CHAPTER IV

The Fulfillment

of the World

 The global importance of fulfillment is indeterminately revealed in the mood of euphoria and determinately revealed in the parallel global affect, rejoicing. Rejoicing reveals happening to be the determinate constitution of the importance of fulfillment. Happening constitutes the intuitively felt global temporality (cf. IV.22-23) and the intuitively felt global existing (IV. 24-26). The world-whole’s fulfillment-of-happening can be purely appreciated only in an affective rejoicing; other affects, such as global despair, marveling, awe, tedium, and peacefulness, are impure appreciations of this importance and are based upon its pure joyous appreciation (IV.27).

IV. 22. Rejoicing in the World-W/hole’s Fulfillment-of-Happening

I am sitting on a veranda on a summer afternoon, watching the trees as they sway gently in the sunlight. My awareness gradually broadens and deepens, and soon a joy begins to arise in me, a rejoicing in the fulfillment of the very world that is composed of myself, these swaying trees, this blue sky, and the indistinctly manifest “everything else” that extends beyond all that I am perceiving. In this rejoicing I am experiencing a captivated intuition of the determinately appearing importance of global fulfillment. What, exactly, is the nature of this intuition, and what is the determinate character of the world-whole’s fulfillment?

The sensuously felt aspect of this joyously appearing world-whole can be made explicit first. My perceptible surroundings seem to be in fused with an upwardly radiated feeling-flow of joy, a joyous feeling- tonality that has its source, not in the gardens, trees, and sky, but in the fulfilled global interior that appears to be “far behind” and “far within” these perceptible phenomena. This fulfilled global interior joyously radiates everything—including myself—upwards, “on high,” to the sensuously felt “top of the world.” By virtue of my being affected by the fulfilled whole, everything is felt to be flowingly elevated to the highest tonal region of the world.

But my captivated intuition is not directed primarily towards the joyous feeling-tonality that emanates from the fulfilled global interior. The sensuous tonality of joy is marginally apprehended; attentionally I am aware of the global interior that is the source of this tonality. In the following, several characteristics of this rejoicing intuition of the global interior will be made explicit.

First, this global interior is intuitively manifest as the world-whole in respect of its feature of fulfillment. The world-whole is intuitively felt to be a plenum, a fullness, a positivity. The intuitive feeling of this fulfillment is something that properly and uniquely belongs to the affect of rejoicing, for this affect is in its essential nature a feeling-of fulfillment. In rejoicing, what I rejoice in is that something has what it needs to be fulfilled. This is true for mundane joys as well as global joys. In mundane rejoicing, there is often a feeling that I myself possess what I need in order to be fulfilled. For example, I can feel joy upon learning that a woman whom I love loves me in return. Here I feel that I, as a person who needs a loving togetherness with another person in order to be fulfilled as a person, possess this loving togetherness. Mundane rejoicing can also be a rejoicing in the fulfillment of something else. I can feel that the political party espousing the just cause has triumphed—has won the election—and that society is thereby fulfilled in respect of its need for just political leaders.

In order to determine what kind of fulfillment the world-whole is felt to possess in global rejoicing, some further characteristics of the rejoicing intuition must be considered. One of these is the feeling that the rejoiced-in fulfillment is possessed completely and all at once, rather than being possessed piecemeal and in stages, with the fulfillment being gradually and successively acquired. If we combine this characteristic of the rejoicing with the above one, global rejoicing can be understood as an intuitive feeling of the world-whole’s being fulfilled completely and all at once.

A third characteristic is that in rejoicing it is especially true that one is able to ‘live in the present” and to appreciate the present as a fullness in itself. In normal strivings we are primarily future oriented: the present is appreciated, not as a completeness in itself, but as a means to some future state. Strivings presuppose that the fulfillment of things lies in the future and that only by changing the present state of things can this fulfillment be brought about. In rejoicing, however, the present as such and in itself is appreciated as something that is intrinsically a completeness. Just to be present is enough in itself to fulfill.

Global rejoicing, then, can be described as an intuitive feeling of the world-whole completely and all at once possessing the fulfillment of being present.

But such a feeling is only possible if the rejoicing intuition is a simplified feeling-awareness. Normally, in nonjoyous awarenesses, the world’s being present or being in the present is apprehended only in the context of possessing further features or of belonging to a network of relations to various things that are in the present or lie in the future or past. But in global rejoicing, these complexities are stripped away, as it were, and the global being present is allowed to shine forth in its purity.

The nature of this fullness of presence that purely appears can be specified in terms of three characteristics, one concerning its negative nature, one concerning its manner of appearance, and, most significant of all, one concerning its concrete structure as a dynamic phenomenon.

The negative characteristic of this fullness is its otherness, its being completely unlike the world-parts with which we are acquainted. The world’s fullness of presence is invisible and inaudible, and cannot be touched, tasted or smelled. It is without sensuous and physical form, and is not located within any spatial region. Moreover, it is not an image or concept or act of awareness. In these respects, it is utterly unlike the physical and psychical parts of the world and thus, in relation to them, is the Other.

But this otherness of the fullness of presence does not mean it is inapprehensible. Rather, it is omniapparent. Instead of being apparent here and unapparent there, it is everywhere-apparent. It is one and in divisible in terms of the regions of its appearance; no matter where I turn my attention I find it as an undivided omnipresence.

Although other and omniapparent, the world-whole’s fullness of presence is not absolutely static and inert. Rather—and this is the third and principal characteristic of this fullness, its concrete dynamic character—this fullness is a happening; in fact, it is the very happening of the world-whole itself The world-whole’s fullness breaks forth into fullness from an emptiness and into an emptiness. The world-whole’s fulfillment appears to be renewed again and again, as each new fullness arises from and vanishes into the emptiness. Each fullness has been an emptiness and will be one; the emptiness that each arisen fullness has been is a happening-not-yet, and the emptiness that each will be is a happening-no-longer. The happenings-not-yet and -no-longer are internally characterized as lacks or emptinesses of happening: happening is the fullness of which they are deprived in the mode of the not yet and no longer.

These happenings are not “happenings” in the ordinary sense of events or changing things in time, for they are changing temporal intervals themselves. Specifically, they are the intervals which are acquiring and losing the feature of presentness.

While intervals successively pass by, in that they consecutively acquire and then lose the feature of presentness, the presentness that inheres in these intervals does not itself pass by. Presentness remains identically presentness at each different moment of time, the only sort of change it undergoes being one of successively inhering in the different intervals. Presentness is like a constantly shining light, holding all in which it inheres out of the darkness of the no-longer, the not-yet, and the never.

The world-whole is present through occupying an interval that is present. And the world-whole is happening through occupying an interval that is (identically) a happening, i.e., an interval which is involved in the change of acquiring and losing presentness. Since the presentness of the world- whole is that of an interval occupied by the world-whole, the fulfillment or fullness-of-presence possessed by the world-whole concretely understood is the present interval it occupies, the happening, and not the feature of presentness considered by itself, in abstraction from the interval in which it inheres.

The world-whole endures in that it successively occupies different present intervals. Because it endures, the world-whole remains in a constant state of fulfillment: the present intervals pass by and become emptinesses, but the presentness that shines through these intervals continues to fill the world that occupies them with its light.

It is this constant state of fulfillment that I am joyously feeling. I rejoice that the whole composed of myself and these swaying trees and this blue sky and everything else is renewed again and again by occupying the successive happenings. I rejoice that this whole goes on! and on! and on! and does not come to an end and vanish into the emptiness of the past, the emptiness of happening-no-longer. I also rejoice that it is arriving in the present from the vast emptiness of the future, and that this whole thereby does not possess exclusively the privational feature of happening-not-yet. I celebrate the dynamic going on/arriving of the whole from the emptiness and into the fullness.

But it is not disclosed in the rejoicing intuition whether the world- whole occupies every happening, including all those not being joyously intuited. The world-whole may have begun or may end at some time in the distant past or future, such that prior to and after the duration of the world the happenings are unoccupied and make up a pure time unfolding by itself. Furthermore, it is not disclosed whether time itself is infinite or finite; time itself may have begun and may end with the beginning and end of the world, if the world begins and ends.

I rejoice that the world-whole currently is fulfilled, not that it always has been and will be, and I rejoice that this and this and this present interval is occupied by the whole, not that an infinite number of intervals of the same length have and will be occupied.

It is also not disclosed in the rejoicing intuition whether time is composed of simple instants as well as intervals. The happening that explicitly and holistically appears in the joyous intuition is an interval or length of time that implicitly appears to be composed of a briefer happening and a corresponding brief happening-no-longer and happening-not-yet that are immediately contiguous with the briefer happening. This briefer happening implicitly appears to be similarly composed, and so on until the bounds of intuitive comprehension are exceeded. However, whether this decomposition of intervals into briefer intervals does or does not terminate, far beyond the bounds of intuition, in indivisible points of time is not a matter that can be decided on the basis of what is given in the rejoicing awareness.

There are limitations on the lengths of the intervals that can intuitively appear; the length is determined by the upper and lower limits of my capacity to take in intuitively a stretch of time. Although present intervals can be thought of as ranging from one billionth of a second and briefer to one century and longer, the present intervals I can intuitively feel last somewhere in the vicinity of several seconds or large fractions of a second.

