Without love, reality cannot appear.

Why does life, as a whole, appear as such a horror, at times beauty seem entirely absent from Creation ?

How is it possible that prisoners deep in hellish gulags can affirm the goodness of reality ?

Jonathan Bieler, speaking on Ferdinand Ulrich’s epistemology, hints at an answer :  

"…the full meaning of truth is epistemologically speaking only realized in the second operation of the intellect, the judgement, with consists in assigning or separating, affirming or negating features of the object of intellection.

Actively saying “yes” or “no” is an essential part of human intellection and mirrors…the “resoluteness” with which the gift of being is given into concrete subsistence. 

Only by this judgement can the human being comprehend being (esse), as he puts himself and his existence at stake in the judgement and verdict over what is and what is not.

Thereby the human being imitates the “decidedness” of esse, which is always already handed over by God to beings in order to award them with subsistence.

….the pre-socratic rule that “like is only comprehended by like” as meaning that only by committing in a similar way to beings as God is committed to them ….can the human person conceive of being as love.

In this sense, man recreates the world within himself, so as to become a microcosm.

Knowledge and love are thus intimately related, as through love man can say ever deeper yes to what he has come to know through the intellect and realize it.

What is more, through love the human person discovers the deepest meaning of creation, which he or she cannot discover unless by imitating the love that forms the background of creation itself."

David Bentley Hart arrives at a similar conclusion :

"Thus, for Christian thought, knowledge of the world is something to be achieved not just through a reconstruction of its “sufficient reason,” but through an obedience to glory, an orientation of the will toward the light of being and its gratuity; and so the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing.

Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” (indeed, it is rational precisely because of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail), and thus cannot be known truly if this order is reversed.

Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know, one must first love, and having known, one must finally delight; only this “corresponds” to the Trinitarian love and delight that creates. The truth of being is the whole of being, in its event, groundless, and so, in its every detail, revelatory of the light that grants it....

…beauty is present only where there has been love, but only vanity where the light of love has not fallen…love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential “mood” that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it…"

It appears that our intentional stance can either invite reality to disclose itself as gift, or shut out any apprehension of the Good and Beautiful completely.

HOW WE CAN AFFIRM POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD.

HOW WE CAN AFFIRM POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. 

If we were to answer this question philosophically, these brief excerpts from the Thomist Norris Clarke on how we affirm knowledge of God will do :

"Step I . Affirmation of similitude between every creature and God. This is based on the bond of causal participation between creature and God. Every effect must in some way resemble its cause, because what the ef­fect has comes from its cause, and a cause cannot give what it does not have, at least in some equivalent higher way. Hence every positive per­fection in creatures must correspond to, derive from, some equivalent perfection in God (e.g., visual power in us from knowledge in God) . The bond of efficient causality is the indispensable bridge by which our minds can pass over the abyss between finite creatures and their Infinite Source. Deny this bridge, and all we can say about God is by way of sug­gestive metaphors, or direct religious experience which must remain in­ articulate or merely metaphorical. 

Step 2 . Purification of the resulting concept: the negative moment. How can we aptly express this similitude? We cannot directly apply every good quality in creatures to God literally, because many of these contain imperfections built into their very nature that are incompatible with in­ finite perfection. Hence we must take every attribute drawn from crea­tures and purify it by examining whether it contains any imperfection or limitation in its very meaning (e.g., all attributes implying something material, like vision, hearing, speed, etc.) . 

If it does, then it cannot survive the purifying process so as to be applied truthfully to the divine perfection. Only those attributes can survive which contain no imper­fection or finitude in their meaning, although they do contain such limitations as participated in us or other creatures. These are called "pure perfections" (as opposed to "mixed"), and can be affirmed as literally true of God, not merely metaphors. Thus we cannot say, "God has the best eyesight, or is the fastest runner," because these imply in their very meaning the imperfections of a material body. What does cor­ respond to this in God are the pure perfections of knowledge and omni­ presence, which contain no such limitations, "no ceiling," in their meaning. 

