The Fountain. Don Cupitt

      3

      The Fountain: Be-ing

      In a deservedly famous brief discussion, Aristotle points out the large number of different senses in which a person may be said to ‘have’ something. Similarly there is a very large number of distinct senses in which it may be claimed that something is ‘in being’, ‘exists’, or is ‘real’ or ‘extant’. So large, that we can quickly confound all those straightforward, down-to-earth people who feel quite sure that they know how to draw a clear line between what’s real and what isn’t, by asking them about various social institutions and conventions. Is Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto a ‘real’ thing? What sort of object is it? Point it out to me, please! And where does it lurk between performances of it? Alternatively, since they are apt to describe anyone who is very keen on money as ‘materialistic’, try asking them what money is in these days when it is no longer just gold, nor paper, and we are rapidly moving into a fully computerized and cashless economy. It’s ‘really’ quite surprisingly difficult to say clearly just what money is now, and similar difficulties are becoming very widespread as the virtual worlds of the media and of cyberspace get bigger and bigger, and more and more deeply interwoven with the world of everyday life. Computer geeks notoriously can begin to confuse the virtual and the ‘real’. Perhaps this is a new version of what happened at the time of the Industrial Revolution, when people became acutely aware of a cultural rift, and learnt to cope with it by making a broad distinction between two great worlds: there was the hard, masculine, public world of our competitive, science-based industrial society, and there was the more feminine world of private life, of morality, religion and the creative imagination. The Victorians tried to keep these two worlds rather sharply distinct. But today the real and the fictional are already or are fast becoming, thoroughly interwoven everywhere.

      Aware of the growing difficulty Wittgenstein argued for pluralism. Take the case of goodness. When I’m buying a lawn-mower, I am pretty clear in my mind about the criteria for something’s being a good lawnmower, and when I’m asked whether I have had a good holiday, I know again pretty well what sort of things my friend is asking about. But in more general contexts things get vaguer. What could absolute, context-neutral, universal goodness be? There are traditional answers, such as ‘the unity of all the compossible perfections; that is, of all the (compatible) qualities that it’s better to have than not to have’ - but this is getting hopelessly woolly, and we begin to suspect that we are wasting our time. ‘Absolute’ goodness, of no specific kind, is too vague an idea to be useful for any particular purpose. Similarly with existence. In a mathematical context, one can ask if there exists any prime number between 21 and 24; and in a literary context one can ask if David Copperfield had any brothers or sisters. In a scientific context one may say that something such as ‘the force of gravity’ that certainly ‘exists’ under Newton’s theory is not at all the same in modern physics, where there are various possibilities of reducing it to an effect of the curvature of space, or even of arguing about gravitational waves or particles. How much ‘reality’ something has may look very different in different theoretical contexts. Still more difficult and controversial are disputes about the ‘objectivity’ of morals, or of mathematical truth. So Wittgenstein suggests that we can with no difficulty talk about existence within the context of particular fields of discourse and language-games. But we should avoid ‘the absolute-existence mistake’ - that is, the error of supposing that there is any general or absolute is-ness that all existing things have in common, or in which all things in existence are Grounded; and we should not attempt to draw a clear and agreed line around all the various things that do really exist, in order to separate them from all the imaginary, postulated and conventional things that don’t really exist. It’s a mistake to feel that you need to, or indeed can, draw such a line. So we should accept a certain pluralism about existence.

      Wittgenstein’s point of view marks a big advance upon the old metaphysical ideas about existence and the Real that we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. It is also a big advance upon the crude scientific realism we have inherited from Descartes, which feels the need to assert the existence of an objectively real and ready-made world out there, of which our current scientific theory is (we are to suppose) a true and accurate copy - or at least, diagram. That kind of scientific realism is open to many objections, two of which are that scientific theory is in continual - and sometimes fundamental - change, and second, that in scientific reporting the observer, though always presupposed, is always systematically excluded and ‘left unthought’. Science seems always to need to conceal from itself its own human, cultural and linguistic ‘situatedness’.

      There are then good reasons for questioning popular scientific realism. But nor should we be content to accept Wittgenstein’s kind of linguistic naturalism, or positivism. He will say only that ‘This language-game is played’ - which is surely much too pluralistic and passive. It sounds too like the position of someone who is becoming tired and pessimistic, and will soon be giving up philosophy.

      So I take a slightly different view. Like life, language has no outside. Language goes everywhere, and there are some things that are true of language everywhere. If so, language is philosophy’s base, and we may say that something exists if it’s a worthwhile topic of discourse, if it’s debatable, and if sense is talked about it. So the whole field of existence, the world, is co-extensive with the endless, ongoing conversation of humanity. Language in motion = ‘Life’ = the going-on of things in the human life-world = ‘the Fray’ = Be-ing. Within that vast hum of communication - the Web, the noosphere, cyberspace - we are all busy arguing with each other about our valuations, our theories, our proposals for improvement, and generally about what’s worth taking more seriously than what. But it’s all ‘life’; it’s all Be-ing. And within this ceaseless motion of our language we are all the time constructing and renegotiating our various worlds and fields of discourse. What exists is what is linguistically alive, and truth is the current consensus in a particular field.