The 8th IS

The 8th Is

And the God Who Doesn't Exist (fetishized non-Being)


Logicians have been saying "existence isn't a predicate" since Kant pointed out that the difference between there being real vrs. only imaginary 30 talers in my pocket isn't marked by the real one having a property the other lacked -- tacitly attributing a non-existent-but-real status to the non-existent. The philosopher Alexis Meinong actually recognized the existence of self-contradictory things, such as the round square, which could not possibly be real. This drove a wedge between use of "existence" and "reality". The modern logical insight that the grammatical sign used to conjoin words and phrases into determinate true or false sentences, "is" in English, expresses a function (operation, ) proper to discourse, and presupposing it, not objects*, is a fundamental clarification of thinking about existence, or reality, in systematic, coherent terms. The distinction between formal and informal modes of speech (the above is informal), between object language and metalanguage (as in Carnap's LSL), as well as that between unreconstructed vs (theoretically) reconstructed discourse (in explicit true or false statements) is based on this clarification, and must be assumed as background of any metaphysics pretending to be rigorous as well as systematic.

If one turns from "existence" as clarified by the Existential quantifier "There is an x such that..." of symbolic logic, to the little grammatical particle "is" from which it is derived by analysis of function, at least six other uses are found: the is's of

assertion
identity
predication
class membership
class inclusion
present tense

If "existence" -- informal use -- is counted as seventh in this list, as the cognitive gravity center around which the others cluster, the question arises, could there not be an 8th? Wouldn't there have to be? -- in a sense including logical but also (a) non-logical (compulsive) necessity?

The informal use, as in "unicorns do not exist" already posits an eighth through its own negation. "To be is to be the opposite of what it is not to be". In strictly logical terms, this ought to be no more than a confused idea. What it is to be, be-ing, or Being, is a reification of the completed relation of referent and object in a name. What is named, or referred to by a definite description (Russell), is what exists. Any "8th" (for the seven +1 -- shifting token types for numbers) can only be the reality of whatever Being or Existence stand out from, as named. The 8th is thus the predicate of non-Being through its name.


Is God real

It is this sense that merges in informal metaphysical discourse, I suggest, with the use of "real", contrasted with "unreal.". Logical texts, to my knowledge, never point out that "existence is not a predicate", as insight into the logical structure of discourse, does not imply that "reality" is not a predicate, leaving the question of the relation of reconstructed to unreconstructed metaphysical thinking hanging in the air. Even the hallowed assertion "God exists", widely taken as formulating the difference between two distinct species of human being, "theist" and "atheist", according to whether they do, or don't "believe in God", as they say ... even this most simple and fundamental assertion whose content would have been supposed determined as true or false, if rigor meant anything, has never been definitively assigned definite metaphysical status. This is due to a compound confusion, in that "God exists" if "God" is a name, logically speaking; but "God is a name" is not given except through use of the word "God", with intent to refer. Thus whoever uses it globally, for the totality completing itself in their experience, can affirm they "know" God exists, because they use the word with intent to refer -- which is actually all they are
"knowing", at all, as demonstrated by the grounds for the claim.
A.J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic already demonstrated the non-illocutionary force of "God exists". "God" is not used as either name or descriptive expression from which verifiable true or false propositions follow. The fact that the logical positivists never received a response on this point broke the back of religion within the limit of pure reason. The compulsion -- not cognition -- generating God use by God users -- continued with assertions of "His" existence undeterred. The dichotomizing of human psychology on the basis of it was retained intact. In the face of the split between reason and practice in sign-use. the notion took hold that there was an extra-logical domain of knowledge, achievable through freedom by affirming the Unreal as Real: the "God" that doesn't exist as an object in the world is nevertheless made Real by affirmation of His Name in Faith. This was the main idea of the neo-liberal theologians who paralleled logical empiricist philosophy through and after mid-20th century. "The God that exists is the God that appears after God disappears in the agony of doubt," Paul Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be. "God is dead", claimed T.J. Altizer. I always took it to mean "linguistically dysfunctional"; that the term "God", as a token, no longer communicated, but stood in the way of communicating, what it once did. Theologians of this sort kept the token going by holding a mirror to empirical scientific reality and saying: the Not This that is real.