There are only a small number which can survive this purification process: e.g. existence, activity, unity, goodness, power, intelligence, will, love, and others derivative in some way from these or implied by them (justice, mercy, compassion, etc.) . Among these, love especially needs careful purification from connotations of desire for what one does not have, all bodily implications, 

Step 3 : Reaffirmation and application to God + the index of infinity. These purified perfections are now affirmed as necessarily present in God-otherwise he would be less perfect than we are-but with the added index of infinity, i.e., possession in an infinite degree, beyond our positive vision or grasp by human concepts, pointing to the ultimate Mystery, 

Can we put any more direct, quasi-experimental content into our knowledge of the divine Mystery as infinite …..?  I think so, by inserting what we do know positively about these attributes into the radical unrestricted drive of our intellect and will toward the infinite fullness of truth and good­ ness, which says of all finite realizations, "not enough, not enough." This yields an obscure but positive kind of knowing "through the heart, " so to speak, hidden in the very experience of longing, a knowledge through desire itself. If we can recognize the absence of something we must somehow dimly know in silhouette what we are looking for, as Plato pointed out long ago. 

Furthermore, it is frequently overlooked that this knowledge through longing contains implicitly a very precise item of knowledge about God that is essential for our religious relationshp of worship, ado­ ration: "God is the Number One in excellence in all these domains, wisdom, love, etc." This is indeed all we need to know for religious pur­poses, that God is supreme wisdom, love, power, etc., not precisely how he knows, loves, etc. in detail. Whatever his mode of possessing these, he remains, with total precision, uniquely No. 1 , with no rivals. 

Recall the stunning insight ofAngelus Silesius, the 17th century mystical poet: "The abyss in man cries out to the abyss in God; tell me, which is deeper?" In the complementary extremes of fullness and emptiness they must match; otherwise, we are not really longing for the only God there is."

- Clarke, One and the Many

Why Kant is Wrong

Nietzsche once remarked that Immanuel Kant was a Catastrophic Spider. By this he meant that Kant's moral Philosophy sucked the life out of human beings, also reality itself.

Why ?

Well, firstly, because transcendental idealism excludes the possibility of knowledge about things in themselves, including the transcendental idealist’s own cognitive faculties, the theory is self-defeating .

Plus inherent in the very notion of transcendental idealism is the impossibility of discovering probability of Kant’s own theories being true, because we cannot have knowledge of our cognitive faculties or the processes that formed them as they are in themselves.

Kantians want to conceive of things in themselves as the causes of our sensations, while their own accounts of causal inference ruled that claim out.

It certainly seems that, in abstracting experience into various kinds of ideal content – formal, mathematical, moral, aesthetic, and so on – the mind really does extract knowledge from what would otherwise be nothing but meaningless brute events.

It is easier to resolve the question of the correspondence between perception and the perceived by ascribing that correspondence to the supereminent unity in which the poles of experience—phenomena and gaze—participate - God or what have you, as said by Plotinus or Hegel.

Also, it makes human discourse a mockery,he has no explanation at all, and can in principle have none, of the miraculous fit between the structures we have im­ posed on the world, apparently independently of anything in the world, and the way the world responds to our practical action on it based on the predictions thought up by our minds-successfully coping with the challenges of nature, technology, etc. 

Nor can he explain-in fact he never tries-how we can know other human beings as just as real as our­ selves and successfully exchange information with them ininterper­ sonal dialogue. 

If it is really I that am structuring your being and the messages you seem to be sending in to me through my senses, then it follows that you are also structuring me and my messages-which can­cels out into incoherence: both can't be true at once. 

We are open to truth-grounding communication about themselves from the real active beings that surround us, across the bridge of their self-expressive, self­ revealing action. 

That is what it means to have a mind open to being. 

I do know things as they really do manifest their existence and their natures by their real action on me. Action is pre­cisely the self-revelation of being. Action that is indeterminate, that re­veals nothing about the nature from which it proceeds, is not action at all. Hence, all action is necessarily essence-structured action. 

And Bertrand Russel notes Kant's problem with Mathematics agrees :

“A similar argument applies to any other a priori judgement. When we judge that two and two are four, we are not making a judgement about our thoughts, but about all actual or possible couples. The fact that our minds are so constituted as to believe that two and two are four, though it is true, is emphatically not what we assert when we assert that two and two are four. And no fact about the constitution of our minds could make it true that two and two are four. “

And Kant out to have know this, without Cantor mathematics etc 2 physical objects and two other physical objects must make four physical objects, even if physical objects cannot be experienced.

