Does [ X ] Exist?
Language can invent or deny the ‘existence’ of things and relationships that are, primarily, fictions of language. Much of what ‘exists’ depends not upon categories or proofs… but relationships. It is in relation that ‘existence’ arises and is confirmed, not, as we too often pretend, in language.
Everyone has heard that language is dangerous. Features of this cliche are deeply involved in the structure of humor, critical discourse, philosophy and media spin. More importantly, this conflict, between language and reality, between language and relationships… the conflict that forms the cause and basis of essentially all of our modern social crises — is a familiar constant in the common daily experience of nearly all children.
Children are preternaturally aware of the bizarre estrangements from relation and reality that ‘the adult’ uses of language seems to impose upon our minds or feelings, as if by divine edict.
As with most cliches, our interest in them is generally proportional to our departure from relation with or insight about their subjects. The more popular the cliche, the more devastating our absence from its subject tends to be. Thus the cliche is a trophy that declares our public absence from the insight it encodes.
So the fact that we have heard that language is dangerous isn’t very useful, unless we can be introduced to the dangers… and discover their resolutions… together.
Our inner and public relationships with language comprise an ‘extra world’ that we sustain like an overlay on reality, intelligence and relation. Unfortunately, we are prone to use and experience language in ways that evict us from relation and knowledge, into an abstract universe of declarative terms, special jargon, verbal descriptions, courtroom-narratives and other monstrous impoverishments. While appearing to be a profound accomplishment, the actual relations of our species with conceptual knowledge are so commonly deadly that they imperil the entire history and future of life on Earth. Every one of us will suffer tragic agonies throughout our lives due to being dominated by language, concepts, or their cultural projections. Many of us will die of this.
Let’s be clear: that is not intelligent. So if we are to become intelligent, we must rediscover and invent sober relationships with language and concepts. Together.
One way we can do this is by investigating and disclosing the structure, history and forms of crude thought whose deceptions have become so monumentally overauthorized that they can evict us from our own humanity. Though we are no longer children, we yet sustain within us the child’s senses of the deceptive nature of verbal identification. If we will attend them we can escape the dungeons of subjugation to dead language and fictional authorities that dominates the recent history of our species and invent a new order of intelligent relation with our representational heritage.
Before we may ask if something exists (or declare it does not), we must first carve it forth from the great everything, we must distinguish it, generally and specifically. In this act of distinguishing or carving out, we are guided by usually invisible concerns, perspectives, desires and expectations. The result is of a species determined by these orientations, and is thus the result of an invention, however fervently we may declare otherwise.
To determine if a rock exists, propositionally, I must (often unconsciously) decide how (and why!) I shall distinguish or verify the presence of such an entity. In this process, I am actually involved in discarding most of reality, relation, and identity. I will, in general, discard nearly all of everything, in order to propose the remainder as ‘absolutely reliable’, or ‘authoritative’. The closer we get to a mode of linguistic certainty, the more we had to ignore or throw away to get there, yet the remainder — the ‘certainty’ — seems to pervade reality itself when the task is complete. Most of what is true about ourselves, relation and reality… must be surreptitiously ignored to produce the concrete derivative that many modes of ‘rational’ concern demand.
As regards the reality or separateness of the rock, my intentions in pursuing this matter guide the process so intimately that the result can be none other than the produce of their intrusion. Is the result a rock? No. It is a proposition —a complexly derived ‘collapsing’ of being, reality and relation into a unidimensional assertion. The result is a linguistic artifact. And what ‘exists or does not exist’ is, from the position of analysis, deceptively over-authorized and pretends to a completeness it is the actual opposite of.
How does this happen? It is the result of a socio-cultural history in which propositional knowledge overcame the knowledge-ways that were their own origin; and replaced intimacy-based ways of knowing with analytical-‘objective’ results. Nothing seems more certain or factual than the results of ‘objective’ analysis; as the gods drowned in the onset of formal analysis and logic, propositional knowledge somehow acquired the throne of absolute authority previously reserved for the divine.
