, and that Aristotle’s argument does not prove that being is extrinsic to individuals. Given that being transcends the ‘quidditative dimension,’ it does not follow that being must have a merely conceptual status. For being might transcend the quidditative dimension toward the transconceptual ‘existential dimension.’ If so, the transcendentality of Being would imply that it is transconceptual rather than merely conceptual.

If this is right, then being is an intrinsic non-generic determination of individuals. Intuitively, a thing must exist if it is to be anything at all, and to have any properties at all; how then can existence fail to be intrinsic to an individual? I am aware that in saying this I am flying in the face of Butchvarov’s Meinongianism according to which an object can have properties without existing. My point, however, is that Aristotle’s 998b22 argument, taken by itself, does nothing to support the contention that existence is a transcendental concept extrinsic to individuals. One ought not read Kant and Meinong back into old Aristotle. Contrary to what Butchvarov suggests, Aristotle and the medievals are by no means committed to the quasi-Kantian view that being is a concept imposed by the mind on objects which, in themselves, lack existence. After telling us that “Kant was not the first to hold that existence is not an intrinsic property of objects,” Butchvarov adds that this “was the view of Aristotle and most medieval philosophers.”[xiv] This is simply not the case. For the medievals, the transcendentals are not mere concepts imposed on objects, but concepts that correspond to the esse in objects. In Thomas, for example, a being (ens) is so-called because it participates in Being (esse), where the latter is an intrinsic principle (principium = ground) of a thing’s existence, and not a concept imposed by the mind from without. From the fact that being is not common to beings univocally in the manner of a genus, Thomas does not conclude that it does not belong to them intrinsically; he concludes that it belongs to them intrinsically, but analogically. The analogia entis allows each thing to have its own existence, an existence ‘proportioned’ to the thing’s essence. In each thing there is a real distinction (distinctio realis) between essence and existence with the transcendentals grounded in the existence.

Thus for Thomas, the transcendentality of ens bears none of the subjective connotation one finds in Kant who re-interprets the scholastic term ‘transcendental’ to satisfy the exigencies of the Critical philosophy. One could say that Kant hijacks the scholastic term to pilot it to a subjective destination. Continuing with the metaphor, Butchvarov then takes the hijacked term and sends it back to the scholastics via time-machine. For Kant, ‘transcendental’ describes “knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with our concepts a priori of objects in general.”[xv] These concepts are of course the Kantian categories, which, unlike the Aristotelian categories, are not categories of being (Seinskategorien) but categories of the understanding (Verstandeskategorien). It is also very telling that in his discussion of the transcendentals unum, verum, and bonum, Kant, in his Teutonically architectonic zeal, reduces them to his categories of quantity, namely, unity, plurality, and totality, thereby reducing them to modes of finite understanding. His subjectivizing claim is that unum, verum, and bonum, far from being “transcendental predicates of things are, in fact, nothing but logical requirements and criteria of all knowledge of things in general....”[xvi] Thus, to know an object, I must construe it as one object, a unity, concerning which there is a plurality of truths which totally determine it. One can see the logic of this re-interpretation, but also how much exegetical violence Kant must expend to force the old scholastic wine into new subjective bottles. Take bonum. The scholastic view was that every being (ens) in its Being (esse) is good, despite the fact that every good thing has a necessary reference to human desire or ‘appetite.’ Thus the goodness of each being is grounded in its Being. It is not just that ens and bonum are necessarily equivalent concepts – Ens et bonum convertuntur – but that the goodness of each being has its source in the Being of each being. Kant, however, reading goodness as complete (perfect, total) determinateness, sees it grounded not in the Being of the object confronting the mind, but in the mind as constitutive of objects. This is quite a ‘transcendental turn.’ The transcendental turn of the transcendentals consists in their reduction to mere concepts of the understanding. This transcendental reduction deprives them of their status as intrinsic determinations of individuals. Whereas for Thomas the transcendentals were concepts that corresponded to something real in individuals, for Kant they are mere concepts with no objective correlate.[xvii]

To sum up. The main point is that there are two senses of ‘transcendental,’ the Aristotelian-medieval, and the modern which we find in Kant. They ought not be conflated as Butchvarov appears to conflate them. Thus Aristotle’s sound argument for the transcendentality of being does not amount to an argument for its being a transcendental concept in Butchvarov’s sense. To appreciate the transcendentality of being one need not negotiate a ‘transcendental turn.’

