• What is existence?

We explain what existence is, its different philosophical currents in history, from Greek antiquity to the present day.

Philosophers see existence as the concrete reality of something, as opposed to its essence.

What is existence?

According to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language, existence is the mere act of existing, that is, the reality concrete and tangible of anything, in opposition, according to the Western philosophical tradition, to its essence: its abstraction, its concept.

In fact, the origin of the word itself seems to point in that direction, since it comes from the Latin existentia, formed by former ("Outside") and stare ("Be straight"), which would lead to a concept such as "be, appear." Therefore, what exists is what is, and existence is the capacity of something to be.

However, these terms are always complex to define, since they require a philosophical approach, which in this case should provide us with the metaphysics. Since ancient times the man he has wanted to define what it is to exist, and there are many possible answers that he has found.

For example, the ancient Greek philosophers distinguished the true existence of things, which was eternal and ideal, from their changing and worldly appearance, perceptible, that is, phenomenological.

Especially Plato (427-347 BC), whose vision of the world was based on the metaphor of the cave, that is, we live in a cave and what we perceive from the outside world are the shadows that light that enters projects on the walls.

This means that for Plato the world was more appearance than existence. Much of his thought was later rescued by Christianity, which proposed a true world after it and our transitory existence.

Much later, with the arrival of the rationalism of René Descartes (1596-1650) and other great thinkers of the modern age, the existence was thought in terms similar to those raised by Artistóteles (384-322 BC).

Although he was a disciple of Plato, using syllogisms and deductions logical, Aristotle came to the conclusion that the only possible substance in the universe is that of God, and that therefore "the idea of ​​God implies its existence."

However, those innate ideas had many opponents. For example, empiricists thought of existence from experience, since something existed adds absolutely nothing to the thing.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, very radical ideas about existence were raised, especially by Federico Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Headed by these authors and reversing the traditional formula of the philosophy, from the school of Existentialism he proposed that existence was prior to essence.

This hypothesis implied that things existed before they had a meaning, especially in the case of humanity. Thus, an atheistic, materialistic and philosophical movement was built. nihilistic, which would be of great importance to speeches politicians of the twentieth century.

As will be seen, there is no truth absolute in terms of what it means to exist. In what the different interpretations coincide, however, is that what exists we can perceive, we can name it, it is something that is in the order of things present.

But the debate over what exactly is existence, and especially human existence, may never be fully closed.