As AE Taylor explains,


No element whatever supplied by sense enters into the mathematician’s concept of a circle, a parabola, an integer, or a real number. Kant overlooks this all-important point because he assumes throughout his whole reasoning that, before I can demonstrate a proposition in geometry,I must draw the figure, and similarly that, before I can say what the sum of two integers is, I must count the units of which he supposes the integers to consist. The erroneous character of this view has been sufficiently demonstrated by the subsequent history of mathematical science, but ought to have been clear to Kant himself.

Even if all geometry, as he tacitly assumes, were metrical geometry, he ought to have seen that Descartes' invention of co-ordinates had already made the drawing of figures in principle superfluous in geometrical science. 

His conception of arithmetic is even more superficial-in fact, on a level with Aristotle’s.

As Couturat has correctly observed, Kant’s examples are all drawn from the demonstration of singular propositions (such as 7 + 5=12). 

If he had asked himself how any general truth in the theory of numbers is proved (how, e.g., we prove Fermat's theorem), he would have seen at once the inadequacy of his own theories. Indeed, mere consideration of a singular proposition which does not relate to integers (e.g., the proposition 2 x 5 + 3x6=6x16) might have taught him that arithmetic is not the same thing as counting, and even suggested to him that an integer is not a ‘ collection of units.” 

Gilson, an existential Thomist, proves the ultimate failing of Kant’s epistemology. To summarize Gilson’s argument:

“...by reducing knowledge to the univocity of the intellectual, the a priori categories of the mind Kant’s system collapses in on itself; for the veracity of knowledge, through the synthetic a priori judgments which occur within natural philosophy and mathematics, requires the union of two distinct sources of cognition—the categories of reason and the intuitions of the senses (or at least, in the case of mathematics, the pure intuition of space)—the positing of a cause for which union seems to transgress the very principles of Kant’s epistemological system…

I end with David Bentley Hart’s rumination upon the subject :

As DBH says,

“to discover, as Kant did, how much is known before it is known, how much is presumed a priori in every posterior act of knowledge, is not necessarily to have determined how consciousness constitutes its world - nor, certainly, to have arrived at the vast machinery of the schematism of perception and the synthesizing energy of imagination - any more than it is to discover how much of my knowing and how much of the known transcend the consciousness they shape; indeed, such a discovery more properly, with fewer metaphysical leaps of logic than Kant's epistemology requires, merely declares again, even more emphatically, that all being and knowing is the work of an irreducible givenness…”


Of course, it is asking too much of transcendental philosophy that it recognize this: what the transcendental ego can understand is so much more limited than the reality visible to the soul. But before modern subjectivity had fully evolved and emerged from the waters, a person was indeed conceived as a living soul, swimming in the deeps, participating in the being of the world, inseparable from the element he or she inhabited and knew; and the soul, rather than the sterile abstraction of an ego, was an entire and unified spiritual and corporeal reality; it was the life and form of the body, encompassing every aspect of human existence, from the nous to the animal functions, uniting reason and sensation, thought and emotion, spirit and flesh, memory and presence, supernatural longing and natural capacity; open before being, a permeable and multiplicit attendance upon the world, it was that in which being showed itself, a logos gathering the light of being into itself, seeing and hearing in the things of the world the logoi of being, allowing them to come to utterance in itself, as words and thought. 

The soul was the simultaneity of faro and intus, world and self, faith and understanding. Perhaps such language seems, from the post-Kantian vantage, somewhat less than rigorous; but it certainly requires nothing so elaborate (nor so arbitrary and unconvincing) as the Kantian architectonics of knowledge to sustain it. 

In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or "adequate" a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic. Every act of knowledge is, simultaneously, an act of faith (to draw on Hamann's delightful subversion of Hume); we trust in the world, and so know it, only by entrusting ourselves to what is more than ourselves; our primordial act of faith meets a covenant that has already been made with us, before we could seek it, in the giving of the light. 

No one can shut his eyes to that splendor, or seal his ears against that music, except as a perverse display of will; then, naturally, knowledge can be recovered again only as an exertion of that same will. But one then has not merely lost the world momentarily, so as to receive it anew as "truth:' One has lost the world and its truth altogether, and replaced them with a phantom summoned up out of one's need for a world conformable to the dimensions of one's own power to establish meaning - a world that is nothing but the ceaseless repetition of otherwise meaningless instantiations of that power."

Are star's Angelic intelligences, Biblically ?