Kant: Being is not a Real Predicate

As for Kant, Butchvarov sees in him a further reason to deny that existence is an intrinsic determination of individuals.[xviii] He reminds us of the famous dictum, proposed in the context of the critique of the ontological argument, that “‘Being (Sein) is obviously not a real predicate (reales Praedikat)....”[xix] It would be a mistake to interpret this as meaning that existence is not a property at all, or that it is not a property of individuals. Reales is from realitas, which derives in turn from res, thing. Res, however, is interchangeable with quid, what. Therefore, given the late scholastic background of Kant’s thought, a real predicate is a quidditative property, a property pertaining to the whatness of a thing. This is also clear from the fact that Reality appears under the rubric Quality in Kant’s table of categories, while existence (Dasein) is booked under Modality.[xx] Since Kant is obviously maintaining that existence is not a quidditative property, it is a mistake to take him to be denying that existence is a property. It is also an egregious error, no less egregious for being oft-made, to think that Kant is here anticipating the ‘Fressellian’ doctrine that existence is a second-level property, a property of concepts or propositional functions, and never a property of individuals. Kant’s negative thesis is simply that existence is not a quidditative property of individuals: it is not a property that can enter into anything’s description, or can be extracted by analysis from anything’s concept, or can be used to determine what a thing is. Kant’s negative thesis, to which Thomas could have no objection, is obviously compatible with holding that existence is a property of individuals. As Butchvarov appreciates, Kant’s positive view is roughly that existence is a relational property of individuals.[xxi] Existence is relational in that the existence of a (phenomenal) thing is its being-posited by the mind on the basis of sensory givenness in accordance with empirical laws. Thus existence harbors a triple relationality: to the mind, to the affection of our sensory receptors (and thus ultimately to the Ding an sich as source of affection), and to the laws of nature that articulate the space of the empirically possible. If this is right, then of course existence cannot be an intrinsic property of any (phenomenal) individual.

If we combine Kant’s negative and positive theses on Being, we still do not get as far as Butchvarov’s theory. Although for Kant, existence is a transcendental concept in the modern sense, this concept is applicable to objects only if there is sensory givenness to underwrite the application. There need be no discriminable property in the phenomenal object which corresponds to the concept of existence, but the matter of sensation must be given. Since this comes from the Ding an sich, there is a sense in which, for Kant, the concept of existence, though transcendental, does correspond to something in the world.

Now just as Aristotle’s negative thesis that being is not a genus does not entail that being is a transcendental concept extrinsic to things, so too Kant’s negative thesis that being is not a real or quidditative property does not entail that being is a transcendental concept extrinsic to things. Each of these negative theses is rock-solid; but neither of them, nor the two taken together, lend any support to Butchvarov’s view. No doubt they are consistent with his view, but they are also consistent with my diametrically opposed view.

Meinong and the Independence of Sosein from Sein

Butchvarov is right to point out that Meinong agrees with Kant’s negative thesis, namely, that existence is not a quidditative property, or in Meinong’s jargon, that it cannot pertain to the Sosein of any individual. But Meinong goes well beyond Kant’s negative thesis that existence is no part of what a (finite) thing is. This Thomistic-Kantian negative thesis is consistent with the claim that every what or every Sosein exists, and with the (stronger) claim that an essence without existence would be nothing at all. But Meinong’s claim to fame is that there are Soseins that do not exist, that essence and existence are not merely really distinct (distinctio realis) but that there are essences that actually have the properties they have without existing, or indeed without having any mode of being whatsoever.