These remarks suggest how the above-described characteristic of the joyously felt fulfillment, its character of being possessed completely and all at once by the world-whole, is to be understood. The world-whole’s rejoiced-in fulfillment is not possessed “all at once” in the sense of being possessed literally instantaneously, but in the sense that it is possessed all at one present, the present in question being the present interval with which the rejoiced-in fulfillment is identical. The global fulfillment is possessed at the present it itself is.

IV. 23. Intuitively Felt Time and the Rational-Metaphysical Theory of Time

In this section I shall defend the foregoing account of time as it is intuitively felt from some objections based on the predominant alternative conception of time.

Many philosophers have claimed that our so-called “awareness of the present” is in truth an awareness of phenomena related by the relation of simultaneity. If this were the case, there would be no “presentness” in the sense stated in my descriptions and no global importance of fulfillment-of-happening. But I believe there are several reasons to doubt this reduction of presentness to simultaneity.

A global state is the state of the whole world at a certain time; it is that which is composed of the state of each world-part, such as the swaying of the trees in the wind, at that time. My joyous awareness is a part of the global state that is simultaneous with my joyous awareness. But this relation of simultaneity is not the presentness of the global state in which I am rejoicing. This is shown by the fact that after the joy burns out, it remains true that the joy bears the relation of simultaneity to the global state of which the joy is a part, but it is false that the joy and the global state to which the joy belong are present. If two states are simultaneous when they are present, they are still simultaneous when they are past—and consequently the presentness of the states is nonidentical with their simultaneity.

The awareness-of-simultaneity with which the above-mentioned philosophers identify the awareness-of-presentness is sometimes specified as an awareness that some phenomenon is simultaneous with my awareness of the phenomenon. This notion is incompatible with the nature of the rejoicing awareness. It is not a reflexive attentional awareness of itself as being related to the world-whole, but an unreflexive attentional awareness of the world-whole itself. The presentness that appears in this awareness is a nonrelational or monadic feature of an interval occupied by the world- whole.

Other philosophers specify the relevant awareness-of-simultaneity as an awareness of the simultaneity of some phenomenon with my utterance of a sentence about the phenomenon. This also is incompatible with rejoicing in the global presentness, for no sentence is uttered during this experience.

Philosophers who endeavor to analyze presentness in terms of simultaneity usually also analyze intervals of time in terms of relations among events. Temporal intervals, they hold, just are physical or psychical events qua simultaneous with, or earlier or later than, one another. The implications of this theory are that time is not an original feature of the world-whole, comprised of happenings different from and irreducible to parts of the world, but is nothing other than interrelated and changing world-parts. This reductionist theory has a long history, beginning with Plato’s identification of time with the orderly motions of celestial bodies, continuing with Plotinus’s identification of time with the sequential acts of the world-soul, Augustine’s idea that time is an expanse of the human soul, the variously expressed belief that time is the succession of ideas (Locke), perceptions (Hume), representations (Schelling, Lotze), or psychical states (Bergson), and continuing in this century with the various attempts by Russell, Reichenbach, Adolf Grunbaum, and others to identify time with the interrelated physical events postulated by the physical sciences.

The reductionist theory of time is an expression of presuppositions derived from rational metaphysics. It is a central tenet of this metaphysics that being or “what is” in the wide sense is divided into two realms, that comprised of the consequences of the first reason (the whole of created being) and that of the first reason itself (God). This basic ontological division determined the manner in which fundamental categories or phenomena were to be understood and conceptualized; instead of seeking to conceptualize such phenomena in terms of features belonging to the whole of all being, one aimed to comprehend them in terms of features unique to each of these two realms of being. Thus one sought to define the basic phenomenon of “the present” in two ways, in terms of a character unique to “the world” or the whole of created being and in terms of a character unique to God. The unique character of “the world” which seemed to correspond in some way to the general sense of “the present” is change, and the correlative opposite character of God is changelessness. “The present” defined in terms of worldly change is the temporal present, and defined in terms of divine changelessness is the eternal present. “The concept of eternity derives from unchangingness in the same way that the concept of time derives from change.”

This way of conceiving time persisted in the metaphysics of rational meaninglessness, inasmuch as time was still presupposed to be something uniquely characteristic of “the world,” where “the world” was still (albeit tacitly) conceived in opposition to the realm of changeless being as “the whole of changing being.” Rather than attempt to define “the present” in a new way and from a new perspective, the philosophers in the epoch of rational meaninglessness simply adopted as material for refinement one of the two definitions of “the present” offered in the metaphysics of rational meaning—the one definition, they believed, that could be known to have a referent, the definition of “the present” in terms of changing being.

If these two rational-metaphysical presuppositions are rejected, namely the presuppositions that “the world” is the whole of changing being and that time is to be defined in terms of this whole, then it becomes possible to recognize a “world-whole” and a “time” in a different and ontologically unrestricted sense. In particular, it becomes possible to understand “the world-whole” in the absolutely unrestricted sense that corresponds to what appears in our moods and global affects, a sense that is largely indeterminate in its reference and encompasses all that “is” in any sense whatsoever, be these “beings” changing or unchanging. Correlatively, it becomes possible to understand “the present” or “time” in an unrestricted way in terms of this intuitively felt whole.

In the following pages I will show that present intervals in the sense of happenings are change-independent features of the unrestricted whole. The change-independent and global nature of happenings is most clearly apparent in global rejoicings wherein no changing world-parts are being attended to. Consider this instance of such a rejoicing: I am becalmed in a sailboat on a motionless sea on a blue and windless day. Not a sound is to be heard, not a sign of movement is perceptible anywhere. As I open myself to this silent and vast solitude, a rejoicing begins to well up in me, a rejoicing in the happening of everything. I am rejoicing, not only in the happening of these things around me—the still sea and the blue sky—but in the happening of “everything else” as well. I am rejoicing in the happening of the whole that is composed of the sea and the sky and the indeterminately appearing “everything else” that extends beyond the perceptible circumference of the sea and the sky.

In this global rejoicing, no movements are appearing to me or are being “measured” in any way. Everything is still. But in this stillness, the enduring of the whole of myself, these-things-and-everything-else is appearing to me, and it is appearing to me more clearly and exclusively than it ever could if my global awareness were distracted by the motions of world- parts around me. In my rejoicing, I transcend the sphere of movements and aim at the being present of the motionless world-whole itself.

It is evident that in this intuition no physical changes are displayed before me as the focus of my rejoicing intuition, and that accordingly the temporal being of the world-whole is manifest in my rejoicing as independent of physical changes. But with respect to this very same intuition it may well be wondered if the temporality of the world-whole is not manifest to me in terms of psychical changes. Is there not a “succession of psychical phenomena” passing before my awareness? In particular, am I not apprehending the enduring of the world-whole by means of introspectively observing the successive awarenesses that comprise the synthetic phenomenon of my rejoicing affect?

It is clear that this is not the case. I am not engaged in a reflexive self-awareness wherein I “turn back” my glance and apprehend my rejoicing awarenesses themselves. Rather, I have a straightforward and unreflexive awareness of the world-whole’s enduring itself. My successive intuitings are not what I am aware of; rather, I am “living in” these intuitings, and through this “living in” I am aware of what it is that is being intuited, viz., the enduring of the world-whole.

This may be acknowledged, but a further question may present itself. In my rejoicing awareness I may not be intuiting my intuitings, but may I not be apprehending other kinds of psychical phenomena and apprehending the world-whole’s temporal being in terms of these psychical phenomena? Am I not aware of certain images, thoughts, feeling-sensations, or bodily processes, and am I not “estimating” the enduring of the world- whole by means of noting the changes in these images, feeling-sensations, etc.? In this case, I would be observing the successively appearing images, bodily processes, etc., and inferring on the basis of this psychical succession that a certain amount of time has lapsed in the world as a whole.

It must be noted to begin with that if I am genuinely rejoicing in the world-whole’s enduring, then other images and thoughts are not “floating before my mind.” Rather, my attention is entirely absorbed in a captivated intuiting of the world-whole’s enduring However, it is undeniable that I have at least a marginal awareness of my upwardly radiated feeling-sensation of joy, and even more marginally, I may be aware, as James would argue, of such bodily processes as my breathing. But my awareness of such psychical or psychophysical phenomena is not relevant in the sense required to my awareness of the world-whole’s temporal being. For I am not aware of these psychical phenomena as phenomena in terms of which the world-whole’s temporal being is appearing to me. These phenomena appear concomitantly with the world-whole’s temporal being, but to conclude from this that the world-whole’s temporal being is “estimated” or “inferred” on the basis of these appearing phenomena is to draw a conclusion that is in conflict with the appearances themselves. My joyous feeling-sensation, for example, does not appear as a phenomenon whose sequential changes are being used to estimate the world-whole’s endurance; rather, it appears as a phenomenon that stands in relation to the world-whole’s enduring as an affective response that is engendered by it. And the enduring of the world-whole itself appears as a phenomenon that is immediately and noninferentially apprehended in my rejoicing intuition.

One may respond to this by saying that the world-whole’s enduring is “unconsciously” estimated in terms of the changes in the feeling-sensation or in some bodily process, but this would be to resort to empty theoretical constructs that not only remain in principle unverifiable, but which are incompatible with the given fact that the world-whole’s endurance is immediately and noninferentially apprehended in the rejoicing intuition itself.