Meanwhile, the existential tradition in Europe from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche to Sartre and Heideggar vied with Biblicalists Karl Barth, Emile Brunner; Rudolf Bultmann's de-mythologizing program; Ernst Cassirer's work on Symbolic Forms in natural languages; religious historian Mircea Eliade's Myth of Eternal Return; paralleled from l900 by the ever widening influence of psychodynamic depth psychology, merging the physiology of sexual arousal, motivation, ritual and symbol, religious ideas and the matrix of individual-group relations, leading from family to politics. These are only some of the many profound new perspectives twentieth century unfolded to put the spotlight on what religion is all about. Bridging the language of organized religion and psychoanalysis, to go with the great novelists Mann and Hess, were Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy, landmark echo of the Magisterium of old; and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. James make the further bald face suggestion, in his classical "Will To Believe", that "belief in God" was a matter of wishing, rather than thinking, the world was a certain way. The kind of thing reserved for the Right to Believe to vouch for, when reason and all else fails.

The Reality Function

If the particle "is" is understood as having a function, not as standing for anything ('exstence'), should "reality", as in "is real" also be properly understood through its function?

Here is where Sigmund Freud and the theory of repression come in. "Reality" IS, indeed, a "predicate", in the sense of what it's use says about the user. It is a kind of welcome to the world. There is not just use of the word according to certain rules, however; there is also, in addition, the inner attitude of 'something to confront', or contend with. An acceptance -- minimal cathexis of its representation with libido -- of it as subject for further opposites. Or rejection: denial, refusal to recognize, turning away from, suppressing the name.... This psychological rejection of something's 'reality' is noisily chattered by use of such phrases as "that's unreal". Such hubris, mastering ocean waves by speaking to them, has a sliver of justification in the functioning of the sign-use apparatus. There is a gap between two kinds of memory, one for token and one for text, making it possible to call things what they are not, but 'ought to be' to fit the wishes of the caller. One of Freud's earliest neurophysiological ideas was that instinct demands that perception be brought in agreement with desire. We see what we want, and what we want is to gratify pleasure on it, as in eating or copulating. One memory will prompt a picture -- a baby crying, for instance; another memory cuts in, depending on associations, to add the tag: "needs mammary", etc (which can be suppressed).

Now, contents that are rejected from consciousness continue to be psychically real: counted as real by the unconscious, which is its motive for defending against them. What is denied, at one level of processing (conscious), is affirmed at another (the unconscious -- these may exchange places). The person as a functional conscious ego-totality, a reflective "I" for themselves, preserves the viability of its acquired adaptation and memory in a given sign-use situation by warding off painful, or discomfort-threatening perceptions; but it will require more energy to ward these off (for ego defenses), the more conflict there is between conscious and unconscious, memory 2 and memory 1 content. The organism instinctively tries to preserve an unperturbed happy state in accordance with the pleasure principle. In Oriental religious traditions, the frustrations objective reality imposes on this demand tends toward nirvana, and Freud came to recognize a death instinct running deep and silently behind the scenes of libidinal striving, working to bring the suffering of unfulfilled desire to an end. In Occidental religious traditions, no limit is placed on the possible fulfillment of pleasures on earth below, or on the experience of blissful joys of heaven beyond, so long as soul, heart and mind remain true. Many traditions there are, all claiming to fulfill the human potential. Occidental religions, unfolding larger ego potential, generate more ego-conflicts with recalcitrant reality.

Such a psychosemiotic move, quite acceptable to ordinary English grammar, amounts to a "token tautology", a use of signs in which a text verifies itself on its own token . "Word" is a word.

Yet if a subtle linguistic shift is allowed from the informal "non-existent", to the psychological "unreal", the question of what is going on, in the sense of what is communicated by, advancing "the reality/unreality of God" is not just afirmation or rejection of "being", but rejection, in principle, of a systematic judge of the experienced totality of conscious being