Now it is this Meinongian thesis that Butchvarov needs to make good on his claim that existence is a transcendental concept that we impose on objects and that corresponds to nothing in them. For if there are nonexistent objects, then no object qua object has existence as an intrinsic determination. And if any object has existence intrinsically, then no object qua object is nonexistent. So if existence is a transcendental concept, then it becomes quasi-relational: as Butchvarov puts it, “an object exists if and only if there is an indefinite number of objects each identical with it.”[xxii] The identity in question here is a relation of contingent sameness not to be confused with formal identity. This material identity, however, is not a relation strictly speaking since it is not an entity in the world but a transcendental concept, thus a concept with no worldly correlate. Butchvarov’s reason for this is that the sameness of two objects is no more observable than their existence is. Thus I cannot justify my judgment that the pen I just picked up is the same as the one I put down a moment ago by appeal to a perceived relation of identity holding between them. No doubt the two objects are identical: the world is not a Heraclitean flux. But the ground of this identity is not in the world but in a conceptual decision. What I do is impose the concept of identity on the two objects. I simply decide, albeit nonwhimsically, that the two objects are identical. So deciding, I do not discover the existence of the objects, but decide their existence.

A Cartesian and a Roycean Objection to Meinong and to Butchvarov

I have been arguing that Butchvarov’s transcendental nihilism about existence depends crucially on Meinong’s theory of objects: the Aristotelian and Kantian considerations lately discussed are insufficient to motivate it, consistent as they are with its denial. But there is a very powerful argument against Meinong’s object-theory and the Independence of Sosein from Sein on which it rests.

If anything can count as an established result in philosophy, it is the soundness of Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum ‘argument.’ Thus to the query, ‘How do I know that I exist?’ the Cartesian answer is that the very act of doubting that one exists proves that one indubitably exists. Now this may not amount to a proof that a substantial self, a res cogitans, exists; and this for the reason that one may doubt whether acts of thinking emanate from a metaphysical ego. But the cogito certainly does prove that something exists, even if this is only an act of thinking or a momentary bundle of acts of thinking. Thus I know with certainty that my present doubting is not a nonexistent object. But if Meinong were right, my present doubting could easily be a nonexistent object, indeed, a nonexistent object that actually has the property of being indubitably apparent to itself. For on Meinongian principles, I could, for all I could claim to know, be a fictional character, one who cannot doubt his own existence. In that case, the inability to doubt one’s own existence would not prove that one actually exists. This intolerable result certainly looks like a reductio ad absurdum of the Meinongian theory. If anything is clear, it is that I know, in the strictest sense of the word, that I am not a fictional character. My present doubting that I exist is an object that has the property of being indubitable, but cannot have this property without existing. It follows that there are objects whose actual possession of properties entails their existence. This implies the falsity of Meinong’s principle of the Independence of Sosein from Sein, and with it the view that existence is extrinsic to every object. Forced to choose between Descartes and Meinong, we ought to side with Descartes.[xxiii]

In an interesting article, Arthur Witherall tries to defend Meinong from the above sort of reasoning.[xxiv] One of his central claims is that subjectivity is a presupposition, but not a postulate, of Meinong’s theory of objects. I take Witherall to argue as follows: (P1) The Independence of Sosein from Sein holds for every object. (P2) The subject disclosed by the cogito is not an object. Therefore, (C) the fact that the subject of thinking violates the Independence Thesis does not show that the theory of objects is untenable. The trouble with this argument lies in its second premise. What the cogito reveals is precisely an existing individual ego which is at once both the subject and the object of its own awareness. The cogito does not reveal an unobjectifiable pure subject transcendentally prior to every object and somehow common to every empirical self. A pure subject other than every object would not be able to identify any object as itself. But a self that could not identify any object as itself would be no self at all. In the cogito, I am aware that I myself exist as the subject of this or that thought.