The above explications make it manifest that the happenings are not to be identified with changing physical or psychical world-parts or with their interrelations or features; rather, they originally and directly inhere in the unmoving and unthinking world-whole as features of it. But this “change-independent” nature of the happenings does not of course mean that they can inhere in the world-whole only if no changes are taking place in the parts of the world. As far as we know, some changes are always taking place in some parts of the world. Happenings are “change-independent” in the sense that they can inhere in the world-whole irrespective of whether changes are or are not taking place in its parts. Even if mundane changes are always in fact taking place, they do not need to take place in order for the happenings to break forth from and into the emptiness as fulfillments of the whole.

Through being change-independent, happenings inhere in eternal beings (if there are any) no less than in changeable beings. This at first sight seems like a contradiction, inasmuch as it belongs to the definition of an eternal being to be “outside of time.” However, the “time” that the eternal being is conceived to be outside of is not happening-time but “time” in the rational-metaphysical sense of changing world-parts or their relations or features. To be “in time” in the rational-metaphysical sense means to be changeable, and to be “outside of time” means to be unchangeable. Thus, to be “outside of time” in the rational-metaphysical sense does not entail being “outside of time” in the sense of not happening.

That eternal beings happen is consistent with the characteristics traditionally ascribed to eternal beings. Eternity, like time, is a sort of measurement: “eternity is the measure of unchanging existence [esse per manentis], time is the measure of change.” The standing now (nuncs stans) is the unit in which the unchangeable state of the being is measured. If a being remains in an unchangeable state throughout every happening, the measure of its state is still the nuncs stans, for this state is unchangeable and the nuncs stans is (identically) the measure of such a state.

Eternity is also defined as a simultaneous totality (tota simul): no parts of the being have passed away or are still to come. A being can exist as a simultaneous totality in every happening; in each happening, every part of the being is happening, such that no parts are happening- no-longer or not-yet.

The distinction between eternal and “temporal” beings in the traditional sense is still preserved: the former unchangeably and as a totality occupy every happening, whereas the latter are changeable from one happening to the next, such that at any one of the happenings they occupy, some of their parts could be happening-no-longer or not-yet.

Relative to happening, eternity must be understood as a mundane present, a present that belongs only to one part of the whole of all being, the unchangeable part (if there is such a part). Anything that is “present” in the sense of being eternal also is “present” in the sense of happening, but what is “present” in the sense of happening is not necessarily “present” in the sense of being eternal. Accordingly, in order to turn towards the ultimate and truly metaphysical present, one must turn away from the eternal realm and towards the all-embracing realm of that which is happening.

Since the global fulfillment-of-happening is more fundamental than either eternity or “time” in the rational-metaphysical sense, it should not be wholly surprising if this fulfillment-of-happening should prove to be identical with Existing Itself The considerations supporting the idea that “to exist” is “to happen” are the subject of the next sections.

IV. 24. Fulfillment-of-Happening as the Meaning of Existing

To say that something exists, existed or will exist is just to say that it is, was, or will be. Existence in its modes is none other than happening in its modes. “To be” in the temporal sense of occupying a present interval is identical with the existential sense of “to be.”

That this is indeed the case shall be demonstrated in the following two sections. First let us clarify the sense of the thesis to be established, the thesis that “to exist” means to happen.

In the statement that happening is the meaning of existing, the expression “the meaning of existing” has two senses. In one sense, it is about the referent of the term “existing” (“meaning” here is a synonym for “reference”), and in another sense it is about the importance of existing (“meaning” here is an abbreviation of “felt meaning”). Fulfillment- of-happening is the meaning of existing in both of these senses. The term “existing” refers to happening, and the happening to which it refers is (identically) the importance of fulfillment-of-happening. The importance of existing is not some value intrinsically inhering in existing or added onto existing by human beings; it is not a value or even a feature of existing at all; rather, it is absolutely identical with existing. “Fulfillment” is an evocative expression for which “happening” or “existing” is a more exact expression. It can truly be said in an evocative manner that existing is the fullness of which nonexisting is the privation; existing is the positivity of being, of the Is, that is lacked by nonbeing or the Is Not. The Is is lacked relatively by the Was (the Is-no-longer) and the Will Be (the Is-not-yet), and absolutely by the Is Not and Never Was and Never Will Be (the Is-never).

The fullness of existing can be purely appreciated only in the feeling- of-fulfillment, joy. This is why the “problem” of the meaning of existing does not arise in joy, but only in nonjoyous moods and affects. In joy, I intuitively feel the plenitude of existing; I feel in a pretheoretical way that existing is fulfilled and fulfilling in and by itself, and that nothing more than to be present is needed to provide myself and others with a meaning of existing. This meaning is wholly realized at each moment of each thing’s existing and is not something possessed only piecemeal and in stages, or something that lies waiting for the existent in the future and which can be obtained, if at all, only after a long evolutionary struggle. To existents like ourselves, an appreciation of this meaning is granted, although it can be purely experienced only in times of rejoicing. In nonjoyous attitudes, existing in its purity is veiled: I cannot feel its fullness-in-itself, so I may come to think that the meaning of existing must lie elsewhere, outside of the present in which we are all partaking. But no theoretical “answer” to this nonjoyously raised question about the meaning of existing can ever really satisfy me, for no theory can provide me with the intuitive feeling of meaning that is experienced in joy. In joy, the question as an intellectual matter dissolves, for I am elevated to a condition where I can pretheoretically “see” the meaning of existing. But what I see is so obvious and simple that it can elude my theoretical grasp, for intellectually I may be operating on the false assumption that the meaning of existing must be some highly complex and difficult-to-understand state of affairs. Thus when the joy fades, I may once again resume my theoretical quest, not conceptually realizing that the terminus of my quest had been reached on a pretheoretical level in the joyous affect itself.

It may be said that the real difficulty does not lie in trying to discover a meaning of existing that is hidden from us, or in inventing a meaning that is not originally there, but in appreciating the meaning that existing already and always possesses. Only rarely can this meaning be purely appreciated—hence the seemingly problematic character of our quest for the meaning of existing.

The existing of a thing in its complete character is the thing’s occupation of an interval that is acquiring and losing presentness. To say that existing is a feature of a thing amounts to saying that occupying a present interval is a feature of a thing. If we wish to consider existing in and by itself, in abstraction from the existents in which it inheres, we shall say that existing itself is the present interval that existents occupy.

The meaning of my existing is in one respect identical with that of other world-parts and the world-whole: at any given moment of our existing, the present interval I occupy is identically the same interval that other world-parts and the whole occupy. In another respect it is different: my occupation of the present interval is not any other part’s or the whole’s occupation of it, for if I cease to exist I shall cease to occupy the interval that is present, while other parts and the whole continue to occupy it.

The conception of existing itself as the present interval occupied by existents is thrown into relief by opposing it to a predominant rational- metaphysical conception of existing itself, according to which existing itself is not a felt meaning but a rational meaning, the first reason for the world. “God is existing itself that subsists by itself [Dues est ipsum esse per se subsistens]“ For the metaphysics of feeling, existing itself is the temporal present, but for this rational-metaphysical theory, it is the eternal present, for “God is identical with His own eternity.” For the metaphysics of feeling, existing itself is known through intuitive feeling, but for this rational metaphysics it is known through logical reasoning, by means of propositional inferences that follow the via negativa. And for the meta physics of feeling, all things “partake of” the one existing in the sense that they occupy the same present interval, but for this metaphysics of reason things “partake of” the one existing in that they imitate the same eternal present, God.

Is existing itself a rational meaning or a felt meaning, God or fullness- of-happening? It can briefly be shown that existing itself cannot be God. God, if there is a God, is but apart of the world-whole, where “the world-whole” is meant in the absolutely unrestricted sense to include all “things” whatsoever, be they divine or nondivine. The world-whole exists, and this existing of the whole cannot be or be an imitation of one of the parts of the whole, God. For a part of a whole is an essential content of the whole; it is part of what the whole is, and a part of what something is can neither be nor be like that the thing is, the thing’s existing. The existing of the world-whole transcends God as it does creatures. Existing itself inheres in the world-whole and in each part of the world-whole, and so God, if He is a part of the world-whole, “participates” in this sense in existing itself no less than do His creatures.

But this critical reflection upon this rational-metaphysical theory of existing is not sufficient to substantiate the fact that existing itself is the importance of happening. The identification of existing with happening poses several problems that have not been addressed. Some of these problems follow.

It makes sense to say numbers exist in some way, and yet surely numbers are not in time? Thus does not “existing” have a wider signification than being present in time?

It makes sense to say time exists, but this cannot mean time is present, for some intervals of time are not present. Does not this entail, then, that “existence” cannot be explicated in terms of presentness?

We can distinguish a real happening from an imaginary happening. Is not the “real” in “real happening” what “existing” truly means, so that “existing” means something other than simply happening?

Is not time a category, like Aristotle said, and thus a generic predicate? Since, as is commonly acknowledged, existence is a transcendental rather than a genus, does it not follow that time or the temporal present is not existence?

Is not being present in time a real predicate, as Kant implied, and thus distinguishable from existing, which is not a real predicate?

These problems can be resolved if we distinguish the existential sense of “being” from the nonexistential senses (in IV. 25) and explain in what sense existing or happening is a transcendental and is not a real predicate (in IV.26).