Propositional existence is a common deception, whose endless expressions in modern parlance proceed from the idea of existence, when considered as an abstract question about ‘reality’, ‘people in general’, or ‘the universe’. The perspective insists that the subject and observations ‘must be agreed to exist relatively or totally independently of the involvement of those who would otherwise necessarily be involved’. This is related to the concept of bias, or personal relation with reality, which is what ‘objective’ analysis is designed to ‘correct for’.
This should seem a ridiculous idea, and believe me when I say that for all of us, as children, it was. Initially, nearly all of us actively resisted the derivation of false verbal realities (especially norms and universalizations of concepts) within relational contexts. In other words: we knew the lie of language when it was posed to dominate or declare … identity, qualities, relations or analyses. Eventually, however, our immersion in common culture wore us down, and we became ‘willing to admit’ the force of descriptions and propositions. Later, perhaps, we were dominated by them.
How do we determine or understand whether something we can name or conceive of exists? This idea of existence-testing is provocatively deceptive in the same way nearly any evaluation can be. For does that which exists do so without any involvement whatsoever with me — as seems to be the common interpretation of objective language, or does that which exists emerge from my own attention, concern, awareness, and interaction?
But there is a more serious problem. Existence is not monodimensional, like words can be. That which can be said to exist must be said to exist in some context. Often, we invent the context along with the domains of existence or nonexistence we concern ourselves with the declaration of. Surely, that which we can conceive of exists as our conception and thus to conceive of that which does not exist at all is impossible. Do you follow me?
Apparently, there are (probably endless) different modes and domains of existence, and rarely is the answer simple.
In our common habit and thought, that ‘which exists without us’ (understood to be objective) has come to dominate that which exists with and through our relationships and actions. This is a bizarre turn of events, since, that which seems to exist ‘with or without us’ actually does not exist at all. It is a fiction of imaginal language. And it is universally deceptive.
The philosopher Brian Magee presents the argument thus: “Propositional knowledge, knowledge by description, is pale, grey, thin, second-hand stuff compared with the knowledge by acquaintance from which it is abstracted. It is the theoretical against the experienced, paper notes as against gold.”
A certain perspective demands that the stone I am looking at ‘is still there when I close my eyes’ (this is a proposition). My only actual contact with this stone as visual; is it then ‘still present’ when I close my eyes? In what senses is it present and in which absent? It should be obvious that there is no overriding single sense or way in which the stone is present or absent; our answer to the question depends upon our concerns, purposes, perspectives, desires and most of all… features of relational intimacy which are essentially infinite in number and kind.
While it is not entirely unreasonable to assert that the stone remains when my eyes are closed, this position is not authoritative in the ways we are trained to imagine or defend. What is ‘there or not there’ for actual persons experiencing relation has little to do with the strange demands of language and logic when they are used to declare relations that must actually be interior, personal or communal. There are no abstract relationships except in language.
This same perspective proposes that, if I were to disappear or die, the stone would ‘go on being there’. And yet, is any of that true? For whom would it go on being there? For theoretical others in future hypothetical situations? If I am the living frame of reference, and I depart, I suspect the entire charade departs with me. For me, for the person who is alive, sensing, relating and knowing… reality disappears.
Consider that meaningful experience emerges as and within a frame of reference, in this case, me. If I depart, the entire frame departs with me, and any commentators on that are, as they must be, invented. They are ideas. Not actual situations or people. Theories, really. In very compelling language. Theories about a universe in which I have no role or existence — in other words, theories about absence — of one who perceives, experiences and relates. What sort of an authority is the absence of a subjectively involved human being or group?
If I am gone the universe is gone. That which exists for me absolutely requires my relation, the intimacies of being — and something far more than an empty abstract placeholder that has been overauthorized as ‘true’ or ‘real’. The concept of objectivity is fundamentally false. There neither are, can be, nor ever were ‘objective observers’, and they cannot be simulated.
Whatever the universe is, reality is… whatever exists or does not… implicitly depends upon actual experiencing persons like you and I. If you remove us from the ‘equation’, what you have is propositions about abstractions in theory, not reality.