Pace Butchvarov, this awareness cannot consist in the self-application of the concept of existence. For one thing, I cannot apply any concept unless I exist; hence it would be viciously circular to suppose that my existence is the result of the self-application of the concept of existence. It is also clear that in the cogito I discover my existence rather than deciding on it. Augustine’s Si fallor, sum and Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum were profound insights for their authors, direct intuitions of their own existence. Granted, I do not sense my existence either via the outer senses or via inner sense. My existence is not observable in either of these ways. But it doesn’t follow that my existence is hidden: in the cogito I am directly aware of it. Butchvarov often argues that if existence were intrinsic to individuals, then existence would be hidden and that this would be absurd. But in my own case, I am directly aware of my existence as intrinsic to me. Thus in my own case, my existence does not consist in my indefinite identifiability; it is my existence that first makes it possible for me to identify anything.

The phenomenon of self-love also give us a reason to reject Meinong’s theory of objects and Butchvarov’s theory of existence. As Josiah Royce once argued, love and loyalty posit their objects as essentially unique and irreplaceable.[xxv] These attitudes mean, intend, ‘aim at’ the essentially unique. If we follow Royce in his definition of the individual as the essentially unique, as that which cannot be reduced to an instance of a type, and if there are cases where love ‘hits’ what it ‘aims at,’ it will follow that there are genuine individuals. But Meinong’s object-theory has no room for genuine individuals. For on this theory, ‘two’ objects having the same (nuclear) properties are identical, which implies that every object is just an instance of properties. So if Royce is right, Meinong is wrong. There is reason to think, however, that Royce is right.

What the lover loves in the beloved is not a mere instance of lovable qualities, but a person whose being (existence) cannot be identified with the being-instantiated of any set of properties. Instances of the same quality-ensemble are interchangeable: so if what Jack seeks in Jill is a mere instance of lovable qualities, then it will not matter to him if Jill be replaced by someone with the same set of qualities. If Jill and Hillary share the same set of lovable qualities, then, qua instances of these qualities, they are interchangeable. But in that case Jack, who seeks merely an instance of these same qualities, cannot be said to love either Jill or Hillary. And both ladies will indignantly point this out to him: “If you love me for what I have in common with her, then you don’t love me at all!” Clearly, Jack only digs his hole deeper by telling the girls that he loves both of them; for if they are philosophically astute they will point out that, in truth, he loves neither of them but only the being instantiated of a set of lovable qualities. Where there is love there is a directedness to an individual in its essential uniqueness. This is what the lover intends, and it is what the beloved expects. The object of love is the object of an exclusive interest.

This is spectacularly clear in the case of self-love. I may have some lovable qualities, but it is certain that I do not love myself merely as an instance of them. Suppose I have an indiscernible twin, and that one of us must be annihilated. If my self-love were merely the love of the being-instantiated of my lovable qualities, then it should not matter to me whether me or my twin is the one to be annihilated. Either way, the lovable qualities would remain instantiated. There is simply nothing to choose between two instances of the same properties qua instances. But obviously it would make all the difference in the world both to me and to my twin whether it will be me or my twin who gets the axe. I am me, not him; my existence is mine, not his; my desire to remain in existence is not a desire that certain properties remain instantiated, or that a certain object be indefinitely identifiable, but a desire that the bearer of these properties who I am remain in existence. It is my very existing that I love, which is also clear from the fact that I would continue to love myself even if I were to lose all of my lovable properties. It follows that self-love is love of an individual in its essential uniqueness.

We therefore have good reason not to abandon the commonsensical view that there are genuine individuals in the world despite their ineffability to sense and intellect. Both self-love and other-love mean or intend genuine individuals, albeit without finding them via intellect or senses. Royce sees the cases of self-love and other-love as symmetrical. In neither case can we “define in thought or find directly presented in our experience the individual beings whom we most of all love and trust....”[xxvi] One may doubt the symmetry, however, since it is arguable that there is a direct, albeit nonsensible, intuition of the self. If this is so, then Royce’s case is even stronger: in the case of ourselves, we not only aim at, but also make contact with, a genuine individual.

