Does the world exist? On Markus Gabriel’s inflationary metaphysics (2)
In the our last entry, we saw the weakness of Gabriel’s ‘inism’ (the belief that to exist has to be identical to ‘exist in something’) as the most important logical fault of his ontology. We also saw that his idea that ‘the world’ (in the sense of a super-entity comprising the totality of real beings) does not exist is much less astonishing as he pretends to sound (and in a more rigorous sense, it is just a trivial consequence of Russell’s paradox). In this entry, I will focus instead on the second part of the main metaphysical slogan of Gabriel; remember, the one saying that “the Whole does not exist, but everything exists.” This “everything” is much more literal than it seems, for it does not refer to “everything that a reasonable reader would consider to exist if they reflected seriously about it,” but to… well… everything, everything, everything; that is, even anything you might right now be thinking obviously does not exist—an issue to which we will soon return.
But let me return briefly to the issue of Russell’s paradox and the non-existence of ‘the Whole”, for I have not yet explained Grabriel’s alternative argument in detail. Let us do so now: Gabriel simply points out that, according to his description of “fields of sense” (a description which, I insist, we have no reason to accept as a serious ontological or epistemological category in the absence of a more elaborate justification, for it is too general and too little informative about what exactly it means, since in the end anything could be a ‘field of sense’), there cannot be an all-encompassing field of sense, one in which all the others appear (and which is what Gabriel calls “the world”), because that universal field of sense would itself have to appear, in order to exist, in some other, even more encompassing field of sense. Recall that for Gabriel, “to exist” consists in “appearing in some field of sense,” and this must also apply to the existence of the world itself.
That this argument is fallacious is not hard to see: apart from the fact that, I repeat, we have no need to accept the merely gratuitous conjecture that “to exist is to appear in some field of sense,” nor to take the very notion of “appearing” as something free of semantic difficulties, there is also no logical demonstration that a field of sense cannot “appear” in itself, or in another field that in turn appears in the first. Gabriel merely compares the case of “fields of sense” with visual fields (where it may seem clearer that many things appear in a visual field, but not the visual field itself), but there is no reason why “fields of sense” should share that property with visual fields. After all, the concept of “dog” is a concept that exists because, among other things, it appears in the “field of sense” consisting of the concept of “concept” (just as the rhinoceros appeared in the “field of sense” consisting of the meadow), and it would not seem very strange to claim that “the field of sense of concepts” is itself a concept that, precisely for that reason, also appears in itself. Thus, it is far from clear that a field of sense cannot “appear in itself” (after all, is the meadow not also somehow in the meadow?), and so there would be no problem in saying that the existence of the field of sense we call “world” (or “the Whole”) exists because it “appears” in itself. That said, let us recall in any case that, in order to accept the nonexistence of something like “the world” or “the Totality,” we did not need Gabriel’s simpleminded argument, since we already had the old Russell paradox for that. And let us also highlight the fact that, given how peculiar and extravagant his philosophical concept of “world” or “existence” is, even if we were to accept that Gabriel has “demonstrated” the thesis that “the world does not exist,” this would oblige other philosophers to modify what they say when speaking about the world about as much as it would oblige the editors of Jules Verne to change the title of Around the World in Eighty Days.
But, as we said above, the truly problematic conclusion of Markus Gabriel’s ontology is not actually the claim that “the world does not exist”, but rather the thesis that “everything exists.” Attention: this is not just about accepting the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany, mourning for the dead, or the number pi—examples already mentioned by Gabriel himself—but also something like the following:
I claim that there are unicorns dressed in police uniforms on the hidden side of the moon. For this thought exists in the world, and with it, the unicorns dressed as police officers, although, as far as I know, they do not exist in the universe… There are elves in stories, but not in Hamburg… Quite simply, the question is never whether something exists, but where something exists, for everything that exists, exists somewhere, even if only in our imagination. The only exception is, once again, the world (Why the World Does Not Exist, ch. IV).
Aside from the fact that Gabriel lets slip here that a thought “exists in the world,” just after trying to demonstrate to us that “the world” does not exist and therefore nothing can exist “in the world”; aside from the whiff of “inism” in the idea that what matters ontologically is “where something exists,” rather than “when it happens,” “how much it weighs,” or “how much it cost me”; and aside from the fact that, if it turned out that according to the tale in question those elves lived in Hamburg, we could then ask whether those elves might not, in fact, exist precisely in Hamburg, or doubt whether the Hamburg mentioned in the tale is or is not the same as the “real” Hamburg… Aside from all that, I say, it seems to me that Markus Gabriel’s true hidden aim, in plunging us into what we might call ontological inflation or ultrapluralism, is simply to make more palatable the thesis that the physical universe is not all there is, and that therefore there is nothing wrong with claiming that, in addition to physical or natural facts, “the world of the spirit also exists,” along with everything related to it (for Gabriel’s explicit goal is to ‘rescue’ the reality of what he calls ‘the spiritual’, in the sense of everything related to human thought, consciousness, and freedom). After all, if even witches exist (for they exist at least in Goethe’s Faust, to use one of Gabriel’s own examples), what could be odd about the existence of things as little “material” as free will, human rights, or spirit itself?
The problem, of course, is that if the price of admitting the existence of these “spiritual” things is to incorporate them into the package of “all those worlds that are not the physical world” (a package overcrowded with fictional entities like witches and elves), then one might suspect that spiritual things (rights, freedom…) may be just as fictional as witches and unicorns dressed as police officers. And, of course, no materialist or scientistic thinker would have any problem acknowledging the “existence” of the spiritual, if doing so simply meant accepting that those things “exist as fictions exist—that is, in the imagination (or in novels and films).”
I believe Markus Gabriel’s ontology is excessively wasteful in “democratizing” the notion of existence to such an extreme degree, and that even he subconsciously misses a convincing way to distinguish between the spiritual entities that exist “for real” (e.g., the right of all human beings not to be tortured, and, at least according to many people, perhaps God and the afterlife) and those that exist only “in the imagination” (e.g., the elves and orcs from The Lord of the Rings, or the alleged right of the German people to invade any territories necessary to secure their “living space”—a right that existed, at the very least, in the imagination and writings of a certain Adolf Hitler). But unfortunately, I fear that Gabriel’s theory does not easily allow such an indispensable distinction to be made.
References
Gabriel, Markus, Why the world does not exist? Polity, 2017.