This should instigate shock in anyone who can penetrate my language to see what I am pointing at: in language we have learned to invent ‘objective worlds’ that never did and cannot ever exist, except as ideas in words. These we too easily confuse with worlds, or reality, situations, time, the universe, ‘other people’ and so on. We have a habit of ‘believing in’ an abstract ‘extra universe’ that we refer to as ‘objective’.
Yet it is impossible that any of us have ever had any such experience. Never. It is, in fact, impossible to have any experience, meaning or evaluation… without actual persons being involved and orchestrating, experiencing, responding, questioning, and so on. There is no machine-like universe that a disembodied, machine-like ‘unbiased universal observer’ would ‘detect’; we are not detectors of the world… we invent it, and the world of our ideas and experience are the result not of detection, but something more like intercourse. The world emerges from our mating with it. It is not ‘just there’ will all its parts, qualities, unions, situations and potentials. In fact, without you … we must admit, whatever is there has no structure or meaning.
So what actually exists?
How did we get this confused? Well, this entire idea of objectivity, of ‘detecting what is, with the idea of the absence of all biases and a universality of result’ is a prosthesis, like a microscope or compass. It is, in certain specific contexts, an extremely powerful prosthesis, with which we may deepen or correct a variety of species of thought, theory and understanding about processes that may be thought of as independent or self-existing. Yet even in their proper contexts, we are inclined to neglect the actual slipperiness of such an agenda, and find ourselves reifying metaphors and over-authorizing our own models and the languages we use to encode them. Unfortunately, these methods escaped their proper contexts long ago, and began a relatively tyrannical career as popular arbiters of ‘reality’ and ‘normality’. We are subject to the declarations of those who would tell us what is or is not according to a ‘rationality’ whose origin and functions render it toxic when employed beyond its proper arena, and this has become a public disease whose momentous profusions have thoroughly infected every aspect of common thought, speech… and expectation.
There is a singular pivot we can identify in language, however, that may assist us in acquiring and sustaining a kind of herd immunity — a vaccination, if you will — which endows us with the capacity to excel in relations with language and ideas, rather than be subject to domination by them. It relates to the dichotomy that we refer to as subjective : objective. While objective language and thoughts appear to have ‘high authority’ and ‘high verity’, the nature of these appearances is related to having discarded most of reality and relation, the production of a sort of ‘perfect experiment’ in abstract language or conception, which is, we must admit simply a model. And, crucially, it is a model of ‘reality without us’, in other words: that which is not generated by our activity or concern, bias, desire, expectation or action. Of course, none of us will ever have any experience of this, except theoretically. And this is the point we must highlight. Objectivity is a theoretical position that is false-to-facts for any and every living being, person or group. Even statistics, which we often depend upon rather blindly, comprise a fiction that falls apart when the sample is one. An actual person. Or even a small group.
On the other side of this pivot are phenomenon we participate in, and in which our relations are transformative and inventive. In fact, there is no other class of behaviors, even pretending that ‘objective reality actually exists without us’ is such an action, no matter how fervently one declares otherwise. Without someone to assert something, there are no somethings! So whenever people go around asserting something as if they were simply naturally existing facts that humans have no effect upon, they have become confused. They are confusing language with minds, and words with reality.
There is nothing that exists without us participating in, examining, relating with it… and thus ourselves. Except in certain ways of thinking and speaking — ways that, primarily, descend into common exposure from the realms of science and the techniques of mathematics. And, again, within the confines of their proper contexts, these methods and ideas are appropriate and expedient. It’s when they escape that nightmares ensue… and propagate… wildly.
What I want to talk about directly is stuff that exists. As in, what does, and what doesn’t? How do we know? Does science tell us? Do books about God tell us? How do we know what exists or doesn’t? And here’s the problem: nothing exists that we do not bring into being in awareness, language and concern. So, in a way that is absolutely real and true, we existify reality. By bringing our concerns, purposes, methods, language and techniques… we invent that which we declare to exist. And we do this according to the structures and expectations, habits and functions of ways of knowing.