The situation, then, is this. Love and loyalty, if they are not to be illusory attitudes, demand or require genuine individuals, individuals that cannot be reduced to instances of properties. But science too, as the pursuit of the final truth, aims at an individual, namely, the individual whole of truth.[xxvii] Love and loyalty, and all pursuit of truth, aim at the Real. But the Real is the individual. “To believe anywhere in genuine reality is to believe in individuality.”[xxviii] Each of us is unshakably convinced of his own reality despite all facile talk of the ‘illusion of the ego’; but to be so convinced is to be convinced of one’s individuality, which is to say, of one’s essential uniqueness and irreducibility to any mere instance of properties. But if genuine individuals are neither definable by the intellect nor presentable to the senses, then how are we to understand their reality?

What I am suggesting is that we have direct access to the reality or existence of the individual in the cogito. Far from being a mere concept we apply to objects, existence is that which, beyond all concepts, first intrinsically establishes individuals as existent. Existence is not nothing, but in a certain sense everything: it is that without which a thing would be nothing at all. It is by a sort of ‘transcendental illusion’ that existence appears to be nothing, or a mere concept we decide to impose on some objects but not others. Not finding existence as a discriminable feature of objects, Butchvarov concludes that existence cannot intrinsically determine them. But this is to look in the wrong place: existence is not ‘out there’ but ‘in us’ as our very interiority

NOTES

[i]. Reinhardt Grossmann, The Categorial Structure of the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 405.

[ii]. J. P. Moreland, Universals (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 20001), p. 135.

[iii]. Roman Ingarden, Time and Modes of Being, trans. Michejda (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1964), p. 34, n. 6.

[iv]. Panayot Butchvarov, Skepticism about the External World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 122-123.

[v]. See William F. Vallicella, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated, Philosophical Studies Series 89, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). Cited hereafter as PTE.

[vi]. Panayot Butchvarov, Skepticism about the External World (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 119. Cited hereafter as SEW.

[vii]. SEW, p. 119.

[viii]. PTE, ch. 4.

[ix]. R. G. Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), Chapter II.

[x]. Sydney Hook, The Quest for Being (New York, 1961), p. 147.

[xi]. Donald C. Williams, “Dispensing with Existence,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LIX, no. 23, pp. 748-763.

[xii]. SEW, p. 121

[xiii]. SEW, p. 121.

[xiv]. SEW, p. 121.

[xv]. Critique of Pure Reason A11. Cited hereafter as CPR.

[xvi]. CPR, B 114.

[xvii]. But most telling of all is Kant’s suppression of ens as a transcendental. In the First Critique, Kant gives the scholastic view in the formula, Quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum. (B 113) In this formula, quodlibet functions as a universal quantifier that binds ens as a free variable. So we could just as well say: For any x, x is one, true, good. Thus this formula does not capture the crucial scholastic idea that it is in virtue of a being’s Being that it is one, true, and good. To capture the crucial idea one needs a formula like, Ens inquantum ens est unum, verum, bonum. What makes the transcendentals other than ens transcendentals is their connection to ens. And what makes ens a transcendental is its connection with esse which is transcendent of the quidditative dimension. But it is precisely esse as the root of ens that Kant loses sight of. In Heideggerian terms, he is guilty of a certain Vergessenheit des Seins. Whereas for Thomas, the transcendentals are transcendentals due to their connection with esse, for Kant esse drops out and the transcendentals are reduced to mere concepts of the understanding.

[xviii]. SEW, p. 119.

[xix]. CPR, A598 B626.

[xx]. CPR, B106.

[xxi]. SEW, p. 120.

[xxii]. SEW, p. 125.

[xxiii]. Cf. Arthur Witherall, “Meinongian Metaphysics and Subjectivity,” Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XXIII (1998), pp. 37-38. See also Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 217-219.

[xxiv]. Witherall, op. cit., p. 37 ff.

[xxv]. This view is developed in several of Royce’s works. For a compact treatment, see his 1899 Ingersoll lecture, The Conception of Immortality (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968). Cited hereafter as CI.

[xxvi]. CI, p. 26.

[xxvii]. CI, p. 42.

[xxviii]. CI, p. 42.