IV. 25. The Existential Sense of Being Distinguished from the Nonexistential Senses

A problem that has undermined traditional ontologies is the failure to recognize the equivocal meaning of “being.” The word “being” has neither a univocal meaning nor a group of meanings that are related by a unity of analogy, but a series of disparate and unrelated meanings, including identity, inherence, essence, instantiation, truth, and existing, to name most of the central meanings. Not only has this equivocal meaning or sense of “being” not been adequately recognized, but the existential sense of being has not been recognized or distinguished from the nonexistential senses, despite the frequent claims that are made to this effect.

In the following I will distinguish existing from the five other senses of “being” mentioned above. This can be done in a very brief manner, simply by showing that these other senses of “being” do not conform to our constant and intuitively based understanding of existing, an under standing that we ordinarily linguistically articulate by means of the term “existing” and its cognates. This term is used to articulate the existing of world-parts and the whole that we marginally intuitively feel on most occasions, and sometimes explicitly and purely feel in joy. It is in reference to this intuitively felt phenomenon of existing that we understand what it means to say “The world exists,” “The Devil does not exist,” “I exist, but the people who lived during the eighteenth century no longer exist,” and “Physical things may have existed ten billion years ago, even though no humans or other mental world-parts existed.” Insofar as a sense of” being” does not conform to what we understand in such expressions as these, that sense of “being” must be distinguished from the sense of “being” as existing.

Being as identity. “The world is the world” expresses the sense of “being” or “is” as identity. To assert that each thing is itself and is not things other than itself is to assert that each thing is identical with itself and is different from other things. It is clear that “being” or “is” in the sense of existing is not identity, for some self-identical things do not exist. It is true that the Devil is (identically) the Devil, but the Devil nevertheless is not, where “is not” means nonexistent.

Being as inherence. “The world is a whole” expresses “being” or “is” in the sense of inherence, i.e., the inhering in something of a feature, where “inhering in” means the linking together or combining of a feature and a thing. Inherence differs from identity, for a thing is identical only with itself, not with any one of its features, and what inheres in a thing is not the thing itself, but only this or that one of its features.

Inherence is evidently not existing, for existing is a feature that inheres in things and thus must be nonidentical with its own inherence in things. “The world is existing” expresses (in the “is”) the inherence of existing in the world, and this inherence is necessarily nonidentical with that which inheres, existing. Furthermore, evilness inheres in the Devil (the Devil is evil) but the evil Devil does not exist.

Being as essence. This sense of “being” is conveyed in the phrase “what it is,” where essence is expressed not by the “is” (which here expresses inherence), but by the “what.” What something is, is comprised of the essential features that inhere in it, these essential features being necessary or accidental. In asking “What is it?” I am asking about the thing’s essential features, and the question may be answered, “It is a whole,” where “It” refers to the thing, “is” to inherence, and “a whole,” to an essential feature that inheres in the thing.

Existing is similar to an essential feature in that it is a feature of things (although it is never a necessary feature of things, as I indicate in IV. 27 ii). But existing is not an essential feature; it does not comprise what something is, but that it is. A thing could possess all of its essential features and still not exist. The Devil is evil, personal, finite, powerful, disembodied, etc., but nevertheless is not existing.

Being as instantiation. In asserting that “There are wholes” I am asserting that the universal concept of Wholeness has instances, and in affirming that “There is a world” I am saying that the universal concept, World, has an instance. But “there are” and “there is” as expressive of instantiation are not by that fact expressive of existing, for there are in stances of universals that do not exist. Some instances of the universal, Human, such as myself, are existing, but other instances, such as those who existed during the eighteenth century, no longer exist.

Moreover, it is possible to argue that there are instances of universals only if classifying minds exist, and that particular physical things could exist even if no classifying minds existed. This can be argued as follows. First, assume that features of particulars are not universals but particulars. Second, assume that universals are formed by minds through abstracting common characteristics from particulars and, consequently, that the universals are mind-dependent. Now if minds ceased to exist, the mind-formed universals would cease to exist, and thus particulars would lose their relational feature of instantiating this or that universal (for a particular can instantiate a universal only if there exists a universal it can instantiate). However, this would not entail that the particulars would cease to exist, for the particulars could still retain their necessary particular features and thus retain all the conditions needed for their existence. If the assumptions of this argument are true, as I shall argue them to be, then it is false to say that existence means instantiation.

Being as truth. “Being” in the sense of truth appears in sentences like “The world is a whole!” In this sentence, “is” is emphasized and thereby overtly indicated to have a double expressive function, to express both the inherence of a feature in a thing and the truth of this inherence. Truth in such propositions as these means correspondence, i.e., the correspondence of the proposition asserting the inherence of a feature in a thing to the featured thing itself Since it is true that “the world-whole is existing,” i.e., since this proposition corresponds to the existing world-whole, truth cannot be identical with existing, for the correspondence (truth) and that to which there is a correspondence (the existing world-whole) are different phenomena.

Nor can existing be plausibly construed as the relational feature things possess of being correspondents of true propositions, for some correspondents of true propositions no longer exist, e.g., the correspondents of the proposition, “The people who lived during the eighteenth century are dead.”

Moreover, it is possible that physical things could exist even if there were no minds and no true propositions asserted by these minds (as I shall show in Chapter 6).

I will explain in Chapter 5 that a “nominal truth” can be distinguished from propositional truth, nominal truth being the reference possessed by nominal senses (the senses expressed by names for things) or the subject-concepts of propositions. False propositions can still have nominal truth in respect of their subject-concepts; “David Hume was a musician” is false, yet “David Hume” is a nominal sense that refers to somebody. Since “the existing world-whole” can be a subject-concept of a proposition, and as such refers to the existing world-whole, its referring cannot be the existing world-whole to which it refers. Moreover, the feature of being referred to can belong to no longer existing things, e.g., David Hume, and so this feature cannot be the feature of existing. And without minds and the referring nominal senses conceived by these minds, there still could be existing physical things.

There is also a prepropositional sense of “truth,” which means appearance or “presence” in the apparential sense. But appearance or presence cannot be existing, for it makes sense to say “Ten billion years ago there may have existed physical things, but no humans or other mental world-parts to which these physical things appeared.”

Being as existing. The sense of “being” expressed in the sentence “The world is, was, and will be” expresses the existential sense of being; this sentence is equivalent in sense to “The world exists, existed, and will exist.” The temporal sense of “being” is (identically) the existential sense of “being.”

I stated at the beginning of this section that the existential sense of “being” is that expressed in various sentences—examples of which I quoted—containing the word “existence” and its cognates. We have seen that none of the five aforementioned senses of “being” can be plausibly interpreted as that which is expressed by “existence” in these sentences. However, in each of these sentences, “happening” can be used as a synonym for “existing” without any alteration of sense. Thus, “I exist, but the people who lived during the eighteenth century no longer exist” just means “I am happening, but the people who lived during the eighteenth century are no longer happening.”

Furthermore, on each occasion when we distinguished existence from one of the nonexistential senses of “being,” the word “happening” could have been substituted for “existence.” Thus in distinguishing existing from identity, we understand existing as equivalent to happening and can ex press this understanding by saying, “The Devil is the Devil, but the Devil is not happening.” And the same is true in regard to inherence (“the Devil is evil, but the evil Devil is not happening”); essence (“the Devil is evil, powerful, etc., but the evil and powerful Devil is not happening”); and instantiation (“there are humans, some of whom are no longer happening”). We can also synonymously express the distinction between existing and propositional truth in terms of “happening” (“The correspondence of ‘The world is happening!’ to the happening world is different from that to which there is a correspondence, the happening world, and thus correspondence is different from happening”), and express similarly the distinction between the existing and prepropositional truth (“Physical things may have happened ten billion years ago, even though no minds happened to which these things were appearing”).

The distinction of existing or happening from these nonexistential senses of “being” enables the first three problems raised by my identification of existing with happening to be resolved.

The first problem was formulated thus: “It makes sense to say that numbers exist in some way, and yet surely numbers are not in time? Thus does not ‘existing’ have a wider signification than being present in time?”

Traditional ontologists have frequently argued that numbers and essences or universals are “timeless” and have a “timeless existence.” But the time from which numbers and universals must be excluded is the change-dependent time of rational-metaphysics, the time that is identified with changing world-parts and their interrelations. Numbers and universals do not change; they are intrinsically invariable and thus are not “in time” in the rational-metaphysical sense of this phrase. But this says nothing against the fact that universals happen, for happenings inhere in things regardless of whether they are variable or invariable. I will argue in Chapter 6 that universals happen only while they are being apprehended and thus undergo an external relational change (they acquire and lose the external relational features of “being apprehended”), but universals are invariable in what they are (a two cannot become a one or three).

The second problem reads as follows: “It makes sense to say time exists, but this cannot mean time is present, for some intervals of time are not present. Does not this entail, then, that ‘existence’ cannot be explicated in terms of presentness?”

In reply it can be said that “time exists” does mean time is present, if the latter assertion is understood appropriately to mean time is present in a sequential manner. The assertion that “time is present” is false only if it is misinterpreted to mean the intervals which make up time are simultaneously rather than successively present. “Time exists,” properly explicated, means that the intervals of time are present one after the other and that one of these intervals currently is present. Since it is intervals of time whose existence is being characterized, “to exist” does not mean here to occupy an interval which is present, but simply to be present.

The third problem is explained in this way: “We can distinguish a real happening from an imaginary happening. Is not the ‘real’ in ‘real happening’ what ‘existing’ truly means, so that ‘existing’ means something other than simply happening?”