There isn’t any way of knowing that can declare the actual nature of existence, reality, or even an experimental framework — because all of our knowledge is a form of highly structured persistent incompleteness. There are endless avenues of concern, purpose and approach — and any way of knowing is selective and particular in its applications of these. That which we derive within their proper contexts is at once severely limited (incomplete) and hyperbolized (exaggerated and/or decontexted). So each way of knowing will both authorize and ignore various domains of existence, in general. None of them are authoritative, except within their appropriate(ly narrow) contexts and purposes. None of them can say what exists or does not, in fact, the ‘them’ in this sentence is itself an abstract fiction.
Let me explain what I mean. Does science exist? No, it doesn’t. Nor does it, unlike the common parlance and expectation ‘tell us things’. Science doesn’t speak, or exist. It is a way of knowing that only actually exists when human beings are directly engaged in being scientific together. So it’s something we do. It doesn’t ‘exist’ in any way that can have a mouth, make declarations, or tell us what is good, real, true or right. It’s a way of knowing that exists in and as our enactions of it. All of its produce requires human interpretation to be meaningful. And it’s potential objectivities are true and correct only within their appropriate contexts. So frankly, science doesn’t exist. You cannot go out and find science and bring some home. Either humans are acting scientifically, or people are arguing about records and research, but either way, science is people enacting a knowledge way.
So what about other important features of human reality? Water, we presume, exists. I mean, we have direct, palpable experience of it. Does it exist when we are not experiencing it? Well, not precisely. No. If I disappear, water is meaningless. It is only meaningful within the reference frame of an actual human person, cohort, organism, ecology… and so on. Although I can imagine that if I were to perish, the Earth and water would still exist, that is an abstract idea. It is not part of reality, nor is it successfully “objective” in any way that I find intelligent. Let’s take another example: food. Well, it kind of exists, but is it food before I am relating with it in this way? Potentially, yes. Theoretically, yes. Abstractly, and ‘objectively’ we can say that a lump of cheese exists as food whether or not I am relating with it in this way. But, again, these are figments that arise from a purpose that is bizarre: to imagine the world as if we should authorize existence to things and features that cannot possess them in the absence of our transformational, agented relation with them. The world of ‘that which exists without our relation or transformation of it’, is a fiction. It can be a useful fiction, but most of reality emerges in relation, not detection.
Food exists when I am relating with food. What those things are when I am not relating with them is actually rather blurry. They can be considered commodities, food, objects, a problem, assets, or I could be entirely unconcerned with them. Their status, their ontological identity, is never explicit, and cannot even exist without our relation with them. Something is out there, yes. It appears to remain consistent, coherent, and partly predictable. That little part, however, can be incredibly deceptive — because, as I will demonstrate, most of reality does not exist at all. We enact it. We invoke it… we become what cannot be without our thus becoming.
While it is true that the contexts we exist as and within evince some underlying stability, their whatness is fundamentally emergent from our relationships and purposes. It is not then, either there or not. And whatever it might be were we to be absent should be something we are incredibly careful about over-authorizing. This is especially true about two common ideas that have the peculiar quality of referring to and informing everything else at once. One of them is ‘the universe’. The other is ‘god’. Whatever we have to say about either of these topics… preforges and informs all other identities, meanings, possibilities and topics. Although we have little experience of it, most of us believe that the universe exists, and what we understand of this is probably loosely related to ‘facts’ we have acquired from exposure to media that popularizes scientific research. So ‘what we know of the universe’ comes, primarily, from a single way of knowing that, itself, ‘doesn’t exist’ in its own right (we have to do it for it to exist), and also doesn’t have a great deal of purchase on the nature of reality or the universe. It has analytical prostheses. So its results are, essentially, mechanical. Science, then, ‘detects’ things. And part of its method is to ‘absent the human being from the process’, or, in many cases, living beings altogether. Does that result in an authoritative perspective on the remains? Well, to a degree, in appropriately narrow contexts. But when it comes to the universe, we must have more than one way of knowing providing input. Or, better yet, ways of direct relation and discovery, ourselves.
