Plato and the existentialists

I enjoyed the feedback I got on my essay Was Jesus a Pacifist. That essay, with Jesus the Pharisee, I produced as part of my Victoria University paper on the historical Jesus.

The other paper I did in Semester 2 was a third-level philosophy paper called Theories of Existence. This was a great chance to get stuck into a subject I've long wanted to study and finally connect up names with ideas and get my head around the field. We studied big names like Plato and Aristotle, and Anselm and Kant, and also the logicians Frege and Russell, and existentialist thinkers Kierkegaard, Heidegger & Sartre.

It was clear from the start that there would be a big emphasis on existentialism, and I was bracing myself to launch some sort of attack on what I'd understood to have been one of the most destructive philosophical movements of the 20th century. Instead I found my heart and mind strangely warmed by existentialist thought. And that was after being wrapt with Plato for months. Thanks to an obscure philosopher by thge name of Archie J Bahm who featured in our readings, I found a way to take the best from everything I learned from Plato to Sartre, in a way that very much fit my own moderating epistemological commitments in other fields.

And so the two essays I wrote for the paper ended up both using Bahm. Firstly with regards to Plato and his idea of The Good which long shaped western philosophy. And secondly with regards to Sartre, whose existentialism I hope to have rescued from the atheism Sartre has locked it into for the last half century. Both essays address the issue of the long-held dichotomy between existence and essence - what comes first, the existence of a thing, or its essence? It can seem on the surface a trivial or even meaningless question - but it is similar to the "what came first - chicken or egg" - question. Sartre preferred to prioritise existence, because essence implies a designer and thus a God, and Sartre wanted an atheist philosophy. My first essay on Plato follows below, and I will publish my essay on Sartre in the next few days.


Nonreductionistic Platonism

What is the nature of existence? Is this a sensible question to ask? Can existence have a nature, or an essence? And if so, is an essence a thing that existence has, a property that makes up what existence is? If this is so, then essences must be prior to existence, which means that essences must be able to transcend existence.

Yet, if essences transcend and are prior to existence, then before existence comes into being those essences must belong somewhere else, outside of existence. Now, if essences belong in some realm other than existence, then in what way can those essences be present in that realm if their presence is not some form of existence? Thus, surely, existence must be prior to essence. An essence can only cause a thing to exist if it at first exists itself. At least, this is the conclusion of modern existentialism.

Archie J Bahm, a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico for the better part of the 20th century, sought tackle this seeming antithesis between essence and existence. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966) he addresses the problem as identified by existentialist philosophy. He critiques both Existentialism and Platonism as taking extreme positions due to their inherent and unchecked compulsive reductionism. Rather than obsessing over which is prior to the other, essence or existence, Bahm proposes a middle way, which he calls organicism, or nonreductionistic existentialism. In this essay I will review Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism, and discuss whether or not a middle way is possible in the tussle for priority between existence and essence.

Archie John Bahm (1907 – 1906) spent most of his career as a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico. The same year he was appointed (1948), Bahm also founded the New Mexico Philosophy Society. He was involved with the American Humanist movement from early in its inception, as author of A Religious Affirmation, twice published in the Humanist Association journal (1933, 1953), and later as signatory to the 1973 Humanist Manifesto. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966), Bahm provides a new way of looking at essence and existence, and the wide gamut of other classical philosophical dichotomies, by critiquing the reductionist nature of western philosophy and suggesting a more organic approach. He provides a paradigm which can make sense of these dichotomies by accepting the existence of each opposing category as poles on a continuum, rather than problematic contradictions.

Bahm shows how this new approach resolves classical philosophical problems in four easily understandable ways:

1.He shows that the “falsity of the assertion that ‘essence precedes existence’ does not imply the truth of the assertion that existence precedes essence.’” Precedence need not be absolute – essence may precede existence insofar as existence requires essence to exist, but not so far as to exclude existence from the necessary metaphysic within which it must exist – and vice versa.

2.He highlights the way in which the obsession with existence as “will” (volition, power, freedom), and their chief concern with human freedom, has clouded the ability of existentialist thinkers to willingly consider the complementarity of freedom and determinism.

3.Quoting Gerge Herbert Mead, he shows that as human beings we consider ourselves both as subject (free) and object (determined), that to be social requires us to do the latter, and that as social beings humanness must be considered both in terms of our experience both as subjects and objects.

4.Finally, while existentialists claim that we create meaning as a result of experiencing meaningless (ie death, nonexistence of God), Bahm makes the point that we cannot know what meaninglessness is without first knowing what meaning is. “One can only die if he has first been alive.”

Bahm then goes on to provide four principles to avoid extreme reductionism and sustain a more organic approach to knowledge.

1.We must realise that “whenever a genuine issue arises regarding the nature of man or the universe, there is truth to both sides; for otherwise the issue would not have arisen in the first place.”

2.Reductionism tends to arise when we are too quick to take sides on opposing poles of a dichotomy, and thereby defensively oppose any truth claim which might support the opposite side.

3.Antireductionistic measures require reconsideration of “the nature of opposition which…may be seen to be characterized by polarity rather than contradiction,” and that “polar opposites depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature.”

4.Variability and diversity, and the general manifestation of dichotomic properties, as an indication of the reality of polarity and presence of both opposites in the world. “Persons function sometimes more as subjects and sometimes more as objects.” My existential hunger may cause me to want an essential item of food, or the essential item of food may cause in me an existential hunger.


Bahm’s rejection of extremes and binary thinking has a ring of familiarity to it forty-three years on. His “middle way” of nonreductionistic existentialism would find itself quite comfortably at home among similar moderating paradigms in sociology (structuration theory) politics (third way), economics (Keynesian resurgency) and theology (radical orthodoxy). As far as philosophy goes, Bahm’s ideas could sit quite nicely within the scope of critical realism.

