I think, “thinking” is mental event happening purely in one’s mind. It does not affect the object being thought. The object you are thinking is purely inside your own mind, even if the object you are thinking about is outside of you.
That is my opinion, but it would be interesting to read on and further discuss, if you could give your opinion further with more details, why it is “relation”.
The reason I think it is not relation is that you can think about the object, and you can see the object. But you cannot see the “relation”. Relation is just your imagination.
But when I try to think about what exactly we mean by “things,” I feel like we run into the same problem again — whether something can really be thought as existing on its own.
It seems difficult to make sense of a “thing” without already relying on some form of relation or distinction.
So I’m not sure that “things” can be understood as independent from relations in the first place.
Simply by thinking about something it is not on its own. There is a relationship between a thinker and what is thought as well as what is thought and other things that are thought.
I guess the question would be, Is the distinction being made merely between the “something” and its negation? If so, you could argue that such a distinction doesn’t really posit anything over against the something in question.
Thank you, I think that’s a very helpful way to frame it.
I can see how the search for certainty, and the anxiety about lacking a foundation, could motivate the tendency to look for something self-subsistent or ultimate.
At the same time, I’m wondering whether this drive itself might shape how we think about existence — leading us to assume that there must be something that stands on its own.
What I’m still trying to understand is whether that assumption is actually necessary, or whether it comes from a certain way of thinking rather than from the nature of existence itself.
The only thing you need to identify a “thing” as “things”, is a “thing”. You don’t need anything else to identify it.
For example, if I want to identify a “guitar” from books and many other things, then the only thing I need is a “guitar” among many other things. It is enough for identification.
That is why it could be imagination. It exists only in your mind, nowhere else.
Well, again - it’s a big topic! It’s the kind of question that motivates whole careers.
The natural subject area for this question is ‘the history of ideas’, which is a distinct sub-discipline, usually situated in Cultural Studies or Comparative Religion. You also find those kinds of treatments in sociology, a classic example being Max Weber’s ‘The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic’. Such studies consider the geneaology of formative conceptions in society and culture and how they unfold and develop over generations. (I did a BA in Comparative Religion, where this ‘history of ideas’ approach is very much part of the curriculum.)
But this, again, is where the contrast between the Indian and the Semitic religions is useful (the Semitic religions being Judaism, Christianity and Islam.)
They developed in very separate cultural spheres in the ancient world, and started from very different cultural traditions. The questions they explored and their core assumptions are very different, giving rise to diverse cultural and religious forms. At risk of generalisation, I will say that the Eastern religions have a much more fluid, and less concretized, sense of the nature of Being.
It’s always quite possible to think of existence in this way. All you need to do is not think hard about the problems that result. Getting it to hold water is more difficult, and similar thinking drove me to the relational way of thinking, to the abandonment of any kind of realism.
I suspect ‘exists’ might be no more than a mental construct. Not pushing idealism, where minds are fundamental. Thinking entities are made of parts in my book. But the existence of those parts are made of the thoughts.
To illustrate, there doesn’t seem to be a test for the sort of objective existence you’re questioning. Two objects (people say), identical, but one existing and the other not. Can either perform a test to see which they are?
I certainly can test for a relation. Perhaps one person is on a planet with a moon and the other on a planet with a unicorn (OK, they’d not be identical then). One exists relative to that moon and the other exists relative to the unicorn. Those are testable relations.
That’s very helpful, thank you — I can see how the history of ideas provides an important perspective on this.
At the same time, I think my question is slightly different. I’m less concerned with how these ideas developed historically, and more with whether the assumption itself holds at a conceptual level.
In other words, I’m trying to understand whether “existence as something independent” is actually coherent, rather than how or why that idea emerged.
I find this very compelling — especially the point that relations seem to be testable, while “existence” itself is not.
That resonates with my own intuition.
At the same time, I’m wondering whether this suggests something even more basic — that what we call “existence” might not be a primitive notion at all, but something that emerges from relational structures.
In other words, instead of saying that things exist and then enter into relations, it might be that relations are primary, and what we call “things” or “existence” are ways of stabilizing or interpreting those relations.
I’m still trying to think this through, but your example makes that direction feel quite natural.
Well, fair, but it’s a deep question of metaphysics, so I have tended to study it through a history of ideas approach, so as to calibrate my thinking about it against those sources.
Recall the precise derivation of ‘exists’ - ‘ex- ‘ ‘out’ or ‘forth’, and ‘istere’ ‘to be’. So, meaning to stand forth, emerge or appear; to be ‘this’ rather than ‘that’.
And also, your statement seems to undercut itself. Not pushing idealism - minds are made of parts - but the parts themselves are made of thoughts? So no ‘turtles all the way down’, then?
