We explain what existence is, its different philosophical currents in history, from Greek antiquity to the present.
What is existence?
The word “existence” is a philosophical term that designates a multiplicity of meanings related to the act of being. In the dictionary, for example, existence is the act of existing, it is the concrete and tangible reality of anything.
However, this definition is not the only one. If we look at the 20th century, Much of French and German philosophy considers that existence designates nothing more than the being of man.
The origin of the word seems to point in another direction, since “existence” comes from latin existenceformed by ex (“outside”) and stare (“estar derecho”), which translates as “to be, to appear.” According to this definition, what exists is what is, and existence is the capacity of something to be.
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Etymology of “existence”
The word “existence” has its origins in Latin existencederived from I will exist, ek-sistere. This can be translated as being, appearing, emerging, leaving, being, and even “what is outside.”
In this way, the concept of existence like a philosophical phenomenon that can be interpreted in different ways whether as “existence in general”, the “sense of existence”, the “existence of man” and even as daseinwhich is a German neologism popularized by Martin Heidegger that designates the human existent as “being-there.”
History of the concept “existence”
The history of the concept begins with Christianity. In the medieval world, and largely thanks to Thomas Aquinas, it was opposed huparsis (ὕπαρξις), derived from hupárkhō (ὑπάρχω, “I begin, I exist”), to ousia (οὐσία,) to mark the ontological difference between both terms.
This distinction was anchored in the Aristotelian differentiation of the subsistent relationship between the thing in itself and its ideal or essential being. Existence is considered as the actualization of essence that is, being is in act what the essence is in potential.
For his part, Duns Scotus separated the essential being from the existing being to give independence to the concept of existence with respect to the essence.
In modernity, Descartes and Spinoza identified existence as part of an attribute predicable to something (for example, the duck is both animal and existing). Leibniz, on the other hand, saw in the concept of existence a principle of graduation towards essence: an essence for which existence is predicated is a more perfect essence than another for which existence is not predicated.
On the other hand, For Kant, existence is not part of the concept of something since he did not consider it as something predicable while Hegel maintained that existence is the idea of an absolute subjectivity that knows itself, even when it does not assign to it a meaning of “true reality.”
The contemporary concept of existence is associated with the work of Kierkegaard, for whom existence is exclusively human existence. For Nietzsche, existence is associated, in his criticism of Western philosophy, with an idea of “innocent” existence.
Considerations of the 20th century
Broadly speaking, there are three general considerations of the 20th century regarding existence.
- Human-oriented existence, known as “humanistic”.
- Existence as the problem of existential anxiety.
- Existence understood as the problem of “emptiness of the world”, linked to the approach of Schopenhauer and then to Heidegger.
From these considerations emerge the main ideas of existentialism as a philosophical movement, which inverted one of the traditional formulas of philosophy by proposing that existence was prior to essence.
This hypothesis implied that things existed before having their own, predetermined meaning, especially in the case of humanity. So, an atheistic, materialist and nihilistic philosophical movement was built which was of great importance for the political discourses of the 20th century.
In general, however, there is no absolute truth in terms of what it means to exist. The debate regarding what exactly existence, and especially human existence, is, continues.
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References
- Zalta, Edward N. (2016). «existence». The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
- Merleau-Ponty, M. (2009). “The philosophy of existence” in Philosophical Praxisnumber 28, pp. 229-242.
- Arendt, H. (1968). The philosophy of existence. Task.
- “existence” in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “existence” in Wikipedia.
