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DEATH AND NONEXISTENCE
DEATH AND NONEXISTENCE
PALLE YOURGRAU
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
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For Mary
PREFACE
Buffalo Bill ’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break one two three four five pigeons just like that Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death
e.e. cummings 1
The philosophy of death, now a domain of active research in analytical philosophy, originated in recent years with
1. In his commentary on the poem, Thomas Dilworth (1995) writes that “the speaker assumes it is better to be alive than dead. So death, which cancelled Buffalo Bill’s skill and erased his good looks, gives the speaker an advantage over him. . . . Logically, the self-elevation of the speaker is nonsense, since the dead (nonexistent) differ categorically from the living”
the publication of Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay “Death.”2
Historically, Plato’s dialogue The Phaedo is the locus classicus for philosophical discussion of death, while Parmenides’s poem Nature in particular, the first part, “The Way of Truth”—is no doubt where the philosophical debate about nonexistence, as such, began, taken up not long after by Plato in The Sophist. Among recent continental philosophers, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, of course, is the urtext, followed not long afterward by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Two enormous books about nothing. “Nothing,” or “the nothing,” or “nothingness” is indeed an important subject discussed by Heidegger and Sartre, but it’s not the focus of this book, though I will have something to say about nothing. Indeed, one of the primary theses of this study is that the dead, and more generally the nonexistent, are not nothing.
Though my approach differs radically from Heidegger’s, my preoccupation, too, is with die Seinsfrage the question of being (or Being). Like him—and unlike others in the analytical philosophy of death—I’m preoccupied with Parmenides and the question of nonexistence. Unlike him, however, I am an analytical philosopher who engages with modal logic, the (174–75). It’s not clear exactly what Dilworth means here by “differ categorically,” but he appears to be suggesting that there’s such a vast difference between the living and the dead that it makes no sense to compare them, and in particular, to suggest that the living enjoy an “advantage” over the dead. In any case, in this study, I will be arguing that the dead (the nonexistent) do not constitute a different category from the living. They can be compared, and the comparison reveals that the living do indeed have an “advantage” (albeit, a temporary one) over the dead. The “self-elevation” of the speaker is not “nonsense.” 2. Nagel 1993.
semantics of proper names, and possible world theory. My philosophical roots are in Gottlob Frege and Saul Kripke, not Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl.
In the background of this study are three essays I wrote about the philosophy of death in which, in contradistinction to others writing on this subject, I focused on the ancient problem of nonexistence. One can’t do justice, I believe, to the metaphysics of death without rethinking fundamental questions of being. It’s a mistake to think it suffices to merely reshuffle familiar concepts in clever ways. A new approach to metaphysics is needed, and I thought I had pointed out the direction that needs to be taken. In my innocence, I had hoped that no more needed to be said, but the reception of these essays—which have achieved, I think it’s fair to say, some notoriety, if not acceptance—convinces me that much more needs to be said. I have therefore endeavored to set out the larger framework in which my approach finds its proper place.
In a sense, however, this goal is impossible to fully achieve, since the larger framework involves, among other things, providing an account of the nature of the existential quantifier, the semantics of proper names and indexicals, the ontology of fiction, the role of possible worlds as a foundation for quantified modal logic, the question of presentism in the philosophy of time in relation to the theory of relativity, modal set theory, and an analysis of what Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Russell, Frege, and Quine thought about the nature of existence, not to mention what contemporary philosophers like Saul Kripke, Ruth Barcan Marcus, David Kaplan, Nathan Salmon, and Timothy Williamson have written. Rather than attempting the impossible, an exhaustive, and exhausting, account of all these topics and
thus delivering to the reader a massive tome—as seems more and more to be the custom these days—I’ve adopted a different approach. I’ve tried to delineate a clear path through this maze of difficult, fundamental philosophical issues, indicating where, and why, the path leads in a certain direction, choosing, only when it seems appropriate, to “stand and fight” for my ground, to persuade the reader of the soundness of my approach. My aim is thus, in Wittgenstein’s sense, perspicuity, not the false hope of comprehensiveness.
Even this more modest goal, however, is made difficult by the fact that the themes I will be investigating are all closely related, so that I can’t proceed in my argument in a simple, linear fashion. Musically speaking, my approach needs to resemble a Bach fugue rather than a Beethoven symphony. Since I’m not, however, composing a piece of music, I will, perforce, have to proceed otherwise. What follows, then, to change the image, will be a tapestry woven from a series of colored threads which criss-cross and touch each other throughout. A given theme will be taken up again and again, each time using a different colored thread to achieve an alternative perspective on the same problem, resulting, I hope, in a multicolored cloth containing a clear image of the logical landscape I seek to represent.