In my philosophy, ‘existents’ (things that exist) are indeed constituted in the mind — but it needs to be interpreted very carefully. I don’t mean ‘the world is all in your head’. Objective existents are interpreted or construed by subjects in particular ways, determined by various factors including biological, cultural and linguistic.
According to Nāgārjuna, whom Jin mentioned in the OP, particular existents don’t possess intrinsic reality, but arise as a consequence of causes and conditions. Hence Carlos Rovelli’s interest in Madhyamaka:
If nothing exists in itself, everything exists only through dependence on something else, in relation to something else. The technical term used by Nagarjuna the absence of independent existence is ‘emptiness’ (sunyata): things are ‘empty’ in the sense of having no autonomous existence. They exist thanks to, as a function of, with respect to, in the perspective of, something else (> ref).
But intepreting Nāgārjuna is notoriously difficult. His famous work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) has given rise to centuries of commentary and exegesis. A well regarded current textbook is by Jan Westerhoff Nagarjuna_book - JAN WESTERHOFF
Hi I just wanted to say I’ve had very similar thoughts lately but your understanding is obviously much deeper than my own. I suppose I still have lots to educate myself on what I’ve writen up sounds very unscientific now.
‘Existence’ has multiple definitions, most of them being relations. So existential quantification is one such definition, but I’m not sure what meaningfully emerges from that.
If ‘exists’ is no more than a concept, well, concepts require thought, which requires process. Process arguably requires causal structures, so perhaps existence may emerge from causal structures, but I can think of causal structures where that is not the case.
I use a definition that mutated from how Rovelli uses it. X exists in relation to Y if X is part of the causal history of Y. That definition obviously requires a causal structure, so while 5 being less than 7 is a relation, it’s not really a causal relation.
All things arguably are what they are, so the last bit does little for me. Stand out, sure, but to what? Per my example of the two people, only one of which objectively exists, neither stands out more than the other except for this label arbitrarily applied by something considering them.
As always, you cannot distinguish a thing from the concept of the thing. I never said parts are made of thoughts. The concepts of parts are, sure, but minds do not supervene on those. Other way around.
Objective existents are interpreted or construed by subjects in particular ways
If their existence was actually objective, then what subjects think of them would be entirely irrelevant.
I like the Nāgārjuna quote BTW. Tip of the iceberg it seems.
From your first reply:
Interestingly, if existence is but an ideal, then you really do cause your own existence. Nothing contradictory or circular about it, and no necessity of being a god.
You seem to equate that comment with “those parts are made of the thoughts”, which is not what I said.
I just got finished suggesting that existence is no more than a concept, a label assigned to a thing by some thinking entity that finds it pragmatic to do so. So given that definition, it is the assignment of ‘exists’ to the parts (and not to the concept of the parts) that is the mental act. Of course you can assign the label to the concept of parts as well, which is a wordy way of saying ‘thoughts exist’. Gosh, that’s what DesCartes started with, resulting in him deciding to assign the label to himself as well.
About that:
@Jin : Speaking of Rovelli, and my definition of causal existence relation, what follows from the definition is that a thing (an system state at a moment in time) cannot measure itself (it is not part of the cause of itself), so relative to say you (now), you don’t exist. That takes a bit of getting used to. What exists (relative to you) is what’s measured, which includes past version of yourself.
Schrodinger’s cat is often used to illustrate differences in interpretations. So relative to the lab guy, we have this cat in superposition of dead and alive in the box. The superposition collapses once the box is opened. The cat, being unable to measure itself, does not collapse its own wave function, at least not relative to anything outside the box. So it also does not experience a state of superposition any more than you do.
This is very helpful — thank you. I appreciate the way you’ve framed it, especially the connection to Nāgārjuna and the clarification about interpretation.
You’re right to point out a possible tension in what I said. Let me try to clarify what I meant.
When I say that “existence” might be a mental construct, I don’t mean that things are created by the mind in an idealist sense. Rather, I’m questioning whether “existence” is something we can meaningfully attribute to things independently of the conceptual structures through which we apprehend them.
In that sense, I’m not claiming that parts are “made of thoughts,” but that our notion of their existence may depend on the way they are distinguished, related, and interpreted.
This is partly why I’m drawn to a relational perspective — not necessarily as a metaphysical claim about what ultimately is, but as a way of understanding how things become intelligible to us at all.
So I’m less trying to deny realism outright, and more trying to understand whether the idea of independent existence is conceptually coherent in the first place.
I wonder, though, whether describing “existence” as a label might already presuppose something like a distinction between what is labeled and what is not.
From a more structural perspective — perhaps closer to category theory — I’m inclined to think less in terms of labels, and more in terms of objects and relations (morphisms).
In that sense, what we call a “thing” is not something that first exists and then gets labeled, but something that is defined through its relations to other objects.
So I’m not sure whether “existence” can be understood as something we simply assign, as a label, rather than something that emerges from the structure itself.