We have thus successfully discriminated between the order of abstract existence ‘as a form of para-objectivist detection’, and the order of participated existence. Most of the nature of reality is of the species of the latter. Humans invented the former, and were beguiled by it, and in the modern situation this problem has become hydra-like, with new heads propagating madly in a context where disembodied declarations compete for authorization in popular habits and thought, where they threaten to replace the possibility of participation with abstract models, explanations, derivations, and technologies.
The big questions cannot be answered declaratively. No one knows what light or time are, or what their implications are. Of intelligence itself, our species knows nearly nothing, and what we do ‘know’ is, primarily, the produce of science. Which, while a useful and corrective guideline to some aspects of existence and reality, is probably the worst of all possible approaches for many others. Further, science is the wrong authority to depend upon for declarations of the nature and possibilities of identity or relation; in part because it begins by abstracting these into targets for detection. There is no present way of knowing that is dependable in any way for the purpose of telling us what things are or their nature. None. yet we do have ways of knowing that, at least in popular thought and habit, appear to compete for this privilege: science and ‘religion’.
Poorly formed questions lead us into some really bizarre frames of perspective. There is a lot of public debate about the topic of God, vis a vis ‘Does God exist?’ This isn’t a question that can be answered from the perspectives usually in precedence, for a variety of reasons. But first, let me address the abstract, the theoretical, and the rhetorical aspects. The idea that a relatively insane version that literalizes the Deity in holy books is up in the sky judging and blessing specific peoples or persons is not sane, and relatively impossible. The idea that there may be many orders of distributed intelligence in and as organisms and beings in nature is practically a certainty; our own minds are, relatively speaking, gods over the distributed biologies of our bodies in living environments. So there very probably is something like a universal network of being-as-intelligences, and organisms appear to be an expression of it. Those who say this is unlikely are going to have to dismiss the mind with which they assert this, for it is obviously a sentient metaposition on their own biology and relations.
But back to the question. I don’t think it can be answered in the abstract, any more than the question ‘does love exist?’. The question fares poorly when framed thus, because the actual question is ‘with what and or whom are you in love?’ In other words: are you of love? is more to the point of the topic. One imagines a room full of musical instruments. In the first scene, a researcher enters, intent upon determining ‘whether or not music exists’. After careful analyses, she declares that ‘it does not’. After all, she is not making music, and in order to determine whether or not it exists objectively, she must desist from any such action or concern. Another person enters, a musician, and we find that music is being enacted, and absolutely exists. But only when invented, only when made, like a relationship or communication. Just as music, or even intelligence ‘does not actually exist’, one cannot really acquire any useful information by attempting to detect something in which we are no longer participating. Much of our thinking is crippled in just the way demonstrated here, by attempting to detect, analyze or predict aspects of ‘reality’ that we have absented ourselves from direct participation in. For one who does not love, love’s possible existence is putative, verbal, the assertion of a term from the dictionary. For one who is in love, it’s existence is shot through everything, undeniable, absolute — because they are not detecting it that have become the embodied emergence of it in their experience, feelings and actions.
Most of the flotsam orbiting this question is deceptive. It is not really about God or No God, but rather about models of God and positions of historical argument. But whatever the nature of our minds, our intelligences… our world and the sky… it is nothing like the disembodied remains thrust upon us by detection-oriented methods. One does not sit around trying to detect one’s own origin — yet in direct relation it becomes obvious that divinity is not a subject for conjecture.
Like love, it is something that we ‘remember into existence’ in ecstatic relation with nature, each other, and the origins of being and minds. Without our invention, remembrance and involvement, we are unaware of the this entire domain of being, in the places of our active relation and intelligence. It is invisible to analysis, which is departure from intimate relation. Whatever the nature of the divine, it is like music or orgasm, not a matter for abstract conjecture… but rather the result of enacting and expressing intimately mutual ‘completions’ — of our humanity in nature, as reality. A matter of possibility, not denotation. Of adoration, not analysis.
And so it is with all that is noble and true: it shall not be detected by those who have not already become so fervently involved as to have escaped all possible abstract concern, and engaged with nature’s depth and transentience… firsthand.
Nothing exists without participation, and that which can be said to … is largely verbal costumes devoid of interior content.