If I imagine a possible but unreal world, say a world composed of ten stars and nothing else, I imagine it to be happening. This imaginary or unreal happening is different from the real happening of the real world. The feature of imaginariness or unreality here means two things: first, an imaginary happening is an analogue or likeness of a happening, but it is not a happening (i.e., it is not identical with a happening); second, an imaginary happening is one that originarily appears only in an imagining awareness and appears as a phenomenon that is formed by this imagining awareness.

The nonimaginariness or reality of a happening is to be understood correlatively. A happening is “real,” not in the sense that it has the feature of existing, but in the sense that (1) it is the original of which imaginary or unreal happenings are imitations, and (2) it originarily appears, not in an imaginative and formative awareness, but in a nonimagining intuitive awareness (in a “perceiving” in the broadest sense of this term, where “perceiving” means a direct and nonimaginative awareness of the original).

The two other problems that arise from the identification of existing with happening, viz., that existing is a transcendental and not a real predicate, whereas temporal presence seems to be a generic and real predicate, shall be resolved in the following.

IV. 26. Happening Is a Transcendental and Is Not a Real Predicate

Two theses that have played a decisive role in traditional ontological discussions are being is a transcendental and is not a real predicate. The first thesis was mainly discussed by Aristotle and Medieval ontologists, and the second by late modern and contemporary ontologists.

The use of the term “transcendental” to refer to being (ens) first appeared in Roland of Cremona’s Summa theologica, but the main treatments of the transcendentals can be found in Aquinas’s theory of the transcendentals that are coextensive with being (ens), in Bonaventura’s recognition and explanation of the disjunctive transcendentals, and in Duns Scotus’s fivefold distinction among (1) being, (2) the transcendentals coextensive with being, (3) the disjunctive transcendentals, (4) the pure perfections proper to uncreated being alone, and (5) the pure perfections proper to uncreated being and some created beings. However, the theory of the transcendental character of being was first developed by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, Topics, and Posterior Analytics, and most of the subsequently developed ideas were already explicitly or implicitly present in these works of Aristotle. Accordingly, in the following I will concentrate on Aristotle’s explanation of this theory.

In Book 3 of the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes:

But is impossible for either unity or being [on] to be a single genus of beings [onta] For the differentiae of each genus must each of them be [einai] and be one; however it is impossible for the genus without its species or the species of the genus to be predicated of the differentiae, so if unity or being [on] is a genus, no differentia will have being [on] or unity.

The reason a genus cannot be predicated of the differentiae is stated by Aristotle in Book 6 of the Topics. If a genus were predicated of the differentiae, it “would be predicated of the species a number of times.” Aristotle does not spell out the cause or problematic consequence of this repeatable predication of the genus of the species, but the reasons clearly implicit in his theory can be stated as follows.

If the genus were predicated of the differentiae, it would be necessarily predicated, and would thereby belong to the definition of the differentiae. Accordingly, a predication of a differentia of a species would analytically involve a predication of a genus of the species. But this would mean that definition is impossible, for the following reason. In order to predicate the differentia of the species in a way that differentiates the species from the genus, the element in the differentia that is differentiating must be distinguished from the element that is not differentiating, the latter element being the genus that belongs to the definition of the differentia. This differentiating element will then be the true differentia, for it will be what differentiates the species from the genus. But the genus is necessarily predicated of this element, for this element is now the differentia, and the genus is necessarily predicated of differentiae. So once again the same problem arises. With each expansion of the differentia into further and further differentiating elements, the differentiating elements that are predicated of the species are increased in number, and since the genus is predicated of each of these elements, the genus “would be predicated of the species a number of times.” And this renders definition impossible, for the species can then never be finally differentiated from the genus.

Consequently, “it is impossible for the genus ... to be predicated of the differentiae.” And since being is predicated of differentiae (“the differentiae of each genus must each of them be”), it follows that it “is impossible for . . . being to be a single genus of beings.” Being is, rather, a transcendental (although Aristotle himself does not use this word).

However, for Aristotle, time (chronos) is a genus, it is one of the ten categories. Unlike being, time is not predicated of each differentia, for some kinds of things, the invariable kinds, are not in time. Thus being is necessarily nonidentical with time.

But this does not mean that being is necessarily nonidentical with happening. For the time that is thought to be a genus is “time” in the change-dependent sense of rational metaphysics. Happening-time is predicated of invariable kinds of things no less than of variable kinds of things and thus, like being, is predicated of the differentiae of each genus. Since happening is a transcendental, it makes sense to say that happening is being, specifically the existential sense of “being.”

This correctly implies that there is more than one sense of “being” that is transcendental. Each differentia, for example, not only happens, but also is identical with itself.

The idea that “being” in the existential sense is predicated of the differentiae of each genus can be explained in two ways. A distinction can be made between a “differentia” in the sense of a universal concept and a “differentia” in the sense of an instance of the former. Inasmuch as universal concepts exist or happen qua thought-about phenomena, it can be said that the universal differentiae happen qua thought-about phenomena. In other words, the universal differentiae happen while and insofar as they are relational terms of an act of thinking.

The second way of explaining the transcendental predication of happening concerns the instances of these universal differentiae. An instance of a universal differentia is a particular feature of something, the “something” being an instance of the species that the universal differentia differentiates. Inasmuch as the instance of the species happens, the particular features that inhere in this instance happen, and since the instance of the universal differentia is one of these features, it happens.

The transcendental predication of happening has a temporal character. “Happening is predicable of each differentia of each genus” means, precisely put, that each differentia of each genus is happening, was happening, or will be happening. Stated otherwise, this means that at some time it is true to say of each differentia that “It is happening.”

But at this point the question may be raised, Are not some differentiae such that it is never true to say that “They are happening,” and does not this mean that happening is not predicable of every differentia, and consequently that happening is not really a transcendental after all? It seems true to say that the differentiae of absolutely nonexistent things, things that do not, did not, and will not happen, are differentiae that never happen. For example, the Devil never happens, and yet it-seems true to say that the Devil has a differentiating feature.

The resolution to this problem is to be found consequent upon the explanation that being is not a real predicate.

The discovery that being is not a real predicate was made by Pierre Gassendi in his “Objections” to Descartes’s Meditations, but the first at tempted explanation of the grounds of the truth of this thesis and its accepted phraseology (“being is not a real predicate”) were contributed by Kant. That “being is not a real predicate” became a central thesis of most twentieth-century theories of being, from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s to Russell’s and Ayer’s. However, interpretations of its sense have diverged widely, and consequently it is best to return to Kant’s original explanation of it and to extract the kernel of truth from his remarks.

By saying that “being is manifestly not a real predicate [Sein ist of fenbar kein reales Pradikat],“ Kant means that being is not a predicate that belongs to the concept of an object and determines its content. The concept of an object expresses the object in its possibility; in a concept of a completely determined object, each real predicate, each predicate that determines what the object is, i.e., that determines the content of the object, is contained. “In my concept [Begriffe] nothing is missing of the possible real content [dem moglichen realen Inhalte] of the thing.” Now if I assert that this object actually is, I do not thereby add a further determination to the content of the object. For the object qua being and the object qua possibility must both have the same content: “They [the object and concept] must both have the same content, and nothing can have been added to the concept, which expresses merely the possible, by my thinking (through the expression ‘it is’ [er ist]) its object as absolutely given [als schlechthin gegeben].”

Why must they have the same content? Because if they did not, the object qua being would be a different object (for it would have a different content, one additional determining predicate) than the object of the concept, the object qua possibility. And this would entail that I could never assert that the object of my concept is, for the object that is would in every case be a different object than the object of my concept, the object qua possibility. “The object that exists would not be the very same that I had thought in the concept, but something else.” But since there are true existential judgments, since on occasion we do truly assert that the object of our concept is, it follows that being is not a real or contentful predicate.

But what then is being? Being “is merely the positing of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves [ist bloss die Position eines Dinges odergewisser Bestimmungen an sich selbst].” The content of my concept is “posited as an object that is related to my concept.” This positing takes place in connection with our perceptions, such that each thing that is posited is either perceived or is connected with something perceived.

A further explanation of Kant’s theory of positing is not necessary in order to bring out the veridical ideas that lie at the basis of his theory. This can be done by answering these questions: Is positing the existential sense of “being,” as Kant seems to implicitly think it is? If not, what sense of “being” is it? And if positing is not the existential sense of “being,” is it nevertheless true that existing, like positing, is not a real predicate?

There are several reasons that warrant the conclusion that existing is not positing. Even within the framework of Kant’s ontology it is clear that this must be the case, for it must be true that noumena “exist” in some sense (for if they did not, how would Kant’s ontology radically differ from Fichte’s?), and yet for Kant only phenomena can be posited. Moreover, it is clear that “to be existent” cannot mean “to be posited,” for it is true that an act of positing exists; as such, it would itself need to be posited in another act of positing, and this act of positing would in turn need to be posited, and so on to infinity. However, we cannot perform an infinite number of acts of positing; therefore an act of positing “exists” in some other sense than being posited.

That positing is not existing can also be shown apart from the framework of Kant’s philosophy. I can posit objects that no longer exist, as when I posit an object that is related to my concept of “David Hume.” David Hume’s being posited cannot be his existing, for he is no longer existing. Moreover, it is possible for things to exist even if no minds and thus no acts of positing exist, as I shall indicate in Chapter 6.