The book is written in the first person and, in general, is more personal in tone than my other writings, for a number of reasons. To mention just one, it was essential to respond in detail to some important reactions to my approach. To attempt to do this from a neutral, third-person point of view would have resulted only in stilted artificiality. The aim of my replies, however—which constitute only a small part of the book—is never merely polemical, but always
designed to clarify, and thereby defend and contextualize, the new approach to the philosophy of death I’m proposing. Experience teaches me that often only when philosophers respond to their critics does one begin to understand what the philosophers were really saying.
I should add, finally, that this book, unlike most other recent philosophical studies in the field, is devoted primarily to the metaphysics of death, which has too often been neglected or taken to be too obvious to merit serious attention. Ethical, psychological, religious, and political questions are not my focus, though some of what I say here will have relevance outside the realm of metaphysics. Only in the final chapter do I turn my attention to questions beyond metaphysics.
I thank my colleague at Brandeis University, Berislav Marusic, who has, for a number of years, invited me to address his class about my work on the subject, and who has engaged me, after each lecture, in discussion of these ideas. Another Brandeis colleague, Eli Hirsch, made critical comments on an early draft of (what was then) the second chapter of the book, and corresponded with me about some issues relating to that chapter. I also corresponded with him and Thomas Scanlon at Harvard University about an issue concerning Derek Parfit. Jennifer Marusic, another colleague at Brandeis, offered helpful comments when I was composing a reply to a referee’s report on the book proposal I submitted to Oxford University Press. Mary Sullivan, in addition to constructing the index, offered constructive comments on the text itself.
I thank Brandeis University for providing me with a onesemester sabbatical leave, and for granting me a one-semester
Senior Faculty Research Grant, to allow me time to work on the book. Finally, I thank my editor, Peter Ohlin, of Oxford University Press, for his support for the idea of the book and then for the book proposal itself, and for his patience in awaiting delivery of the final draft.
THE PARADOX OF NONEXISTENCE
[I]f A were nothing, it could not be said not to be.
Bertrand Russell
W. V. QUINE, IN “ON WHAT There Is,”1 suggests that the answer to the question, “What is there?” is, obviously, “everything.” After all, it would seem, there isn’t, in addition to everything (that is), something that’s been left out, which would have to be what isn’t, since, there isn’t, in addition to what is, what isn’t. In case you’re tempted, however, to bring what is not into the picture, Quine reminds us of an ancient puzzle, which he designates “the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing” or “Plato’s beard,” to wit: “Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not?” For myself, this riddle, correctly understood, hides a deep truth, which I’ll attempt to bring out in the following pages. Plato himself, of course, in The Sophist, wrestled with this paradox, which he took to be a deadly serious one (not simply, if you’ll excuse the expression, a mere sophism). He acknowledged the father of the paradox, Parmenides of Elea, who famously declared, “It is not possible for ‘nothing’ [what is not] to
1. Quine 1961.
be.”2 Indeed, not only not to be, but not to have been or to be going to be, for “how could what is be going to be in the future? And how could it come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it, if it is at some time going to be. Thus becoming is extinguished and perishing is not to be heard of” (37–38). These grave pronouncements, which have darkened Western ontology ever since, came with a warning aimed at the realm of thought itself, for, as Parmenides also announced, “it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be” (31).
Now, I don’t want, here, to take part in the scholarly dispute as to whether for Parmenides, “what is not” refers to predication (i.e. to what is not F, for some property F), or to facticity (i.e. to what is not the case), or to nonexistence. I will assume without argument, for the purpose of this discussion, that whatever else may be at issue in this ancient debate, existence is at least a central theme. My position is essentially that of Montgomery Furth in his classic article “Elements of Eleatic Ontology,”3 where he argues that though Parmenides had what Furth calls a “fused notion of being” (fusing together the factive with the existential notions), faced with “the question whether this assimilation on Parmenides’s part is of any importance in obtaining his conclusions . . . I shall propose . . . that the answer is roughly No” (247).
