| | I started to read Dr. Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR) and I found something that caused me to pause.
On page 5 Dr. Peikoff writes, "The concept of 'existence' is the widest of all concepts. It subsumes everything - entity, action, attribute, relationship (including every state of consciousness) - everything which is, was, or will be."
On occasion, I've felt uncomfortable with thinking of something which does not yet exist, say someone who will be born 10 years from now, as part of "existence." If it doesn't exist now, how can it be part of existence? But yesterday I turned from OPAR and read from Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE) and saw how she formed this axiomatic concept by keeping the fact of time but dropping any measurement thereof (page 56 in 2nd Ed). This would be necessary to formulate a concept that was the widest of all concepts, and where nothing is outside of the concept now, and there never will be, nor has there ever been anything outside of the concept. The alternative to existence is... void.
So, I continued to the next sentence in that paragraph in OPAR, "The concept does not specify that a physical world exists." This, I think, should have been left out. It is confusing by itself. To understand what is going on you have to follow the sentence's reference to ITOE (page 245-249). Once you read that, then you see that Ayn Rand was asked if "Existence exists" is equivalent to "a physical world exists" and Ms. Rand was emphatic in saying these are not equivalent: That "existence exists" is an axiom formed from an axiomatic concept which puts it in a very different epistemological category, and that "a physical world exists" is a fact that requires advanced knowledge. So, this is confusing to have put it in that paragraph of OPAR without an explanation beyond a reference to a footnote in the appendices that only refers to a page number in ITOE.
It is the next sentence that I thought was most poorly worded. He writes, "As the first concept at the base of knowledge, it covers only what is known, implicitly if not explicitly, by the gamut of the human race, from the newborn baby or the lowest savage on through the greatest scientist and the most erudite sage." This wording is saying that "existence" covers ONLY what is known. That would be the primacy of consciousness. And I know that is not what Dr. Peikoff believes. Perhaps I'm missing something, or making some obvious mistake that I'm just not seeing. I welcome any corrections.
At this point, having been rereading parts of ITOE I had a thought. The conversion of the axiomatic concept "existence" into the axiom "existence exists" raises the question of grammatical tense. We know that "existence" include all things past, present and future, but the verb "exists" implies the present and the time-binding is when the statement is made. Perhaps one could imply the past as existing history, but I can't get my mind around "exists" as referring to things that won't exist till some time in the future - not without accepting some form or rigid determinism where every act, every thought, every event - till the end of time - is predestined by current conditions (which were predestined by past conditions). And even that doesn't work since potential isn't actual - and "will be" isn't "is."
So, I'm left wondering about how to use this predicate of "exists" in a way that isn't ambiguous with the subject "existence."
On page 59 of ITOE (expanded 2nd Ed), Rand writes, "The concept 'existence' does not indicate what existents it subsumes: it merely underscores the primary fact that they exist." And in the next paragraph, "This underscoring of primary facts is one of the crucial epistemological functions of axiomatic concepts. It is also the reason why they can be translated into a statement only in the form of repetition (as a base and a reminder): Existence exists - Consciousness is conscious - A is A. (This converts axiomatic concepts into formal axioms.)
The only thing I can think of is that when the axiomatic concept is considered alone, it has no specific time, not even past versus present versus future. That we've seen. But when it is made the subject of a verb, perhaps there is a fundamental, epistemological need to put it in time, even if not a specific time. Verbs are often related to action, or bind things to a time. Is that approach logically defensible? If that is the answer, then it is saying that "Existence exists" carries an implicit but required condition such that a full understanding would be something like "Existence exists across time."
Any thoughts?
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