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Notes on Existence
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Authored by Frank Redmond, 2012
According to Arthur Schopenhauer, “With the exception of man, no being wonders at his own existence”. Existence to other organisms, like chimpanzees and fish, is a unasked question; it just is, existence exists. Period. But to man, existence poses many problems, namely due to our curiosity about our place in the order of things. We, being inquisitive creatures, want to know: what is existence?
Throughout history many theories have been recycled, rejected, and formulated in order to answer this question. None of them has unequivocally answered the question, but they all offer man an explanation. But of all these explanations, there have been two main schools of thought: the nominalists and the realists. I tend to veer towards the nominalist explanation of existence since they deny the existence of “real” universals.
The nominalist explanation of things eliminates the abstract “universal” from the equation. Things here in existence do not correspond to abstractions. Instead, things correspond to themselves. What I mean by this, is that the individual entity only exists, not the universal. The universals are nothing but names. For instance, words like “blue”, “metallic”, and “fish” do not exist as real, independent universals, but only exist in our imaginations.
However, in a very general sense, the concepts of “blue”, metallic“, and “fish” exist as useable symbols in our imaginations. Without these symbols, we would be unable to transfer or translate knowledge since one imaginative universal would equal another. We need to have common mental ground, thus the symbol. The symbol thus allows us to communicate, create, and share knowledge.
Take the alphabet for instance. The letter “A” doesn't have an independent universal which provides it with meaning, but as a symbol, people understand and give meaning to “A”. “A” is not given meaning through an abstraction, but through the collective imaginations of its users.
Therefore, nominalism best explains existence since it does not rely on abstractions, but rather on something tangible like the imagination.