The force of the paradox of nonexistence has persisted over thousands of years, extending to Gottlob Frege’s logic, in which there can be no truth-valuable statement in which
2. Cornford, F. M., transl. with an introduction, Plato and Parmenides: Parmenides’ “Way of Truth” and Plato’s “Parmenides” 1957, 31. 3. Furth 1974.
there is a singular term denoting what does not exist. For Frege, if any part of a sentence fails to denote (what exists), so does the entire sentence, the referent of which, if all the parts did refer, would be, according to Frege, a truth-value.4 Given Frege’s philosophy of language, that means that, just as Parmenides declared, one can’t even think of what isn’t. Paradox enters the picture due to the fact that it seems obvious, Parmenides notwithstanding, that there are plenty of things that don’t exist—Aphrodite, for example (who is a mere myth), and the round square (which is impossible), as well as New York’s World Trade Center towers (destroyed by terrorists), not to mention (more controversially) the past (no longer with us) and the future (not yet arrived). When you get right down to it, not only do some things fail to exist, most things do. And yet, if there are such things, such objects as the World Trade towers, “they” would have to be objects that don’t exist, i.e. nonexistent objects—which sounds an awful lot like objects-such-that-there-are-no-such-objects— and we’ve fallen right back, it seems, into “the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing.”
Bertrand Russell, with Frege a cocreator of modern logic, also took the riddle with deadly seriousness. In the spirit of Alexius Meinong, he argued in 1902 in The Principles of 4. Frege believed the referent of a sentence isn’t a fact, which might seem the most natural view—assuming there is such a thing as the referent of a sentence. More recently W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson defended the view that there are no such things as facts. The argument against facts was formalized—but not defended—by Alonzo Church and Kurt Gödel. That allowed the argument to finally be refuted. See my essay “Frege on Truth and Reference” (Yourgrau 1987). I point out there where my approach differs from the similar one adopted by Jon Barwise and John Perry in “Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations” (1981).
Mathematics5 that the only way out was to introduce a third ontological category in addition to existence and nonexistence, which he called “being,” declaring, “Being is that which belongs to every conceivable term, to every possible object of thought,” whereas “Existence, on the contrary, is the prerogative of some only amongst beings” (449). Following directly in the footsteps of Parmenides, he declared that “ ‘A is not’ must always be either false or meaningless. For if A were nothing, it could not be said not to be.” “A is not,” here, should not be taken as a denial of existence, but rather as a denial, so to speak, that “A is anything at all.” As examples of beings that don’t exist but are not “nothing at all,” he mentions “[n]umbers, the Homeric gods, relations, chimeras and fourdimensional spaces.”
As will emerge later, I believe Russell was onto something, but unfortunately, the details of his account, as put forward here, are replete with difficulties. To begin with, note what he says by way of explicating the concepts of being and existence, in particular, explaining how being differs from existence and nonexistence. Having pointed out that existence, unlike being, belongs only to some things, he says, about existence, “To exist is to have a specific relation to existence,” which is, strictly speaking, to say nothing at all.
Why, then, introduce the distinction in the first place? “[T]his distinction is essential,” he says, “if we are ever to deny the existence of anything. For what does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the nonexistent” (450; emphasis added). Here 5. Russell 1902.
he separates himself to some extent from Parmenides by attempting a solution to the paradox of nonexistence. He does not reject nonexistence, as such, but rather introduces a new ontological category, being. In effect, he accepts Parmenides’s pronouncement, only interpreting “what is not” as indicating nonbeing rather than nonexistence. So far, so good. Indeed, in the following pages, I’ll be arguing that what Russell is saying in these last few passages is absolutely right. The problems come later.
For Russell also accepts Parmenides’s association of what is with what can be thought, thus, given his interpretation of what is as what has being, equating being with what can be thought. 6 Hence the generosity of his list of beings, which matches Meinong’s. His philosophy of thought seems, like Meinong’s, to directly mirror his philosophy of language, so that any meaningful singular term is taken to denote a genuine object, even if it is only, as it were, an object of thought. (Not for nothing does Meinong describe his account as Gegenstandstheorie, or theory of objects.) More, not only does Russell accept, with Meinong, that “the F” always refers, he appears also to agree with Meinong’s principle that the F is F, or, a bit more formally, that F(the F). This principle, however, unless somehow amended or modified, as he later realized, is logically disastrous.7 It leads immediately to
6. Today, we distinguish belief, or thought, de dicto vs. de re, a distinction that would have to be taken into account in assessing Russell’s neoParmenidean identification of what is with what can be thought.
7. Which is why neo-Meinongian logicians and philosophers do modify the principle, invoking a distinction between “nuclear” and “extranuclear” properties. This is not the place to assess how successful have been attempts to make out that distinction in a manner that is not ad hoc.
absurdities or outright contradictions, such as that the existent round square really is round and square and existent, and the nonexistent largest prime number really is both nonexistent and a prime number greater than every other prime number, etc.
