What Is Existence?

Brendan from Youtube writes,

Hi Pat,

When Norris Clarke discusses the idea of co-principles of being: essence and existence, and If I understand it correctly, he then proceeds to establish that existence must proceed any given essence, that is to say that existence is unbounded, and an essence is just a bounded existence of some kind, I find I am struggling with nailing down what we mean when we say existence itself.

The reason I'm asking (other than just getting my head around it) is Cameron (the Christianity Channel guy) just had on Suan to discuss Catholicism. And Cameron seemed to struggle with what is meant by existence in this same sense (something that's essence is existence itself). Would I be correct at all in saying that existence itself is that which contains all possible being? It all just seems like a trip to try to imagine all possible being lacking any quality that we experience in any real being of our experience. Anyways, thanks again man.

Hi Brandon,

First, a practical tip: do not try to “imagine” existence itself. Images require boundaries, finitude, etc, so the moment we try to “picture think” what pure existence itself (“existence alone”) would be, we are already down the wrong track.

Simply put, existence is the actualization of essence. In other words, existence is that in virtue of which something is made to be a REAL being and without which would be indistinguishable from nothing (= pretty common sense, honestly). Essence, on the other hand, is a configuration of being; a bound or limitation to the extent existence is manifest. The essence of Socrates, in other words, “Socratizes” existence: limits existence to a “Socrates mode.”

Now consider — conceptually, but not with images! — that which just is existence itself as proved by De Ente; whose essence is simply to exist, and hence free of arbitrary boundaries or restrictions or limits. This would be God: whose essence is “existence alone,” as Aquinas puts it. God requires no actualization because God, in virtue of being identical with pure existence, is already, fully actual. (Why? Because essence normally relates to existence as potency to act: i.e., Socrates is merely possible until granted an act of existence. However, that in which essence and existence are not really distinct, all potentiality has been removed. We’re now in the realm of pure actuality, or that which is intrinsically uncausable.)

Further, because there is nothing beyond existence (outside of existence = nothing), then all possibilities are ultimately grounded in that whose essence just is existence itself. In other words, as things which are causable by God. That is just the definition of omnipotence: the ability to bring about all possibilities of being. (But just to be careful with language, I would prefer to say all possibilities of being depend on God but are not necessarily contained in God LESS we make the necessary distinctions of effects being in their cause either formally, eminently, or virtually.)

Here is what I think the real problem might be, after watching some of Suan’s and Cameron’s exchange. Many contemporary thinkers have a faulty paradigm of existence. For example, they have a “thin” conception of existence and think of existence as the instantiation of a property. But this view is either 1) mistaken or 2) inadequate.

What thinkers who hold to this view of existence are denying is that existence is a first-order predicate and instead a property of concepts, or that which is expressed by the existential quantifier to mean “there is an (x) such that (x) is an (f)” says there is some property (for example, “being a moose”) that has been instantiated. In other words, to say that mooses exist is just to say, “there is at least one (x) such that (x) is a moose.”¹

The (I think obvious) problem with this analysis is that all property instantiation presupposes existence and does not explain existence. Obviously, no property can be instantiated without some individual already existing!

Or to borrow a critique from Turner Nevitt, “Take the statement. ‘Planets exist,’ and now consider Vulcan (the mistakenly posited inter-Mercurial planet). Does Vulcan instantiate the property of being a planet? If so, then the analysis of existence in terms of property instantiation is mistaken, since Vulcan does not in fact exist, so its instantiating the property of being a planet does not show that planets exist. But if Vulcan does not instantiate the property of being a planet, of course that can only be because it does not in fact exist, which shows that existence is presupposed by property instantiation, rather than being explained by it.”²

Edward Feser offers his own critique of this view in arguing, “Consider that when we are told that ‘cats exist’ means that ‘there is at least one x such that x is a cat’ or that something falls under the concept of being a cat, there is still the question of what makes this the case, of what it is exactly in virtue of which there is something falling under this concept. And the answer to this further question is, as Knasas and others have pointed out, what the Thomist is getting at when he argues that the existence of a thing is distinct from its essence (in this case, from the essence of a cat), and must be imparted to it, so as to actualize what is otherwise merely potential, if that thing is to be real.”³

I could be wrong about where Cameron was held up, but my impression is Cameron is holding to a paradigm of existence common among contemporary analytic philosophers that would understandably make the De Ente difficult. If that’s the case, then perhaps some of the above clarifications — in combination with a careful study of Aquinas’s causal reasoning — could help.  

1. For a substantial analysis of why existence IS a first-order predicate of concrete individuals see Barry Miller’s The Fullness of Being: A New Paradigm of Existence.

2. Source: https://www.academia.edu/37781435/How_to_be_an_Analytic_Existential_Thomist

3. Feser, 5 Proofs, pg. 138.