H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PRINI

 G.: Prini has written Esistenzialismo, and that alone is enough to make me suspicious. S.: Only of existentialism. G.: Of every ism. I am ecumenically sceptical. A philosopher who is not suspicious of an ism deserves to be trapped in one. S.: Yet you are especially alert when the ism arrives in hard covers from the peninsula. G.: Naturally. Imported abstractions are often more dangerous because they have crossed a frontier unexamined. S.: Prini would say you are merely English. G.: He would be right in the wrong way. S.: Still, your complaint is not only against the ism but against the noun before it, esistenza. G.: Indeed. Esistenza is a mouthful and an abstraction at once, which is a bad combination. A short abstraction may still be tolerable. A long one announces a school. S.: Like speranza, perhaps. G.: Like speranza, only worse. Speranza has hope on its side. Esistenza has furniture. S.: You think it is built from stanza. G.: I suspect it of that. At least it smells less of being than of standing, staying, stationing, sticking about. It has not the clean bareness of sum. S.: So you prefer est to existit. G.: Vastly. A est. B est. A est B. One can understand that before breakfast. S.: Whereas A existit sounds as though A has done something procedural. G.: Precisely. It sounds as though A has emerged from an office carrying a certificate. S.: But let us be fair. Existere in Latin is not merely bureaucratic. G.: No, but it is already suspect. There is this ex-, and the ex- bothers me. S.: Because it is spatial. G.: Entirely. Out of, from, forth, out-standing, stepping out. All very theatrical. S.: Yet spatial prepositions do figurative work all the time. G.: Yes, and philosophers are always delighted when they can forget that. S.: Then existere may begin from standing forth, appearing, emerging, showing itself, rather than from simple being. G.: Exactly. Which is why it is not the same as esse. S.: Good. Then let us say that existence is not built directly on the verb to be, but on a more dramatic family of standing out. G.: There you have it. Not merely being, but showing up. S.: Which might explain Heidegger’s affection for Dasein. G.: Ah yes. The German hill-fort. There is a green hill far away, and then there is Dasein nearer than any hill and more exhausting. S.: You do not like Dasein either. G.: I distrust any philosophy that improves itself by hyphenation or compounds. S.: But da is only there. G.: Which is precisely the trouble. There is. There exists. The there seems innocent until it begins charging rent. S.: And existence then becomes a mode of locatedness. G.: Or exhibitedness. Being as turnout. S.: That sounds almost fair to Heidegger. G.: It is fairer than he usually is to English. S.: Then let us return to the Latin. Exsistere or existere, from sistere. G.: Yes, from standing, setting, causing to stand, coming forth, emerging into presence. All of which is perfectly decent as Latin, and perfectly alarming as ontology. S.: Because ontology then inherits a metaphor of movement or manifestation. G.: Exactly. If one says A is, one says very little and quite enough. If one says A exists, one may be insinuating that A has emerged, stands forth, is there in some emphatic way. S.: The antonym, then, is not non est but perhaps non exsistit. G.: Or, if you insist, insistit. S.: I do insist. G.: Of course you do. S.: Existere and insistere make a nice pair. If one can stand out, one can stand on, stand in, insist. G.: Yes. The whole family is spatially overactive. S.: Yet that may help. If existere is to stand forth, insistere is to stand upon or persist. One is emergence, the other pressure or continuance. G.: Very good. And philosophers then turn these prepositional gymnastics into first principles. S.: As they always do. G.: And then complain when ordinary people prefer sum. S.: Cogito, ergo existo? G.: Why not just cogito, ergo sum. Descartes had the decency to choose the smaller verb. S.: Though later people delight in saying cogito, ergo existo as if the longer word gave one more furniture. G.: Longer Latin always gives undergraduates the impression of metaphysics. S.: Then what would Cicero think. G.: Cicero would think many things at once and none of them encouraging. He could understand A est, B est, A est B. He could manage predication without continental melodrama. S.: But would he like exsistere. G.: He used it, of course, in ordinary Latin ways. To come forth, to arise, to appear, to result, to stand out. But he would not have dreamt of making exsistere the sacred portal of ontology. S.: So if one said to Cicero that moderns distinguish between being and existence by making a cult of exsistere, he would raise an eyebrow. G.: At least one. Perhaps both if he had just dined. S.: Then is existence a predicate. G.: No. At least not in the vulgar sense that one lists it among the sensible properties of a