Positing is not the existential sense of “being,” but is related to the sense of “being” as nominal truth. A conceptual content, e.g., “David Hume,” has nominal truth if there is an object that is related to this content, i.e., if the content has a referent. If we say that the content of my concept, “David Hume,” is posited as an object that is related to this conceptual content, then we are necessarily implying that the conceptual content refers to that object, or has a referent.

Given this relation between the notions of positing and nominal truth, it becomes possible to replace the notion of positing, and all the implications this notion has in Kant’s transcendental idealism, by the notion of nominal truth and to thereby reformulate in a strictly veridical and non-Kantian manner the thesis “being is not a real predicate.” Such a reformulation will enable us to understand in what sense it is true that existing or happening, as well as nominal truth, is not a real predicate.

Precisely understood, “being is not a real predicate” has three senses, what I shall call the widest sense, the narrower sense, and the narrowest sense. The widest sense will be explained first.

Nominal truth involves (at least) the notions of the referring of a conceptual content, the referent of this content, and the relational feature of being referred to possessed by the referent. The widest sense of “being is not a real predicate” can be explained in terms of the notion of referring. Referring is not a real predicate because, although predicable of a conceptual content, it is not a part of the conceptual content of which it is predicated. In the concept, “the evil, personal and powerful, etc., Devil,” “evil, personal, etc.” are parts of the content of this concept, and in this sense are real predicates. If this content refers, if there is an evil, personal, etc., Devil that is the referent of this content, then referring is a predicate of the content. But this referring cannot be a part of the content that has reference, for the referring is not itself one of the things that refers. It is predicated of but is not part of the conceptual content—and this we may take as a definition of “being is not a real predicate” in the widest sense.

In this sense, existing or happening is also not a real predicate. Each conceptual content happens while and insofar as I am conceiving it, and thus happening is a predicate of the conceptual content. But the happening of the concept is not a part of the concept; e.g., “male,“ “philosopher,” and “lived in the British Isles during the eighteenth century,” are parts of my nominally true concept of “David Hume,” but that David Hume “is happening” is not a part of this concept. For David Hume is not happening. Nevertheless, happening is a predicate of my concept of “David Hume,” for my concept is happening, it is happening as a relational term of my act of thinking.

The narrower sense of “being is not a real predicate” includes the widest sense, but with the added specification that the “being” that is predicated of but is not a part of a conceptual content is “being” only in the sense of referring and of the features that inhere in each referring. Happening is not a real predicate in this sense because it is a feature that inheres in every referring. A concept is referring only insofar as its referring is existing or happening.

In this narrower sense in which happening “is not a real predicate,” happening has a narrower extension than it does in the widest sense of this phrase. That is to say, every conceived conceptual content, whether it refers or does not refer, happens, but only some of these conceptual contents, the ones that refer, have a referring that happens.

The narrowest sense of the thesis I am examining is explained in terms of the notion of the referent of a conceptual content. “Being is not a real predicate” here means that being is neither a part of nor a predicate of a conceptual content, but either is or is a feature of every referent of every concept. It is clear to begin with that a referent of a concept, unlike the referring of a content, is not a predicate of that concept; it is true that a content is referring, but false that it is its own referent. A referent is, rather, a relational term to which the content is related. One relational term is the conceptual content, the other the referent of the content; the relation between them is the relation of reference.

Happening is not a real predicate in this narrowest sense because it is a feature, a temporally modalized feature, of every referent of every concept; every referent either is happening, was happening, or will be happening. Otherwise put, at some time it is true to say of every referent of every concept that “It is happening.”

In this sense of “being is not a real predicate,” happening has the narrowest extension. For while all conceptual contents that are being conceived are happening, only some of these concepts have a referring that is happening, and of all of the referrings that are happening, only some of them are referrings to referents that are happening.

This threefold analysis of the thesis “being is not a real predicate” enables the above-mentioned problem to be solved, viz., the problem that some differentiae, the differentiae of absolutely nonexistent things like the Devil, never happen, and consequently that happening is not a transcendental since it is not predicated of every differentiae. The solution may be understood thus: if the Devil absolutely does not exist, this entails that the concept “the Devil” has no referent, i.e., that there does not happen, has not happened, and will not happen a referent of this concept. Nevertheless, the concept “the Devil” is happening; it is happening as a relational term of my act of thinking. One of the real predicates that is a part of this conceptual content is the differentiating predicate of the Devil. Inasmuch as the entire content of this concept is happening, each part of this content is happening, and this means that the differentiating predicate that is a part of it is happening. In this sense, then, happening is a predicate of the differentiating feature of the Devil.

This can be explained further. When we say that “absolutely nonexistent things, like the Devil, do have differentiating features,” we mean that differentiating features are parts of our concepts of these things, and “differentiating features” in this sense do happen. And when we say that “the differentiating features of absolutely nonexistent things absolutely do not happen,” we mean there absolutely do not happen any referents of the conceptual contents of which these “differentiating features” are parts.

In terms of the threefold sense in which happening “is not a real predicate,” it may be said that in the first sense of this phrase happening is a predicate of the differentiating features of absolutely nonexistent things, but in the second and third senses it is not.

The explanation of the senses in which happening “is not a real predicate” also solves the problem that originally motivated the discussion of Kant’s thesis that being is not a real predicate, namely the problem that being is not a real predicate, but time (at least as Kant implies) is. The solution is that “time” in the change-dependent sense is a real predicate, but “time” in the sense of happening-time is not. That some thing has a changeable nature is a part of the content of the concept of the thing and, moreover, is a part of the conceptual content of some things but not others. Happening-time, on the other hand, is predicable of every concept, every referring of a concept, and every referent of a concept, and as such is not a part of the content of these concepts.

In this section I have aimed to show that happening is a transcendental and is not a real predicate and thus meets two of the criteria for being veridically identified with “being” in the existential sense. In the immediately preceding section, I argued that happening and only happening meets another criterion for being veridically identified with existing, viz., that it is what we intuitively feel to be identical with existing and that we consequently ordinarily express by the word “existence” and its cognates. In Section 24, I described the pure intuitive feeling of existing, the rejoicing intuition of fullness-of-happening.

The interconnection of our intuitive feelings, and especially our joyous intuitions of existing, with the theoretical understanding of existing as a transcendental and as a nonreal predicate helps to substantiate one of the main theses of the metaphysics of feelings, that our intuitive feelings are not polarized from our veridical theorizings, but are integrated with them. The foregoing discussions have shown that a reappreciative making-explicit of what is intuitively and purely felt in rejoicing-in-existing gives rise to a concept (fullness-of-happening) that provides a solution to the most complex theoretical problems concerning the meaning of existing. This is only possible if human nature is not dichotomized into “reason” and “feeling,” but is comprised of a continuum of feeling-awarenesses, such that the thinking-feelings are more explicit and exact awarenesses of the very same importance (in this case fullness-of-happening) of which the intuitive feelings are more implicit, vague, and holistic awarenesses.

The increase in explicitness and exactness manifested in the thinking- feelings and especially in the concentrative feelings is offset by the loss of the immediacy which is possessed by the intuitive appreciations. Although exactly comprehended only in the thinking-feelings, the importance of fullness-of-happening is directly “seen” and its omnipresence immediately sensuously felt only in the intuitive feelings. Only through experiencing both ways of appreciating this importance, the exact and the immediate, can one completely appreciate it.

In the past three sections I have described global rejoicing as the only pure immediate appreciation of happening. But why cannot the happening of the world-whole be purely intuited in other global affects?

IV. 27. The Impure Appreciations of the World-Whole’s Happening

IV. 27. i. Introductory Remarks on the Pure and Impure Appreciations of the World-Whole’s Happening

There has always been a problem in people’s minds about which type of affective response a state of affairs truly deserves. Is a certain state of affairs properly apprehended in joy or despair, in tedium or awe? Many people assume that there is no one “true” or “proper” affective response to any given state of affairs and that affective responses are “individually relative” and, in the last analysis, “arbitrary.”

Likewise, so this viewpoint holds, the existence of the world does not “truly deserve” any one affective response as opposed to another. Some people may feel joy that the world exists rather than does not exist; others may feel despair, awe, or tedium, but none of these can be said to be the one affect that is truly and intrinsically “demanded” by the world’s existing.

This is undoubtedly the objection many people will feel upon reading my description of the world’s existing as a state of affairs to which the appropriate reaction is joy. One immediately points to different ways in which people have affectively responded to the world’s existing. Does not Schopenhauer write that the truth is that “we have not to rejoice but rather to despair at .the existence of the world; that its nonexistence is preferable to its existence; that it is something which at bottom ought not to be”? And does not Sartre, upon encountering the naked existence of the world, feel nausea? Sartre writes:

Existence [L’existence] everywhere, infinitely, superfluous [de trop], for ever and everywhere; existence—which is limited only by existence. I sank down on the bench, stupified, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh palpitated and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. It was repugnant.

There are two responses to this objection to my description of joy as the appropriate affective reaction to the world’s existing. The first response is to point out that Schopenhauer and Sartre, and most others who have talked about affective reactions to “the world’s existence,” are talking about a different state of affairs than the one referred to in my usage of the phrase “the world’s existence.” Schopenhauer and Sartre, for in stance, are not describing affective appearances of the happening of the whole composed of myself these-things-around-me-and-everything-else. By “the world” Schopenhauer does not mean the unrestricted whole, but the whole of representations that expresses the noumenal will, and by “existence” he does not mean happening or being present, but something else (which he leaves unclarified). The “existence” that nauseates Sartre is not “existence” in the sense of the global happening, but in the sense of being-in-itself (être-en-soi), which (if there is such a thing as being-in- itself) is but a part of the whole that happens.