However, in dealing with the idea of existence, has he really successfully dispelled the Platonic notion of essences having an origin beyond existence? In order to address this I would like to look at Plato’s notion of The Good in relation to the ontological problem of existence, and consider its merits with reference to Bahm’s four principles of organicism.


Plato’s Theory of Ideas

In A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (1920) Walter Terence Stace summarises the ontology of Plato. Stace begins by discussing the way Plato develops the Socratic notion of concepts into a Theory of Ideas, as is illustrated in Meno. Plato poses that the nature of truth is when the concept I hold in my mind corresponds as a copy to something that exists outside my mind. In this way Plato argues that ideas must form the basis for both the substance of the world and our perception of the world as we experience it. Stace summarises (p187), “…the Ideas are substances. They are absolute and ultimate realities. Their whole being is in themselves. They depend on nothing, but all things depend on them. They are the first principles of the universe.” Furthermore as the ultimate substance of reality, the world of ideas is the location of “the essences of all things” (p189).

Stace then discusses Plato’s ontology of this world of ideas in relation to existence, or being, the term Plato uses. Here Stace draws on Sophist and Parmenides (p195 – 197). Against the Eleatics, Plato argued that the One is both a unity and a plurality, for we cannot conceive of the One without also conceiving its predicate, which immediately implies a duality. Similarly, “every many is ipso facto a unity, since we think of the many in one idea, and, if we did not, we should not even know that it is a many.” In the same way, being cannot totally exclude non-being. “The being of anything is the not-being of its opposite. The being of light is the not-being of darkness. All being, therefore, has not-being in it.”

Thus, for Plato, the One – that is, the ultimate reality – is both a unity and a plurality, and is both being and not-being. Plato’s Theory of Ideas is very clearly an ontology of plurality, as there are many ideas. Yet it is also an ontology of unity. For Plato, ideas are ordered in a hierarchy. “Just as the one Idea presides over many individual things of which it is the common element, so one Idea presides over many lower Ideas, and is the common element in them.” In Plato’s system, there is one highest Idea which is supreme over all other ideas, and that is the Idea of the Good (p198).

It is this idea of The Good as the highest ontological principle that caused later thinkers, influenced by Plato, to suggest that essence must precede existence. The first to make this argument explicit was the great Persian and Islamic philosopher, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980 – 1037). Ibn Sina, similarly to Plato, concluded that because essences can be present in either in things or (intentionally) in the intellect, their substance is not tied to the reality of things (the position of the Aristotelian tradition). However Ibn Sina creates a new category for essences which are in intellect and not in things – esse essentiae, a notion of pure possibility with a certain kind of existence, though inferior to actual existence (esse existentiae). Christendom’s answer to Ibn Sina, Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), also employed Ibn Sina’s idea that essence must precede existence. Yet, as Plato posed The Good as the highest ontological principle, and source of all ideas and by implication all essence, so Aquinas has God taking the place of The Good as the First Cause.


Platonism as ultimately non-reductionistic

In expounding his nonreductionistic existentialism, Bahm observes that Platonists overlook or deny the idea that existence and essence could be mutually independent, and hence mutually prior to each other. Bahm claims that a nonreductionistic and realistic approach to the existence-essence problem would better accommodate and understand “the nature of opposition” where the existence-essence dichotomy would be understood as “polarity rather than contradiction,” which “depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature” (p152). Affirming Bahm’s principle of polarity, I would argue that Platonism, in the work of the philosopher himself, and also in the father of the existence-essence dichotomy and his Western interpreter, are not purely reductionistic in their treatment of the problem. All of these thinkers certainly argue that essence precedes material existence, yet there remains a causative link between the material world and the world of ideas (Plato), possibilities (Ibn Sina) and God (Aquinas). Thus these ultimate worlds are no less real than the material world, and thus no less having existence or being.

Nowhere does Plato state the origin of The Good, or those ideas that proceed from The Good. It would seem that The Good was to Plato, because of its ultimacy, something eternal in nature, and thus without beginning. The same can obviously be said of Ibn Sina & Aquinas’ idea of God. The essence of The Good for Plato, or of God for Ibn Sina & Aquinas, could not precede the existence of The Good or of God. And so neither Plato, Ibn Sina nor Aquinas can be said to be purely reductionistic in this matter, nor should they be interpreted to be so. Bahm has reacted to what he calls extreme Platonism and extreme existentialism in his work, and as a solution has produced what he calls a nonreductionistic existentialism. Why he leaned to the existentialist camp with his label is unclear, as this interpretation of Plato, Ibn Sina and Aquinas shows that a nonreductionistic Platonism, at least in terms of first principles of ontology, is just as feasible.


Conclusion

Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism as a middle way in existence-essence tussle is certainly of merit. Yet it would appear there has always been plenty of room in the Platonic tradition for a mutuality between the ontological forces of existence and essence. The extent to which an extreme and reductionist Platonism has been propounded by Existentialists as a platform for their own reductionist enterprise would make for an interesting study.


References

Aquinas, Thomas, On Being and Essence

Bahm, Archie John, Nonreductionistic Existentialism. The Monist, 1966, The Hegeler Institute, La Selle, IN

El-Bizri, Nader, Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. In Medieval Islamic Civilization (London, Routledge, 2005).

Goodman, Lenn Evan, Avicenna (Cornell University Press, 2005).

Plato, Meno.

Plato, Parmenides.

Plato, Sophist.

Plato, The Republic.

Stace, Walter Terence, A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London, Macmillan, & Co., 1969).

Zalta, Edward N., Existence. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 24 May 2002. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/