thing, like red, sour, or municipal. S.: Kant, then. G.: Naturally. Existence is not a real predicate. A hundred possible thalers and a hundred actual thalers differ not in concept but in purse. S.: Which was already one way of curing the metaphysical swelling. G.: Yes. The cure was expensive but effective. S.: Yet Frege gives us the existential quantifier, which makes existence look not like a first-order predicate but like something said of concepts. G.: Quite. Existence belongs in logic as the satisfaction of a concept, not as a property glued onto individuals. S.: So one says there exists an x such that Fx, not Exa in some naïve predicate slot. G.: Exactly. And that is one reason why I distrust the café metaphysics of existence. Logic had already tidied the place before the smoke arrived. S.: Then Quine enters with ontological commitment. G.: Ah yes. To be is to be the value of a bound variable. The driest sentence ever written against romance. S.: Dry enough to make existentialism look upholstered. G.: Entirely. Quine can reduce a continent to notation. S.: Yet Quine too worries about existential commitment. G.: Yes, and rightly. Once one quantify over something, one begins paying rent to it. S.: Your ontological Marxism again. G.: If they work, they exist. S.: That is not Quine. G.: No, but it is a respectable common-room supplement to Quine. S.: Then let us descend from modern logic to Aristotle. G.: Always a relief. S.: The particularis in the Square of Opposition. G.: Yes. Some A is B. There exists at least one A that is B, if one likes later dress. S.: So existential import enters there by the back door. G.: It does, and the mediaevals spent a good deal of time polishing the hinges. S.: Then Aristotle too had to manage existence without making it a dramatic noun. G.: Precisely. He had ousia, being, predication, categories, and enough trouble already. He did not need Saint-Germain-des-Prés. S.: Yet Prini writes Esistenzialismo in 1955 and means something fairly recognisable. G.: Yes. By then the word has become a banner. S.: Through Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus, cafés, war, nausea, black polo-necks. G.: You forgot Le Deux Magots. S.: I was saving it. G.: Good. All that apparatus by which a grammatical discomfort becomes a civilisation. S.: And Abbagnano in Italy. G.: Ah yes. Abbagnano is the one to blame in the peninsula. S.: Prini knows it. G.: He certainly ought to. S.: Because Abbagnano domesticates existentialism for Italy. G.: Domesticates is too kind. He naturalises it, institutionalises it, gives it a proper local passport. S.: While Prini takes it up with Catholic and conversational complications. G.: Yes, and that makes him more interesting and more suspicious at once. S.: Let us not lose the word itself. You said esistenza is built less from being than from standing. G.: That is my prejudice, yes. S.: But etymologically that is not absurd. G.: No, not absurd. Only revealing. The abstract noun carries within it a history of emergence rather than bare being. S.: Then existence is not what there is before philosophy, but what philosophy makes out of a certain family of expressions. G.: Very good. That is exactly the irritation. Existence sounds primitive only after much cultivation. S.: Whereas est is primitive at once. G.: Yes. Est is as near to intellectual clean water as grammar allows. S.: Then why not say that existentialism is a philosophy of standing forth rather than of being. G.: Because its adherents would think one had shrunk the drama. Which is why one should say it more often. S.: Still, there is something to the standing forth. Human existence, for Heidegger, is not inert presence but a way of being disclosed, ahead of itself, thrown, concerned. G.: Yes, yes. One can make poetry out of adverbs if given time. S.: You are unfair. G.: Only prophylactically. S.: Then let us ask the central question. What is Prini complaining about. G.: In one sense, not enough. In another, too much. If he writes Esistenzialismo, he accepts the banner under which too many unlike things have marched. S.: Jaspers is not Sartre, Heidegger is not Camus, Abbagnano is not Marcel. G.: Precisely. Isms are often laundries in which distinctions go to die. S.: Yet one still needs some shelf label. G.: Librarians always do. Philosophers less so. S.: Then perhaps Prini uses existentialism not as a creed but as a scene of problems. G.: That would improve him at once. S.: Finitude, freedom, situation, testimony, discourse, conversation. G.: Yes. Once he moves toward conversation he becomes less café and more civil. S.: Which you prefer. G.: Vastly. I can tolerate many abstractions if they eventually lead to actual speech. S.: Then perhaps the route is this. Existence as standing-forth becomes too metaphysical when reified into a noun, but becomes philosophically useful again when returned to situations in which people speak, testify, verify, listen, risk. G.: That is almost