Does the world exist? A critique of Markus Gabriel’s metaphysics (1)

The main ontological thesis of the German philosopher Markus Gabriel could be summed up in the phrase: “the Whole does not exist, but everything exists.” If we replace “the Whole” with a more familiar word (“the world”), the first part of the thesis amounts to the striking claim that “the world does not exist”—a phrase that, indeed, forms part of the title of one of our author’s most popular works. That title serves as a kind of hook (or, as we say nowadays, a clickbait), since readers eventually realize that the author is not trying to convince them that the room they are reading in is a mere product of their imagination or something of that sort, but rather of something infinitely less disturbing and at the same time much more technical (and therefore less interesting to most readers): the thesis that what does not exist is the totality formed by the set of all things, whereas each and every one of those things is indeed real. We might say that Gabriel’s thesis is simply the rather technical proposition that the many entities that exist cannot be gathered into a single mega-set or super-collection that encompasses them all (including itself as well), and therefore what there is, is an irreducible plurality, one that cannot be reduced to a single substrate, nature, or common ontological system.

This first part of Gabriel’s thesis is not really mysterious at all; in fact, it is rather trivial (though, of course, it was surprising when first demonstrated) if we look at it from a logical-mathematical standpoint. After all, it is just one of the possible formulations of Russell’s paradox: from the hypothesis that there exists a universal set U, containing everything, we can derive, by using one of the axioms of set theory (the axiom of subsets, that says that for every predicate P, and every set S, there exists the set of all entities that belong to S and have property P), that there exists the set R of all elements of U that have the property of ‘not being an element of itself’; but if R itself has that property, it would belong to itself, which entails that it has not the property; and if it does not have the property, then it would not belong to itself, which amounts to having the property. Hence the assumption that the universal set U exists leads to a logical contradiction.

By contrast, the argument that Gabriel himself offers to deny the existence of “the Whole” is much weaker, obscure, and in truth there is not the slightest logical necessity to accept it: Gabriel begins by asserting (without anything resembling a proof—or even a justification) that “to exist” consists in “appearing in a field of sense.” (Incidentally, the prejudice that to exist always means to exist “in” something could be called inism, were it not such an ugly expression; the whole of Gabriel’s metaphysics ultimately rests on this unmotivated inism). Despite the fact that the notion of fields of sense is fundamental to Gabriel’s philosophy, he offers no detailed or convincing explanation of what exactly such fabulous entities would be, beyond the tautology that a field of sense would be everything “in” which something can exist or “appear.” In fact, a careful reading of his works leads to the conclusion that, for Gabriel, anything imaginable can be (and therefore everything is) a “field of sense.” For example:

Let us think of a rhinoceros in a meadow. This rhinoceros exists. It is definitely in the meadow. The fact that it is in the meadow, that it belongs to the field of sense of the meadow, is its existence. Therefore, existence is not simply general appearance in the world, but appearance in one of its domains.

(Why the World Does Not Exist, ch. 2).

In truth, it is far from clear why the existence of the rhinoceros must consist in “the fact that it is in the meadow”: the very same rhinoceros will continue to exist when it leaves the meadow and enters a forest, for example. We would say, with Aristotle, that the fact of being in the meadow is quite accidental to the rhinoceros’s existence—it is not something essential to it—and therefore we can hardly regard that existence as consisting in the particular position that the animal happens to occupy at a given moment. Perhaps there is some deeper and more detailed argument showing why “being in the meadow” (or “appearing in the field of sense that is the meadow”) is precisely what the existence of the rhinoceros consists in—an argument that could, among other things, explain how the rhinoceros that exists in the meadow is still the same one as the rhinoceros that has just left the meadow to hide in the forest. But in truth, I have been unable to find any such argument in the texts Gabriel devotes to the subject; he merely repeats, over and over again, that “to exist is to appear in a field of sense,” as if it were an obvious truth that any intelligent person must accept. Moreover, the property of “being in a certain place” is simply one property among the many that a thing may have (for example, being a certain color, being boring, being frozen…), and it is unclear why this property of “being in” rather than any other property (like being of a certain colour, or containing certain amount of mass) should enjoy the privilege of being identified with the property of existing. In short, the point is that, for Gabriel, if the meadow is a field of sense because the rhinoceros “appears in it” (in plain English we could simply say “is in it”), then—as we noted above—anything can be a “field of sense,” because with respect to anything else we can always say that other things “are in (relation to) it”: fleas would be “in the field of sense of the rhinoceros,” 42 would be “in the field of sense of the natural numbers,” and even 2 is, in a certain way, “in the field of sense of 42,” and so on, and so forth.

Another problem with the notion of “fields of sense” is the fact that the word sense inevitably refers to thought or language, as shown by the fact that we can often use meaning as its synonym. That is, for us, it may well be that the relations a thing has with other things are what “give meaning” to it—what allow us to understand it, say—but most objects in the universe, although they have relations with other objects (planets orbiting stars in galaxies invisible from ours, where there are no living beings, for example), do not need, in order to exist and to have those relations, anyone for whom all that might or might not “make sense.” The expression “field of sense” is therefore too anthropocentric to serve as an explanation of the most general concept of “existence” or “being.” After all, we perfectly understand what is meant by a sentence such as “there exist things about which no one has ever thought, nor ever will think, any thought—whether meaningful or meaningless,” and therefore, the existence of such things cannot consist in the “meaning” that such thoughts might or might not have for them.

References

Gabriel, Markus, Why the world does not exist? Polity, 2017.