Further, there are serious problems with Russell’s list. At the time at which he was writing, 1902, the idea of a fourdimensional space seemed like a notion confined to the mathematical imagination, whereas today, thanks to Einstein, we take it to apply to the physical universe. As for numbers, for the mathematical Platonist or realist, like Russell’s colleague Frege, numbers, as well as relations, are no less real than is the physical universe. Russell appears to be conflating, here, the abstract with the nonexistent, whereas the contrary of the abstract is, rather, the concrete. (We’ll have much more to say about these contrasts later on.) Further, whereas it’s a reasonable assumption that the singular term “the number three” refers to a particular object that figures prominently in the science of mathematics, nothing similar is true of the term “the round square,” the paradigmatic use of which is probably such sentences as “There is no such thing as the round square.”
The case of the Homeric gods, however, is trickier. The name “Aphrodite,” for example, does seem, in some sense, to refer to a particular object, a particular Homeric god, and the name figures prominently in literary and historical contexts, such as Homer’s Iliad, in which it’s important not to confuse Aphrodite with, say, Athena. Indeed, as we’ll see later, some contemporary philosophers, including Saul Kripke, believe that, at least outside fiction, the name succeeds in referring, albeit to an abstract construct of the imagination, while Nathan Salmon believes that the same is
true even within fiction. Nevertheless, as Kripke insists—I think, correctly—there remains an important sense in which (unless one is a Greek polytheist) we need to remember that Aphrodite doesn’t exist (or doesn’t “really” exist), and what makes this true is not a fact that involves an ancient Greek goddess. What exactly does make this true, if not how things stand with Aphrodite, Kripke takes to be a genuine puzzle,8 and here, too, I’m in agreement with him. By contrast, as I’ll argue later, what makes true the nonexistence of Socrates is precisely how things stand with Socrates. As Nathan Salmon puts it in “What Is Existence?,” “ ‘Napoleon exists’ is false because of something to do with Napoleon” (2014, 250, note 8). Indeed, I take it to be a criterion of the incorrectness of a philosophy that it fails to distinguish the nonexistence of Socrates from the nonexistence of Aphrodite, i.e. fails to distinguish the dead from the fictional.
Russell’s invocation, then, of a distinction between being and existence as a way of resolving the paradox of nonexistence is problematic, though it remains to be seen whether the essentials of his approach can be salvaged. It certainly appealed at one time to his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and not only to him. Moore writes in “Being, Fact and Existence,”9 “I used to hold very strongly, what many other people are also inclined to hold, that the words ‘being’ and ‘existence’ do stand for two entirely different properties . . . [that] many things which ‘are’ nevertheless do
8. See Reference and Existence (Kripke 2013, 155). Indeed, I agree with Kripke that it’s not even clear that “Aphrodite doesn’t exist” expresses a proposition. (Whom would this proposition be about?) See also Keith Donnellan, “Speaking of Nothing” (1974).
9. A lecture delivered winter 1910–11, reprinted in Moore 1978.
emphatically not exist. I did in fact actually hold this view when I began these lectures” (300). Indeed, it’s been suggested that the distinction goes all the way back to the Stoics, and also to medievals like Duns Scotus.10 However that may be, it was explicitly stated by Kant’s older contemporary Christian Wolff. In Being and Some Philosophers, 11 Etienne Gilson quotes Wolff as saying: “Being is what can exist. . . . In other words, what is possible is a being . . . [Indeed,] possibility is the very root of existence, and this is why the possibles are commonly called beings . . . [W]e commonly speak of beings past and future, that is of beings that no longer exist or do not yet exist. . . . Their being has nothing to do with actual existence; it is though a merely possible being, yet a being” (114–15; emphasis added).
Wolff here goes considerably farther than Russell did in explicating the distinction, in particular, introducing the crucial idea of possibility. If we combine this with the view put forward by Kripke12 which I endorse—that fictional and mythological beings are not even possible, we’re in a position to explain further why Aphrodite should not have been on Russell’s list of beings, and to defend the distinction between Socrates and Aphrodite, between the dead and the mythological. (It should be clear enough why it’s true to say
10. See Christopher Menzel 2014, “Supplement to Actualism: Classical Possibilism and Lewisian Possibilism,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For a different view of the Stoics, see Nicholas Rescher, Imagining Irreality: A Study of Unreal Possibilities (2002, 117).