Thus examples of affects like Schopenhauer’s despair and Sartre’s nausea do not count as counterevidence to my claim that joy is the appropriate response to the world’s existence, for these other affects are not responses to what I designate by the phrase “the world’s existence” but to something else.

The objection to my claim about joy may be modified accordingly, and the question posed: Cannot one conceive of a despair in what I have described as the world-whole’s happening rather than nonhappening, or a nausea in what I have described as the omnipresence of the global happening? Is it not then arbitrary and unjustified for me to talk about joy as the appropriate response to this happening?

The answer to this objection lies in pointing to the phenomena of pure and impure appreciations. Joy is the “appropriate” response to happening in the sense that it is the only pure appreciation of happening, and other affects are “inappropriate” and are not “truly or intrinsically demanded” by happening in the sense that they are impure appreciations of happening. A pure appreciation of an importance such as the world- whole’s happening is intuitively captivated by this importance alone. An impure appreciation of global happening, on the other hand, feels it to be important, not by itself alone, but qua aspect of a broader importance. This impure appreciation has two modes. If we call an importance “A,” the pure appreciation of it is the captivation-with-A. One mode of impurely appreciating A is to be captivated with A as having this or that feature; one is captivated with the state of affairs, A is B or A is C. In IV. 27. ii-iii I will show that marvelling and despair are captivated by the global happening as possessing some further determination.

A second mode of impure appreciation is to be captivated by A in asmuch as that of which it is a feature also possesses some other important feature besides A. A is a feature of the world-whole, and X and Y are also global features; there can be a captivation with the fact that that which is A is also X, or that which is A is also Y. Unlike B and C, X and Y are not features of A, but of that of which A is a feature, the world-whole. In the first mode of impure appreciation, A is felt to be important qua aspect of the broader importance, A-is-B, and in the second mode it is appreciated qua aspect of the wider importance, that-which-is-A-is-also X. In IV.27.iv-vi it is shown that awe, tedium, and peacefulness are appreciations of the world-whole’s happening in this second impure modality.

The two modes of impure appreciation are “impure” in the sense that A in its purity, by itself alone, is not appreciated but is appreciated only as A qua mixed with other elements, with “impurities” such as B or X.

That global joy is the pure affective appreciation of the world’s happening rather than nonhappening has already been implicitly established in the preceding sections. In IV. 22, joy was shown to be a feeling of “fulfillment,” of something being “fulfilled” rather than being empty or in lack. In IV.24, it was shown that the language of fulfillment is applicable to the world’s being present or existing as an evocative description of it. “To be” in the sense of being present or existent is a fullness, a positivity, a plenitude (in evocative terms) in comparison with nonbeing, nothingness. Since the world is, rather than is not, it is truly evocatively describable as being fulfilled rather than being empty. Now evocative descriptions cap ture the character of states of affairs as they can explicitly and holistically appear in intuitive feelings. The above evocative description of the world- whole’s happening as a fullness brings out the fact that it can explicitly and holistically intuitively appear as a fullness—and it is the intuitive feeling of such a fullness that is uniquely characteristic of joy (for joy, as I stated above, is precisely an intuitive feeling-of-fulfillment).

That this is indeed the case becomes more clearly manifest once it is pointed out that the word “fullness” or “fulfillment” can be used in many different senses and that only one of these is appropriate to rejoicing in the global happening. “Fullness” and its cognates are usually used, whether metaphorically or literally, to refer to essential features of things, what they are. says, “The glass is full,” or “He is full of surprises,” etc. As an evocative signification of global existing, “fullness” signifies an existential feature, in fact, the existential feature—the existing of everything. It is a “fullness” in this sense that is felt in global rejoicing.

Accordingly, to say that what the world is, is “empty” in some sense (e.g., empty of justice), or is such that it does not deserve joy but some other affect, does not touch upon the joyous fullness of the existing of the world. In joy, I am not appreciating what the world is, but that it is. The “that it is” of any world, regardless of what that world might be, would be a fullness, for “to be” in and by itself, apart from considerations of what it is that possesses this “to be,” is a fullness in comparison with “not to be.” Being present as compared with not being present is being full, irrespective of what it is that is present.

It is true nevertheless that in global rejoicing I am rejoicing in this world. For I am joyfully intuiting the whole of myself, these-things-and- everything-else. But I am rejoicing in this world, not because it is this world (because it has this what-content), but because it is, because it has inhering in it happenings. I would rejoice in any world that had happenings inhering in it. I rejoice in this world because of all possible worlds it is the only actual one; it is the only one that has existing inhering in it.

A further delimitation of the sense that is being expressed in my usage of the word “fulfillment” can be made through noting that I am using this word in a sense uniquely pertinent to what is intuitively felt in joy. “Fullness” can also be used for example to refer to the fact that a spatial region is completely occupied by physical things, but such uses are obviously not identical with the one pertinent to joy. “Fulfillment” in the sense unique to joy can only be defined ostensively by pointing to what intuitively appears in joy. And that existing-rather-than-nonexisting can be purely intuitively felt as a “fulfillment” in this sense can also be shown only ostensively, by pointing to an actual joyous appearance of the world’s existing-rather-than-nonexisting. That this is so cannot be “conceptually proven”; it must be experientially verified. Without this experience, one cannot have access to that which is signified by the significations in question. The criterion for verifying these (or any) significations is the discovery of the intuitively felt phenomenon they putatively signify. One must discover this intuitively felt phenomenon in one’s own experience. I can contribute to this discovery only indirectly. I can through my evocative and exact descriptions attempt to evoke an ignited thinking-feeling and elicit a concentrative insight, in which the reader remembers his own joyous intuition of existing. And at most, my descriptions through being read could provide the occasion for the spontaneous irruption of the joyous intuition.

The demonstration that joy is the only pure appreciation of happening also proceeds through descriptively showing that other global affects are not pure appreciations of this importance. Whereas joy is an intuitive feeling of phenomena that are evocatively describable as “fulfillments,” other intuitive feelings are of phenomena that are evocatively describable in different ways. Despair, for example, is an intuitive feeling of futility and emptiness and is able to intuitively feel in a pure way phenomena that are evocatively describable in such terms. The existing of the world- whole is “empty” and “futile” if it lacks something (is empty) in a way that renders the existing of the whole “futile.” These evocative terms are applicable to the state of affairs more exactly describable as the world- whole’s existing without a purpose (cf. IV.27.iii). Despair, the intuitive feeling of emptiness and futility, is a pure appreciation of the world-whole’s existing purposelessly. This means it is an impure appreciation of the world whole’s existing, for it is an appreciation of the world-whole’s existing, not by itself alone, but insofar as it has the feature of being purposeless.

Nausea likewise is an impure appreciation of the world-whole’s existing. Nausea is a feeling of the repugnant and ugly. Ugliness implicitly presupposes a sense of “beautifulness” to which it is compared as the opposite. The nausea before existence Sartre describes presupposes implicitly this beauty to be a “rational beauty,” the beauty of a complete rational explanation. “That was what irritated me: of course there was no reason for it to exist, this flowing larva.” “The essential thing is contingency [L‘essentiel c‘est Ia contingence]. I mean to say that by definition existence is not necessity.” By a reason, Sartre means something that makes existence necessary: “But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a semblance, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and consequently the perfectly gratuitous.” In relation to this ideal of rational beauty, existence qua inexplicable appears to be ugly and repugnant. It is rationally repugnant. Applying this characterization of nausea to global nausea before the world-whole’s existing, we can see that global nausea is an impure appreciation of the world-whole’s existing. It is not an appreciation of existing simpliciter, but of existing as having the feature of being rationally repugnant, of being inexplicable. I feel joy before the world’s existing, but nausea before the world’s existing contingently.

But the preceding description of nausea is erroneous inasmuch as it implies that nausea is a real rather than delusory intuition; It can be shown that nausea is unveridical in two senses. First, nausea as Sartre de scribes it is a seeming intuition of two features of existence that cancel each other out, but which seem in the nausea not to cancel each other out. In his explication of nausea Sartre says that “existence is not necessity” but contingency, and yet that “it was not possible for it [the world] not to exist [il n ‘ltaitpas possible qu‘elle n ‘existat pas].” If it is impossible for the world not to exist, then the world exists necessarily. Existence then is a necessity, not a contingency. Nausea as Sartre describes it thus cancels out its own intrinsic ground of veridicality: its seeming intuitive awareness of the contingency of existence clashes with its seeming intuitive awareness of the necessity of existence, and accordingly each of these claims to veridicality is overridden by the other.

The root of the problem is that Sartre was unclear about the difference between necessity as a feature of propositions and necessity as a feature of existence. To say that existence lacks propositional necessity is at bottom to say no more than that existence is not a proposition, and this is both unilluminating and irrelevant to the question of whether existence itself is necessary or contingent. Due to his failure to clearly distinguish these two senses of “necessity,” Sartre confusedly believed both that (1) existence lacks propositional necessity but is itself necessary and (2) existence itself is contingent.

