Hide and Seek

It looks like an auto salvage yard. Our effort to prove the existence of things has littered the logical landscape with wrecks, now mercifully stored more or less out of sight in junk yards like this one.

Proving that something exists should be easy. “Hello, I’m here!” But not so fast! “Hello, I’m here,” is exactly what I would expect to hear from you if you didn’t exist. Huh? Point is, claiming to be is not the same as actually being.

Sidebar: You’re 10 years old (now…or again) and you’re playing hide-and-seek with your friends, as usual. This time, however, your friends aren’t able to find you. Bored, you come out of hiding, “Here I am.” But to your surprise, you get no reaction. It’s like they don’t see you…or hear you. 

Then you overhear one of your friends say, “He’s not here, he must have gone home,” and they leave you standing all alone in the forest. Being is like that; it’s a game of hide-and-seek. We hide, but no one ever comes looking. Enjoy it now but know that no one will ever find you. It’s scary…and lonely!

“Claiming to be is not the same as being,” or is it? According to Rene Descartes, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). Well, that might work for Rene, but does it work for anyone else? 

Rene might be convinced that he exists but that won’t get him a grande at Starbucks…unless he can conjure up $3.49 as well.  He says he thinks - who am I to judge? But that’s just the point: who am I to judge?

I can either blindly accept Rene’s word for things (faith?)…or I can remain agnostic. Rene may have convinced himself that he exists, but he hasn’t convinced me. Come to think of it, neither have you! Nor has God; nor has the so-called External World (aka, the Cosmos). Turns out, nothing has ever been able to prove to anyone that it exists; and nothing ever will.

No wonder “there was silence in heaven for about half an hour” when the final (7th) seal was opened (John of Patmos, Revelation, 8:1). No wonder Kierkegaard had bouts of fear and trembling.

Only followers of Douglas Adams enjoy the luxury of a quiet meal at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. But better book now, I hear the wait list is insane; and don’t leave home without it, because I’ve also heard that the bill alone can be heart stopping. 

What about me? Well, like Rene, I may (or may not) have satisfied myself that I exist, but I can’t prove it to you, or to anyone else, any more than Rene could.

If all this sounds weird, it isn’t! The idea that existential facts lie ‘below’ the level of sensation, perception, observation, logic, and language runs throughout Western philosophy:

Parmenides’ Aletheia, Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s Potentia, John’s Logos, Kant’s Noumena, Heidegger’s Dasein, Sartre’s Neant - all fundamental constituents of reality, all well-hidden, none of them accessible to ‘existential proof’.

So, to be clear, we can reason logically about relations, appearances, behaviors, etc., but we cannot use logic to determine the existence of any entity underlying those phenomena. To put it more formally, we cannot prove a proposition on one ontological level using premises from a different ontological level.

Math and logic deal with structure that is necessarily the same, always and everywhere; the goal is universality. Science, for its part, deals with contingent but reproducible events; the goal is repeatability. But Being consists of one-offs; its goal is novelty.

Analogy: Math/logic : Real numbers :: Science : Even numbers :: Being : Prime numbers.  

‘To be’ is to be, not to be like. In fact, to the extent that anything is ‘like something else’, it is not entirely novel and therefore gives up a bit of its own being. It subcontracts out part of itself. What is is what’s novel; the rest is just scaffolding. 

Consider the sentence, “it is!” The subject (it) is always the entirety, the cosmos, the universal; a particular person, place, or thing often ‘stands in’ for that entirety. The predicate (is) refers only to that aspect of the subject (it) that is unique, i.e. particular: “What’s new?”

The function of language, the function of every symbolic system, is to confirm the relationship between the universal and the particular. The subject of every sentence is the entirety. The predicate of every sentence is a unique configuration of qualia.

Paradigm: the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. The universal, God, is a quantum of being, Christ. 

‘To be’ is always a scandal, ‘the scandal of particularity’: Why this and not that, why now and not then, why here and not there? For this reason alone, ‘to be or not to be’ will always be the question, the only question. 

What about causality and other patterns that seem to connect events? They exist only in the world of relations; they are not part of being per se. They give you a sense of balance and stability in this crazy world; they are an antidote to fear, trembling, angst, and nausea. They function as a fixed horizon for sailors made seasick by the fickle undulation of Being. 

The truth value of an existential proposition, on the other hand, remains oblivious to observation, experimentation, induction, or deduction. Being is always solitary: “One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.” 

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