People with Christian backgrounds / Christian-influenced educations may be familiar with Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, and perhaps some of Immanuel Kant’s critiques of it. The simple run-through of Anselm’s idea is that if it is possible to conjure something in your mind as an idea, that thing must exist. After all, ideas are Things, and to be a Thing you must exist. Humans can conjure the idea of God in their minds, so God must exist.
Actually, quite a lot of modern paganisms I’ve poked around or interacted with follow similar thinking to this olden-days Christian philosopher. Many people I know believe the gods are sustained by our belief, as the belief of the many lends them greater and greater concentrations of idea-level realness, maybe even physical-level realness if masses of people begin to make changes to the physical world based on their ideas of what their gods want.
The ontological argument for the existence of god(s) is kinda reasoning backwards from the thinking exercise that asks “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” – the technical answer is “well yes and no; it still produces vibrations in the air, those are real enough, but to be a sound it needs to be heard. Those vibrations need to be translated into some other signal that produces a specific sensation to an other-being that can distinguish it as something audible. A sound doesn’t exist if it can’t be heard; so inversely, if you hear something, there are definitely air vibrations that exist to cause the sound.” So the gods may well have existence in and of themselves, but maybe to be more effectual in the world, they need things and peoples to effect. And so a god that can be conceived of probably has some level of existence (I am not actually on board with the Anselm-style ontological argument, by the way, and if you’re starting to make side-eyes at its logic train right about now, you are not alone! Read some Kant, or some more modern critiques).
Anyway, the point is I get easily sidetracked. No, the point is ontology is concerned with the Big Questions of the nature of existence and the structure of reality. Heavy stuff, but fundamental.
What different ontological systems try to do is categorize existence and/or reality. What I just did above, talking as if there is a difference between physical reality (stuff & things, like cats, laptops, sound waves) and conceptual reality (ideas, thoughts, fantasies, stories), was setting up an ontological system, just like that. I may have also subtly implied by my use of language that physical existence is somehow above or better than conceptual existence. Or vice versa. Most ontological systems have a hierarchy like this. Well, not so much a hierarchy as a branching tree of existence categories. The issue is that humans tend to give greater value to the thicker tree parts closer to the ground (these are either closer to the things we can see and hear and touch, or the conditions we would really, REALLY like to be correct and hold fast and stay unchanged, so that the world doesn’t have to scare us quite so much).
Upon closer inspection, my categories might not actually hold up, and the divisions I assumed may not be as solid as I pretended they were. That can be pretty scary. It’s a bit terrifying to think, for example, that instead of an ‘organic’ physical universe, we live in a massively complex computer simulation – that’s quite literally a world-shattering switch of perspective, but it’s something that many thinkers, both philosophers and scientists, have proposed.
The more astounding finds & further confounding questions scientific fields produce, the more we come to understand that the various sciences have to conduct their work and report their findings based on their own assumed ontological systems, and those systems are not beyond critique. Neuroscience, for example, still can’t overcome the problem of consciousness in purely physical terms. This doesn’t mean that ontology, meta-ontology, or metaphysics as a whole can solve the problems science can’t, or somehow make science totally error-free. But ontology does provide a useful bird’s-eye-view of the problems advances in science keep posing to our assumed categories of reality (is the base form of matter particles? Is it waves? Does one make the universe less ‘real’ than the other???) And they give a useful bird’s-eye-view also to questions of faith, or belief, or magic.
For more mind-altering fun, skip around a bit on the Wikipedia pages and check out some of the source books / articles / lectures quoted. (No matter what your college professor or graduate tutors are saying these days, Wikipedia is not a primary source, guys, it’s a collection of stuff-people-read-once-and-half-remember, and to me it’s mostly useful to generate thought bubbles and suggest lines of inquiry. Yes some of the contributers actually do seem to go to the trouble of careful research, but always check the sources, and read THOSE writings with a critical eye as well.) Now go forth and differ, because differing is what makes stuff happen (I lean towards pluralism myself, and would love to have some flaily-noodle-armed discussions with any of you about the nature of existence, minds, whatever – message me!)
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Other Useful Sources Maybe:
R. Grossmann, The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology (London, 1992).
Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Second Edition (Oxford, 2005).
