RE: Everything exists
March 10, 2010 at 5:40 am
(This post was last modified: March 10, 2010 at 5:50 am by Violet.)
LukeMC Wrote:I think I'm catching your drift here and would say that the proposition is entirely implicit in nature. While it reads "God (who exists) exists" and gives no indication as to the type of existence, what it is really trying to say is "God (who exists) does so indepently from our thoughts and feelings, as his own being". You find these kinds of statements throughout language, where the meaning is obvious yet the proposition doesn't allude to it explicitly.
And yet... how can we know (which requires thoughts) such a thing exists separately from our own thoughts and feelings? In fact.... how can we know anything exists that is not within our thoughts as a concept? We have no concept of its existence outside of our thoughts, hence we cannot know it exists without it first being a concept. A god that exists separate from our thoughts is still a concept... hence we can consider it. We have no grounds to believe that anything exists beyond our perceptions... it could as validly be that I generate all of the reality I "perceive" around me... and that there is in fact nothing without me.
If things can exist without us having concepts for them... then existence precedes what essence the net existence is subjectively thought to have. Of course... even if we generate our own reality... it remains that we create the existence either at the same time as, or prior to, the essence (at the least, for a thing could not have essence, let alone be a thing, if it did not first exist).
In this way... it could be said of all things that they exist. By their very being a thing, it has already been posited that they exist. In this way... all things exist. Perhaps further still: Everything exists. Wouldn't it be weird if everything didn't exist?
This is where most of the "existence precedes essence" argument should be based (the other primary argument I know of being that individuals precede groups... though not to suggest this is the only other one, nor to suggest there are not arguments for essence preceding existence or occurring at the same time as essence).
Please give me a home where cloud buffalo roam
Where the dear and the strangers can play
Where sometimes is heard a discouraging word
But the skies are not stormy all day