11. Gilson 1952.
12. Naming and Necessity (Kripke 1980, 158), reversing, as he points out, the position he incautiously took in “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic” (Kripke 1971, 65), with regard to the possible existence of Sherlock Holmes.
that Socrates, though dead, is still possible, but in any case, I’ll be going into this issue in considerable detail later.)
More recently, the distinction has been explicitly invoked in connection with possible-world approaches to the foundations of quantified modal logic (QML, henceforth), i.e. the logic of possibility and necessity that includes quantification over individuals. Christopher Menzel (2014), discussing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy two prominent approaches to QML, possibilism and actualism, writes that “[c]lassical possibilism is rooted in the idea that there is a significant ontological distinction to be drawn between being, on the one hand, and existence, or actuality, on the other, . . . [b]eing . . . encompassing absolutely everything there is, in any sense. For the classical possibilist, every existing thing is, but not everything there is exists. Things that do not exist but could have are known as (mere) possibilia.”
The distinction also appears explicitly in David Kaplan’s “Afterthoughts,”13 concerning his earlier work “Demonstratives,”14 which he says was “dependent on the possibilist treatment of variables in the formal semantics” (579, note 29). He goes on to say, “I now incline to a form of language which preserves the distinction between what is (i.e. what the variables range over) and what exists” (579, note 29). No reference is made by Kaplan to Russell’s invocation of the distinction, though Menzel does mention Russell, and in any case, it’s clear enough that Kaplan’s employment of it is a descendant of Russell’s. Neither Menzel nor Kaplan,
13. Kaplan 1989b. 14. Kaplan 1989a.
however, refers back to the paradox of nonexistence, which clearly animated Russell. Alvin Plantinga’s invocation of the distinction, however, in The Nature of Necessity, 15 does relate directly to that paradox.
Plantinga distinguishes what he calls the impredicative singular proposition, It is false that Socrates has the property of existing, from the predicative singular proposition, Socrates has the property of nonexistence, where a singular proposition16 is taken to contain, in some sense, the object referred to by the subject term, not merely a conceptual representation of the object. The latter proposition, he says, “is true in no possible worlds whatever. If there were a world in which [the latter proposition] is true, then certainly in that world Socrates would be but not exist” (151; emphasis added).
Though Plantinga rejects Russell’s distinction between being and existence, I draw attention to this passage since it points to Plantinga’s familiarity with it—and his assumption that his readers share this familiarity—and the condition he lays down (the truth of the latter proposition) that would constitute evidence for the correctness of the distinction.
15. Plantinga 1978.
16. The notion of a singular proposition originated, I believe, with David Kaplan, though ultimately, it goes back to Russell. See the (mutually frustrating) correspondence between Russell and Frege, reproduced in part in Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames (eds.), Propositions and Attitudes (1988, 56–57). “Mont Blanc,” writes Frege, with exasperation, “with its snowfields is not itself a component part of the thought that Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high” (56). What Frege says here may seem compelling, but as I point out in “Kripke’s Frege” (Yourgrau 2012), when I think a Fregean thought – i.e. mentally engage with the thought, a constituent of Frege’s “third realm” of abstract or Platonic objects – the thought itself is no more literally “in” the mind (whatever that might mean) than Mont Blanc, with its snow fields, is literally “in” the thought.
Interestingly, in a later essay, “On Existentialism,”17 he reverses himself and maintains that there are worlds in which that proposition is true, without, however, recalling his previous position that this constitutes evidence for the soundness of the distinction between being and existence. It remains that Plantinga is clearly sensitive to the paradox of nonexistence, and to the role that the distinction between being and existence may, or may not, play in the resolution of that paradox.
Charles Parsons has also discussed the distinction in a section of his essay “Objects and Logic” entitled “Being and Existence,”18 in which he recalls “the ancient question whether reference to objects is necessarily reference to objects that exist” (505). In his more recent study, Mathematical Thought and Its Objects, 19 he again has a section entitled “Being and Existence,” based on his earlier essay, where he repeats a point he previously made, that “the distinction between being and existence is formally analogous to the distinction between existence and actuality that arose in our comparison between Kant and Frege” (24). He adds, however, that though “[i]t might be tempting to suppose that real existence is just Kant’s and Frege’s actuality and that what in mathematics is called existence is merely being[,] . . . [m]atters are not so simple” (24). We will discuss, in due course, the relationship between Kant’s and Frege’s ideas and the distinction between being and existence. For now, it’s enough to point out that the distinction remains a lively source of debate among
17. Plantinga 2007.
18. Parsons 1982.
19. Parsons 2008.
