“Vivere viventibus est esse? The Relevance of Life to the Problem of Existence

Vivere viventibus est esse? The Relevance of Life for the Understanding of Existence Marcela GARCÍA (München) Traditionally, analytic ontology is almost exclusively concerned with the question ‘what is there?’ and accepts only one sense of being, namely the one expressed by the existential quantifier, that is, existence as instantiation of general terms. In this way, analytic ontology excludes the possibility of further questions regarding existence, e. g. ‘what is it for an individual to be?’, ‘what does its existence consist in?’, ‘in virtue of what does it exist?’. The aim of this paper is to show the relevance of life for the conception of existence: when we take living beings into account, some weaknesses of a quantificational approach to existence become clearer. This may lead to a broadening of the ontological inquiry in order to move beyond the merely quantificational sense of being and beyond the merely extensional question of ‘what there is’. 1 My aim here is therefore not first and foremost an ontology of living beings but rather to explore the significance of living beings for ontological inquiry. There has long been a certain uneasiness with the quantificational notion of existence. Some of the authors that criticize its exclusive consideration find that the notion of ‘being’ or ‘existence’ found in the history of philosophy is not exhausted by the quantificational account. One example that is often given of a different notion of being is that of a well-known Aristotelian passage, ‘for living beings to be is to live’, propagated in medieval philosophy as the dictum vivere viventibus est esse. I take an ‘existential’ reading of the dictum (‘being’ in the sense of ‘existing’) as a starting point to consider the connection between ‘living’ and ‘existing’. At first glance, this connection between life and existence would seem to run into two problems: (a) what can it mean to say that, for some things, existing has the same reference as living? would we need to admit that being can have different senses?; (b) it would seem to turn being into a real predicate in case life were a real predicate. 2 In order to clarify these difficulties, I discuss the positions of two contemporary philosophers, Peter van Inwagen and Michael Thompson, who, for different reasons, address what it is to live, and its relevance to ontology. Michael Thompson suggests the possibility of finding forms of predication (and their corresponding forms of being) that represent a ‘zooming-in’ from more abstract forms recognized by Frege. He thinks that ‘life’ is to be understood as one of these specific forms or categories and not as a series of first-level properties. In this sense, life is a specific form of being, a peculiar way of an object falling under a concept, rather than a real predicate. I will argue that the consideration of living beings provides strong arguments for a richer notion of existence that cannot reduced to the mere instantiation of general terms, but allows us to find more specific senses of being and to move beyond the question ‘what is there?’ to the questions ‘what is it for something to be?’, 3 and ‘in virtue of what does it exist?’ Such a rich notion of being, which is at play in Aristotelian tradition, allows for the consideration of different senses of being. I suggest that these different senses not only correspond to different categories but that they reveal a grounding structure which would be ignored if the different senses of being were to be expressed as first-level predicates. For the rich notation of being, the distinction between what is fundamental and what is derivative cannot be separated from what it means to exist.