Reference to the Non-Existent

REFERENCE TO THE NON-EXISTENT ((DISCOURSE " IS THE English word which, perhaps , better than any other, designates the center of gravity or principal focus, as it were, of contemporary philosophical thought. For, from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge, linguistic analysis and phenomenology are the two dominant movements or schools of contemporary philosophy, and "Wiscourse," signifying, as it does, thought and language equally, is a rubric that covers-as well as any rubric can-the central concern of both of these characteristically different philosophical movements. As its name plainly tells, linguistic analysis is a philosophy concerned with the analysis of language, whether simply to get clear about common usage, and so obviate needless philosophical perplexities consequent upon careless speech (" ordinary language analysis ") , or to supply for the deficiencies of common speech by substiuting for it, at least in scientific and philosophical contexts, a technically exact, formalized mode of discourse (" logical analysis ") . Phenomenology, in contrast to both forms of analysis, is more "mentalistic" or" thought" oriented, inasmuch as it seeks not so much to clarify the patterns of speech as to explicateby a careful attention to and description of immediate experience in all its variety-the forms and laws according to which thought constitutes the objects given in and by experience. In general terms, then, still speaking from the external standpoint of sociology of knowledge, philosophy today is centered on discourse. Shifting now to an internal standpoint, we can say that one of the problems for any philosophy so centered is the problem of non-being, insofar as the question of non-being arises, more 253 ~54 .JOHN N. DEELY or less ineluctably, out of the fact that discourse appears to refer to things regardless of whether or not they exist in fact. In the philosophy of St. Thomas, for example, the celestial spheres are repeatedly referred to as explanatory factors decisively involved in the phenomena of life and death, the specific constancy of biological forms, the genesis of cognition from .sensation, and many other philosophically significant occurrences .1 Yet few today believe in the reality of the celestial spheres. Nor is such a profound confusion of non-being with being by any means limited to medieval times. The history of science and ethnology is jam packed with references to what does not exist-or at least is not regarded as existing by contemporary lights; and no doubt our own culture harbors its fair share of non-beings parading in the guise of beings. Indeed, what would become of literature generally if human discourse did not have, or at least appear to have, the capacity to refer to what does not exist as if it did exist? It 1:-tight almost be said that non-being, which plays no positive role in the physical world, finds a comfortable home indeed in the world of human discourse. It hardly seems too much to say that the relativity of discourse to objects, and its indifference to the being and non-being of those objects, are the two properties that define discourse and reveal its essential character. I. The Impasse over Non-Being I£ we look at the ways in which the analytic and phenomenological traditions have construed the apparent capacity of discourse to refer to what does not exist, we find that they have come to terms with this. phenomenon in ways that not only are characteristically different but also lead to a kind of fundamental impasse in the area of methodological assumptions . For, whereas the phenomenologists descended from Husserl regard this apparent indifference of discourse to the physical world as real and a fundamental given, the analysts 1 See Thomas Litt, Les corps celestes dan~ l'univers de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Nauw~la,erts, 1963), REFERENCE TO THE NON-EXISTENT '255 descended from Russell regard it as a mere appearance, to be explained away with the help of the techniques of mathematical logic. But while the programmatic statement and detailed working out of these two opposed programs is owing, respectively, to Husserl's theory of intentionality and Russell's theory of descriptions , the basic inspiration for both programs came from somewhat earlier background figures-Franz Brentano (18381917 ) and Gottlob...