Let us suppose that a global nausea is experienced that does not cancel out its own ground of veridicality in the above manner; such a nausea would be a seeming intuition (only) of the repugnant contingency of the world’s existence. But this seeming intuition also is delusory. The world’s existence is nonnecessary, and the concept of it as existing necessarily is incoherent (see IV. 27. ii). No incoherent concept is intellectually beautiful; quite the opposite, an incoherent concept is “repugnant to the intellect.” Thus the world’s existing nonnecessarily cannot be veridically appreciated as ugly or repugnant in comparison with the idea of a “rationally beautiful necessary existence,” since there is no such idea. There is no veridical basis for a nauseous intuition of the world’s existence. The world’s existing non-necessarily is appreciated veridically and purely in another affect, that of marvelling, as I will show in the following subsection.

In the following five subsections I shall describe five impure appreciations of global fulfillment-of-happening; marvelling and despair are impure appreciations of happening in the first mode of impure appreciation (cf. IV.27.ii-iii), and awe, tedium, and peace are impure appreciations in the second mode (cf. IV. 27. iv-vi). These five global affects are directly based on global rejoicing in the sense that they include within themselves as one of their constitutive aspects an appreciation of that which global rejoicing purely appreciates (namely the happening of the world-whole). Global rejoicing is not based on any one of these affects (or upon any other affect) in that it does not include within itself an appreciation of some importance of which some other affect is the pure appreciation. In this sense, joy is the absolutely simple global affect. It is the only pure appreciation that does not include as one of its constitutive aspects an impure appreciation. Joy is wholly pure. Every other global affect, by contrast, includes within itself an impure appreciation of the importance of which joy is the pure appreciation.

IV. 27. ii. Marvelling at the World-Whole’s Miraculousness

Global marvelling is captivated, not simply by the happening of the world-whole, but by this happening qua having the feature of being non-necessary. Happening nonnecessarily is the importance of miraculousness, an importance purely appreciated in global marvelling. I will begin the explication of this importance with a few words about the affect of marvelling.

The feeling-sensation of global marvelling has the feeling-flow of being more or less intensely impelled backwards and held in an astonished suspense; the miraculousness of the world affectively strikes me and brings me up short, riveting me in a shocked stillness. I stand before the world dazzled and stunned: Even though it could not be, it is! The habitual sense of obviousness and of “taking for granted” that I feel towards the world’s, happening has been shattered by the sudden unveiling of its utter miraculousness.

The world-whole is miraculous in that at each moment it realizes one of two possibilities, even though it is not necessary for it to realize this possibility rather than the other one. At each moment the world could either happen or not happen, and I marvel that the world happens, and continues to happen, and avoids the possibility of not happening. At each moment, the world-whole stands before the abyss of nothingness, but it does not vanish into this abyss; it continues, and in so continuing it overcomes again and again the possibility of nonexisting. It is miraculous that the other possibility, the possibility of plunging into nothingness, is not realized, for this is equally as possible as the possibility that is realized. There is no feature of the world-whole that shows why one of these possibilities rather than the other should be realized; the nature of the world-whole does not necessitate either its happening or its nonhappening, but is compatible with both possibilities.

The importance of miraculousness can be further explicated as follows. If happening or existing necessarily inhered in the world-whole, it would be an analytic part of the content of the concept of the world- whole; it would be analytically true that “the world-whole exists” and a contradiction to assert that “the world-whole does not exist.” But it is evi dent that existing cannot be a part of the conceptual content of the world- whole (or of anything else, including the divine part of the world, if there is one). For assume that existing were such a part; the concept of “existing” would be a part of the concept of the world-whole, it would be a real predicate of the world-whole. But this “existing” qua real predicate of the world-whole must be different from the world-whole’s existing itself which is not a real predicate. For I could ask of this concept of which “existing” qua real predicate is a part: Does it have a reference, does it refer to some thing that is existing? I am here asking in part if the “existing” that belongs to the conceptual content refers to an existing beyond the concept, or if the conceptual content has no referent. This signifies that if “existing” is a part of the world-whole’s concept, this does not entail that the world- whole exists, for the entire concept of which “existing” is a part could fail of reference. A concept cannot entail its own reference, for a concept includes or entails only the real predicates that comprise its content; and since reference is not a part of the conceptual content, but a nonreal predicate of it, reference cannot be entailed by the content. Whether or not a concept refers is established empirically or a posteriori, by looking beyond the concept to see if there is or is not a referent of the concept.

It might be argued, nevertheless, that in some cases the reference of a concept is itself analytically entailed by the concept itself and as such belongs a priori to the content of the concept. The content of the concept of the world-whole would be: “The world-whole exists and is the referent of a concept.” Thus it becomes necessarily true of the existing world-whole that it is “the referent of a concept.” However, this “being a referent of a concept” belongs to the conceptual content of the world-whole and thus is a real predicate of the world-whole. Consequently, as a part of this conceptual content, it cannot be the referent of this conceptual content, the referent that is not a real predicate of the content, but a relational term to which the entire conceptual content is related. This means that the concept of which “being the referent of a concept” is a part may not refer, for this concept can entail only real predicates that comprise it and cannot entail anything outside of the concept, such as the referent of the concept. It still remains encumbent upon us, then, to answer in an empirical and a posteriori way the question, Does there exist anything that is the referent of this concept, something that has these real predicates of “existing” and of “being the referent of a concept”?

Thus the nature of the world-whole, that which can belong to its conceptual content, cannot entail that the world-whole happens. This nature is compatible with both happening and nonhappening. Both are possibilites; hence, if the world-whole happens rather than does not hap pen, that is a miracle.

We are in a position now to understand how marvelling is an impure appreciation of the world-whole’s happening and presupposes the pure appreciation of this happening.

We know that rejoicing is a feeling-of-fulfillment: it feels the happening or existential being of the world-whole to be a positivity and fullness in relation to the emptiness and negativity of being-no-longer, being-not- yet, and being-never. Thus joy is a comparative feeling that the world- whole is rather than is not. But the relation of “rather than” that the joy intuitively feels is different than the relation of “could not” that is additionally felt in marvelling. Consider that the world-whole’s being rather than nonbeing can be apprehended (whether truly or falsely) as an aspect of two opposite states of affairs, one being “the world-whole is rather than is not, even though it could not be” and the other being “the world-whole is rather than is not, and it necessarily is.” As I indicated- above, the latter state of affairs is an impossibility, but it is sufficient to point it out as a possible datum of a (deluded) global feeling-awareness in order to make clear that “rather than nonbeing” is a different relational fact than “could not be.”

Now marvelling is an intuition of the same relational fact of which rejoicing is an intuition, but it also is an intuition of the additional relational fact “could not be.” In the joy, I feel the is of the world-whole in comparison with an is not, and this is why I feel the world-whole to be fulfilled. But in the marvelling, I feel the entire is-rather-than-is-not of the world-whole in comparison with a could not be, and this is why I feel the world-whole to be miraculous.

Inasmuch as the marvelling feels this “could not be” in addition to the “is-rather-than-is-not,” it is an impure appreciation of the “is-rather- than-is-not.” To say the world-whole “could not be” is a different way of saying that its happening-rather-than-not-happening has the feature of being nonnecessary, and it is in terms of this latter description that we can understand the impurity of marvelling in terms of the definitions of “impurity” offered above. Marvelling impurely appreciates the world- whole’s happening-rather-than-not-happening in the first mode of impurity; it appreciates happening-rather-than-not-happening qua having the feature of being nonnecessary.

Marvelling not only impurely appreciates the world-whole’s fulfillment-of-happening; it also presupposes its pure appreciation and thus is a less fundamental global affect than is the fulfillment-of-happening’s pure appreciation. But this presupposing relation is not a psychological one; it is not as if I must first feel global rejoicing before I am able to feel global marvelling. Nor can it consist simply in a relation of necessitation between the two global importances that arc felt. For there is a mutual entailment between them; if the world-whole is fulfilled (happens), then it necessarily is miraculous (happens nonnecessarily), and if it is miraculous, it necessarily is fulfilled. In other words, if the world-whole is truly worthy of joy, it necessarily is truly worthy of marvelling, and vice versa.

The presupposing relation in question is based on the fact that happening is an aspect of happening-nonnecessarily, but happening-aonnecessarily is not an aspect of happening. Rather, happening-nonnecessarily is (identically) happening plus some feature in addition to happening, viz., nonnecessariness. Thus, in order to appreciate purely the happening nonnecessarily of the world-whole, one must appreciate impurely its happening; however, it is possible to appreciate purely the global happening without appreciating at all the nonnecessariness of this happening. And this is what occurs in joy; although the global happening has (and necessarily has) the feature of nonnecessariness, and has this feature while it is being appreciated in joy, the joy does not attend to this feature. The joy intuit happening (more completely, happening-rather-than-not-happening) by itself, in abstraction from the other features it possesses. But marvelling cannot abstract from happening in intuiting miraculousness, for happening is one of the two aspects of miraculousness. Thus, the truth of marvelling presupposes the truth of joy (the intuition of happening nonnecessarily includes the intuition of happening), but the truth of joy does not presuppose the truth of marvelling (the intuition of happening does not include as one of the aspects of itself the intuition of happening nonnecessarily). In this sense, joy is the unconditionally true global affect; every other affect presupposes its truth, but the truth of joy presupposes no oth