Existence

EXISTENCE. - It is the act, the fact, or the reason by virtue of which one can say that something "is there," and it answers the question "whether it is" (whether it has been or will be).

In the generic meaning of "reason," existence is the appearance of the predicate in relation to the subject in a proposition, and therefore that which stands "at the foundation" of that movement of the spirit which unites them (or separates them) in affirmation (or negation): existence is then understood as a simple abstract conceptual relation proper to logic and also to pure mathematics and to the philosophy of values (cf. W. Burkamp, Begriff und Beziehung, Leipzig 1927, § 49 ff.). Its opposite is non-existence, which is "repugnance," or the contradiction between concepts.

Existence as fact is given by experimental observation, whereby something can be indicated and identified as a singular reality in history and in experience. This is the most current meaning of existence, often used in the concrete form (the existent, existents) and implying the characteristics of individuality (circumstances, facts, situations...) of something or someone on which the right of claim, accusation, and defense can be founded. Its opposite is non-existence as "possibility" not yet realized.

At this sense of "realization of the possible" most traditional philosophies stopped, although not all conceived it in the same way. Thus for some it is the real singularity in opposition to the abstract essence; for others it is the contingent reality of the creature insofar as it expresses a relation to divine causality; for still others it is a modification of the singular essence whereby this is drawn "outside" of possibility: ex-sistentia, an etymology restored to honor by the existentialists. And as these now do (cf. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 5th ed., Halle an der Saale 1941, § 9, p. 42 ff.), one came to distinguish the esse essentiae from the esse exsistentiae (F. Suárez, Disput. Met., disp. 31, sect. VI), a distinction that made the medieval controversy over the distinction between essence and existence even more intricate.

In Thomism, existence is the esse as "actus essendi" of the singular individual essence; it is therefore a participation in the divine actuality received in the essence, with which it forms a real composition like that of act and potency (C. Gent., II, 52-54). Existence as fact, as realization of experience or of history, is a resultant, a phenomenological consequence of such ontological union. Therefore for St. Thomas, the esse is what is most profound in each thing: "Esse est illud quod est magis intimum cuilibet et profundius inest, cum sit formale respectu omnium quae in re sunt" (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 8, a. 1).

Modern philosophy seems to have remained in the dark about the Thomist notion. Fundamental for later philosophy is the Leibnizian notion, which takes existence as a mode or position of the thing: "Exsistentia nobis concipitur tanquam res nihil habens cum essentia commune, quod tamen fieri nequit, quia oportet plus inesse in conceptu existentiae quam non existentiae, seu existentiam esse perfectionem; cum revera nihil aliud sit explicabile in existentia, quam perfectissimam seriem rerum ingredi; ita eodem modo concipimus positionem ut quidem extrinsecum, quod nihil addat rei positae, cum tamen addat modum quo afficitur ab aliis rebus" (L. Couturat, Opuscules et fragments de Leibniz, Paris 1903, p. 9). To this "extrinsicist" notion there comes close the notion that Kant held of existence in the pre-critical period. Existence is what in a thing cannot be reduced to a concept, to an element of the essence, and therefore what "can never be a predicate." Existence is "the absolute positing of a thing"; and for Kant, who here unconsciously approaches the Thomist position, existence is what ultimately grounds possibility, so that "the intrinsic possibility of things presupposes some existence" (The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, in Minor Writings, Italian trans. by P. Carabellese, Bari 1928, p. 44). A thoroughly realist notion, to which Kant always remained faithful, as the example of the 100 thalers and his critique of the ontological argument attest: Kant's failing was to have contented himself with this crude positivity without investigating further the relations between essence and existence, whereby he came to brand as ontological argument even the a posteriori proofs of the existence of God of St. Thomas.

The distinction between the logical and the ontological order, which was in any case preserved in dualist philosophies, disappears in the rationalist monism of Spinoza first and then of Hegel. For Spinoza, existence is a predicate of the one "Substance," to which it belongs as a necessary requirement (Ethica, part 1, prop. VII). In Hegelian philosophy, existence and reality were separated: existence is the particular, the external phenomenon that is real only insofar as it is subsumed into the Idea, as an element of the whole that is Spirit in the development of its historicity (Science of Logic, II, sec. 2, ch. 1). Existence therefore, for Hegel, characterizes the "appearing" of the essence; it is the immediacy that arises from the essence, whereby in existence the "undistinguished unity" of the essence with its immediacy is realized.

In contemporary philosophy, various currents of thought that qualify themselves as "philosophies of existence" (v. ESISTENZIALISMO) have made existence the pillar of their opposition to pantheistic and dialectical monism: existence there is understood as the primary reality of the single "person," isolated in his own situation in the world and committed to his own tasks: "ec-sistere," that is, the placing of oneself outside through the act of personal decision.

Cornelio Fabro