III. ARE THERE KINDS OF BEING? 

As we’ve just seen, ontology full stop can’t be about being full stop. But it could be about what kinds of being there are. That horse over there is one kind of being. Pegasus is another. That horse is a thing, whereas Pegasus is an idea. It’s true, as Bishop Berkeley pointed out, that both, at least at the moment, are equally mere objects of my thought. But whereas the horse would exist even if I didn’t, Pegasus arguably wouldn’t.

I say only arguably because Berkeley thought that “to be is to be perceived.” So just as there can’t be a thought without a thinker, neither can there be a being without a perceiver. So it can make sense to say that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and then, having done so, “He saw that it was good.” But what we need is a distinction between God – or anyone else for that matter – having merely thought of something, and having actually created it. Because otherwise the Book of Genesis could have opened with, “In the beginning God thought the heavens and the earth and decided it was good.” Or, to bring the problem home to us, it would make no sense to say, “The road to perdition is paved with good intentions.”

As is happens, I’m not a theist. But if I were I’d want to say that God can change His mind with the alacrity of … Well, with the alacrity of His divine mind. So if He thought twice about Genesis 3, He could have just rethought the story, could He not? That He didn’t is most commonly chalked up to His not wanting to abrogate His creature’s free will. ‘Free’? Free of what? Free of God’s mind. So, just as it does when you and I make something, as distinct from merely thinking of it, by divine creation must be meant rendering what’s been created no longer amendable by His mind alone. Which is not to say He couldn’t unmake it.  But if so, neither could He do that by His mind alone.

So we do have the distinction between Pegasus and the flesh and blood horse. An idea can be merely thought out of existence. Just stop thinking it. A horse cannot.

But it doesn’t follow from this that ideas don’t exist. On the contrary, it’s going to be very hard to explain how I built my dining room table, which I did, if I didn’t have the idea of it first. As Donald Davidson put it, reasons are causes.

Fair enough. But if an idea is of one substance, an immaterial one, and a table is of another, a material one, how does something immaterial act upon something material, and  vice versa? So either material objects are reducible to ideas, a.k.a. idealism – Bishop Berkeley thought that – or ideas are reducible to material objects, a.k.a. physicalism – most contemporary philosophers think that – or there’s some (albeit metaphysically extravagant) solution to this mind-body problem – Gottfried Leibniz thought that.

The two monisms, idealism and physicalism, both claim to have Occam’s Razor on their sides. Never multiply entries – in this case substances – beyond the need to explain what’s to be explained. And so some philosophers believe, myself among them, that this is really just a clash of linguistic intuitions. But either way we go – putting Leibniz aside – the bottom line is that there can be only one kind of being, because what we mean by a kind, at least at this juncture, is a set of causal relations. That is, if there’s another kind of being that’s causally inert, so far as we can tell, then because we can’t tell, we should just shut up! 

But remember: absence of proof is not proof of absence. So there might well be “more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” just as “Yes Virginia, there [could be] a Santa Claus.”.  But so long as I keep getting coal in my stocking, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”

Categories: pure philosophy

Tags: Berkeley, Book of Genesis, Donald Davidson, free will, idealism, Leibniz, mind-body problem, monism, physicalism, Problem of Interaction, substance dualism