enough to save the noun. S.: Almost. G.: Do not overstate the rescue. S.: Never intentionally. G.: Good. Now let us perform your favourite reduction: izzing and hazzing. S.: At last. G.: Aristotle has to deal not only with what a thing is, but with what it has. Being and having, if you like, though I prefer the mock-Homeric izzing and hazzing. S.: Dyadic relations. G.: Quite. A izz B. A hazz B. S.: Reflexive and transitive if suitably regimented. G.: Or not, depending on what madness one is formalising. S.: But your point is that ontology is not exhausted by izzing. G.: Exactly. One discovers, to one’s horror, that a thing’s relation to its properties, accidents, possessions, states, and equipment matters too. Hazzing is the revenge of predicamental life upon pure being. S.: So existentialism that obsesses over being may forget having. G.: Very often. Though in everyday misery having is usually the more urgent category. S.: Camus’s stranger has less than he is. G.: Nicely put. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep moving. Now Quine again. Ontological commitment does not require one to praise existence; it requires one to count one’s variables. S.: A splendidly anti-café discipline. G.: Exactly. No smoke, only scope. S.: And Frege already had the better weapon: existence is the second-order predicate applying to concepts that have an instance. G.: Yes. Which means that if Prini wishes to talk ontology, he ought not to forget what logic had already done to the old noun. S.: Yet existentialists often write as if logic were a provincial registrar. G.: They must, otherwise the registration would expose them. S.: Then where does ordinary language philosophy enter. G.: To remind everyone that there is a difference between there is, there exists, there stands, there remains, there appears, and that the differences are not always metaphysical. S.: So when someone says “there is a green hill far away,” he is not yet doing ontology. G.: No. He is perhaps doing hymnody. S.: And when someone says “there exists a green hill far away,” he is already insufferable. G.: Usually. Unless he is correcting a map. S.: Then Prini’s task, if he is to survive your scepticism, is to show that esistenza names not a mysterious property but a human mode of situation, exposure, finitude, conversation. G.: Better. And perhaps also desire. S.: Pensare è la maniera più profonda del nostro desiderare. G.: Yes. Once he says that, he becomes less a system-builder and more a civil companion. S.: Yet still under the ism. G.: Unfortunately. There is no cure for a title once printed. S.: Unless one writes against it. G.: Or beneath it. S.: Then what of insistit. G.: Ah yes. If you insist, the antonym of existere in our playful mood is insistere. S.: Because if existence is standing forth, insistence is standing on. G.: And philosophers do a great deal of the latter once challenged. S.: Then perhaps existentialism is what happens when insistence about being acquires publishing opportunities. G.: Very good indeed. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become Parisian. S.: I shall remain only moderately café-bound. G.: Better. Now, Abbagnano again. You said he is to blame in the peninsula. S.: Because he gave existentialism a respectable Italian prose and institutional location. G.: Exactly. Once an ism has a dictionary-man and a university chair, it becomes ineradicable. S.: And Prini inherits that weather. G.: Yes, though he complicates it by theology, conversation, and a dislike of purely apophantic discourse. S.: Which brings him oddly close to you. G.: Close enough to converse with, far enough to keep me suspicious. S.: Then perhaps the final answer about esistenza is this. It is an abstract noun of dubious grandeur, etymologically allied less to bare being than to standing forth, and philosophically dangerous when treated as a simple predicate or primitive metaphysical substance. Yet it may be rehabilitated if one treats it as naming modes of situated human life rather than a thing-like property. G.: That is excellent. S.: Dry enough. G.: Not yet. Add that Cicero would have preferred est and that Frege and Quine had already put paid to much of the theatre. S.: And that Aristotle’s particularis had done more honest work than a shelf of cafés. G.: Better. S.: Then here is the properly dry ending. Esistenzialismo may have arrived from Heidegger and Jaspers, taken the train to Le Deux Magots with Sartre, been novelised by Camus, and naturalised in Italy by Abbagnano, but by the time Prini receives it the poor noun has already been interrogated by Aristotle, disciplined by Kant, quantified by Frege, and taxed by Quine. G.: Splendid. S.: And your own verdict. G.: I remain sceptical of every ism, but if Prini insists on esistenza, I shall allow him one condition. S.: Which is. G.: That he not forget that most of what existentialists call existence could often have been said, more cleanly, with sum.