Existence As a Real Property

Francesco Berto Existence as a Real Property The Ontology of Meinongianism For Graham Priest, Long-distance teacher Prologue: Much Ado About Nothing Some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking. –Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity 1 In an episode of The Today Show of some years ago, Gene Shalit – NBC’s film and book critic, famous for his wits – reviews several books sharing the feature of bearing entertaining titles. The highpoint of the monologue comes with Nonexistent Objects, by the UCLA philosopher Terence Parsons. Shalit wonders how one could write a whole book on things that do not exist!1 This whole book, too, is about things that do not exist. But if one stops to think, one may find that, in a sense, there is nothing special about this. There are, in fact, thousands of books speaking about unreal things. You have probably read quite a few of them: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories portrait the adventures of the detective Sherlock Holmes; The Lord of the Rings speaks at length of Gandalf the wizard. Doyle represents Sherlock Holmes as a detective living in London, Baker Street (precisely, at number 221b), describes his remarkable observational and deductive abilities, makes of him the arch-enemy of the criminal mastermind Moriarty. J.R.R. Tolkien characterizes Gandalf as a wizard with a pointy hat and a grey robe (a white one, from a certain point of the story onwards), a heavy pipe-herb 1 The anecdote is reported by Roy Sorensen [2003], p. 31. vii viii Prologue: Much Ado About Nothing smoker, always holding his wizard’s gnarled stick, and who has spotted in the small Hobbits more temper than the Middle-Earth’s inhabitants could expect. To be sure, Doyle and Tolkien never claim that Holmes or Gandalf do not exist. In the stories that describe them, both the detective and the wizard appear to be very much existent. They talk, struggle, have adventurous experiences, risk their lives and, in the end, succeed against their evil adversaries: these are all-unfeasible accomplishments for a nonexistent object, for the plain reason that, well, it doesn’t exist. In slightly philosophical jargon, Holmes and Gandalf possess several causal features, in the stories in which they appear. They are represented as interacting with the material world surrounding them, modifying it and being affected by it in return. They are characterized as occupying some physical place and as subject to change in the inexorable flow of time, just like the rest of us. That Doyle and Tolkien don’t tell us about the nonexistence of their heroes does not really matter, for we sensible adults know they do not exist in the real world anyway. We know other things to be true of Holmes and Gandalf, even though these truths are not ascribed to them in the stories, nor can we infer them from what is explicitly claimed there. For example: they are both literary characters, both described in books written by British authors. They are both much more famous than I am. They are both in my thoughts and, now that you have started to read this book, they may have surfaced in your thoughts too. Maybe you will think of them reading their names now: Holmes. Gandalf. You can also represent them in your imagination. Let me help you: close your eyes and imagine this wizard, Gandalf, with his pointy hat, his long grey robe, the thick snow-white beard, the pouch full of pipe-herb at his belt, and, naturally, the inseparable wizard’s stick in the hand... 2 Sherlock Holmes and Gandalf are what one may call nonexistent objects. A few terminological remarks are in order: what does “object” mean here? I shall use the term as applying to whatever bears properties. An object, or equivalently, a thing (my use of “thing”, in this book, is such that “object”, and “thing” will mean the same thing), has properties; by having them it may, as philosophers often say, satisfy certain predicates that denote the properties at issue or, equivalently, make true the corresponding sentences. Gandalf and Uma Thurman are objects, for they are property-bearers. It sounds plausible to say that Gandalf has the property of being a literary character, Uma Thurman that of being an actress; that both satisfy the predicates that denote those properties, and by so doing, they make true such sentences as “Gandalf is a literary character”, “Uma Thurman is an actress”. This is, so to speak, what their objecthood consists in. I have glossed the notion of object by saying that objects are bearers of properties. This is not, however, likely to be a full-fledged definition. Perhaps one cannot do much better when such fundamental notions come into play. For, now, Prologue: Much Ado About Nothing ix what is a property?2 Well, it is something objects can instantiate (or have, or bear, or exemplify). Then properties count as objects in their turn. They are something, in that they are bearers of (further) properties, for instance, the property of being something objects can instantiate (or have, etc.). Once being a thing is glossed just as being a property-bearer, it is indeed difficult to think of anything which is not something, or some thing. I will not attempt here any further characterization of propertyhood. It is well known among philosophers that properties themselves are controversial items, being simply rejected by some, accounted for in divergent ways by others. I am taking a dim view on this, if not for other reasons, because the debate on nonexistent objects has traditionally been phrased in terms of objects and properties, plainly taken (I am, on the other hand, at some point talking of that relation between objects and properties I have invoked above: that of bearing,orhaving,orexemplifying; but for the most part of the book, this too will be taken plainly). If I use “object” and “thing” as synonyms, the same does not hold for the word “entity”, dear to philosophers, or for the contiguous word “being” (as used in phrases like “A strange being, more or less humanoid, was staring at me”). These expressions may misleadingly inject being or existence in the concept of an object. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “entity” as “thing with distinct and independent existence”. But the focus of this book is on objects that lack (distinct and independent) existence. 3 Lacking existence seems to be a condition shared not only by Holmes and Gandalf, but by innumerable other characters populating our stories, myths, tales, the narrations we love to listen to and read to our children, the books we keep on our bedside table: Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, Batman, Jessica Rabbit, Mr. Pickwick, Phlebas the Phoenician, Alice in Wonderland with the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat. I will usually call (purely) fictional these characters so dear to us. At times, I shall need the adverb “purely” to make a distinction: some of the characters represented and described in those stories, tales, etc., also happen to be real, to exist or, at least, to have existed in the past – though sometimes they did not exist anymore even at the time the story was written. In War and Peace, Lev Tolstoj 2 When philosophy of language used to be more fashionable among analytic philosophers, it was common to say: an object is what can be denoted by a singular term, while a property is what can be denoted by a predicate. But then to characterize singular terms, one may have found himself saying: a singular term is a linguistic expression that can denote an object. And to characterize predicates, one may have found himself saying: a predicate is an expression that can denote a property – thus getting back where one started from. x Prologue: Much Ado About Nothing talks about Napoleon. Napoleon was a very real, existing and, indeed, influential person, even though he passed away in 1821, thus he does not exist anymore (give and take religious beliefs regarding man’s immortality). In Dante’s Divine Comedy we find Virgil, another really existed character, even though (give and take the aforementioned beliefs) he didn’t exist anymore already at the time when Dante wrote his poem. Sometimes these non-purely-fictional characters are represented in the relevant stories as similar to what they actually were. Sometimes they look quite transformed: the historical Julius Cesar was probably a bit different from the Cesar of the Shakespearian dramas, and even more from the funny Roman emperor who faces the Gauls Asterix and Obelix in the strips by Goscinny and Uderzo. It seems that the things populating the many worlds of fictional representations, like Holmes, Gandalf, or Alice, are not the only ones that lack existence. Besides Julius Caesar, Virgil, and Napoleon, many other things not belonging (only) to literary fantasy do not exist anymore, despite having existed in the past: Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Charlemagne, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, Immanuel Kant, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, all our beloved departed (with the usual give and take). All these, in spite of their inexistence at the time I am writing these lines, still retain the status of objects, following the gloss on “object” given above: they still bear properties and make certain sentences true. Socrates is dead; George Washington makes “The first president of the United States had wooden teeth” true;3 Napoleon has the property that he suffered a defeat at Waterloo; Heraclitus is still misunderstood today; Virgil is self-identical (he is, after all, Virgil); and Plato has the property that, according to Alfred North Whitehead, the history of Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to his dialogues.

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