Are starts angelic intelligences ? What did the apostles think ?

David Bentley Hart, in his article, The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients HERE writes,

“Spirit was something subtler but also stronger, more vital, more glorious than the worldly elements of a coarse corruptible body compounded of earthly soul and material flesh. Thus too the word “spirits” was common parlance in late antiquity for all those rational personal agencies and entities who populated the cosmos but who were not bound to vegetal or animal bodies, and so were immune to death: lesser celestial gods, daemons, angels, nefilim, devils, or what have you (what one called the various classes of spirits was a matter of religious vocabulary, not necessarily the basic conceptual shape of their natures).  These beings enjoyed a life not limited by the conditions of the lower elements (the στοιχεῖα) or of any of the intrinsically dissoluble combinations thereof.”

Everything else, even spirits, had some kind of body, because all of them were irreducibly local realities. The bodies of spirits may have been at once both more invincible and more mercurial than those with an animal constitution, but they were also, if in a peculiarly exalted sense, still physical. Many thought them to be composed from, say, the aether or the “quintessence” above, the “spiritual” substance that constitutes the celestial regions beyond the moon. 

Many also identified that substance with the πνεῦμα—the “wind” or “breath”—that stirs all things, a universal quickening force subtler even than the air it moves. It was generally believed, moreover, that many of these ethereal or spiritual beings were not only embodied, but visible. The stars overhead were thought to be divine or angelic intelligences (as we see reflected in James 1:17 and 2 Peter 2:10-11). And it was a conviction common to a good many pagans and Jews alike that the ultimate destiny of great or especially righteous souls was to be elevated into the heavens to shine as stars (as we see in Daniel 12:3 and Wisdom 3:7, and as may be hinted at in 1 Corinthians 15:30-41). 

In the Jewish and Christian belief of the age, in fact, there really appears to have been nothing similar to the fully incorporeal angels of later scholastic tradition—certainly nothing like the angels of Thomism, for example, who are pure form devoid of prime matter and therefore each its own unique species.

In fact, it was a central tenet of the most influential angelology of the age, derived as it was from the Noachic books of the intertestamental period, that angels had actually sired children—the monstrous nefilim—on human women. It is even arguable that no school of pagan thought, early or late, perhaps not even Platonism, really had a perfectly clear concept of any substance without extension. For Plotinus, for instance, “soul” was “incorporeal,” but not in the way we might assume; while the soul in Plotinus’s system was not susceptible of “material” magnitude, and hence could contain all forms without spatial extension (Enneads 2.4.11), it was still “incorporeal” only in the sense that it possessed so subtle a nature that it could wholly permeate material bodies without displacing their discrete material constituents (Enneads 4.7.8²)

“So it has also been written, ‘The first man Adam came to be a living soul,’ and the last Adam a life-making spirit . . . The first man out of the earth, earthly; the second man out of heaven. As the earthly man, so also those who are earthly; and, as the heavenly, so also those who are heavenly; and, just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man.”

 This is for Paul nothing less than the transformation of the psychical composite into the spiritual simplex—the metamorphosis of the mortal fleshly body that belongs to soul into the immortal fleshless body that belongs to spirit: ἡμεῖς ἀλλαγησόμεθα. Δεῖ γὰρ τὸ φθαρτὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσασθαι ἀφθαρσίαν καὶ τὸ θνητὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσασθαι ἀθανασίαν, “We shall be changed. For this perishable thing must clothe itself in imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself in immortality.”

And David Burnett claims that at least the Jewish peoples did, and expected to be Angelmorphized INTO angelic intelligences, based on his reading Paul’s use of Gen 15:5 :


“Then behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “This man will not be your heir (κληρονομήσει); but one who will come forth from your own loins, he shall be your heir (κληρονομήσει).” And he took him outside and said, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And he said to him, “So shall your seed be (oὕτως ἔσται τὸ σπέρμα σου).”

This places burnett within the context of already well-established deification or angelomorphic traditions in Early Judaism that see the destiny of the seed of Abraham as replacing the stars as the divine or angelic inheritors of the nations.

A number of early Jewish interpreters of Gen 15:5 (and related promises in Gen 22:17; 26:4), who understood the patriarchal promise of being multiplied as the stars of heaven not merely quantitatively, but also qualitatively, that his seed would become star-like, assuming the life of the gods or angels.

Origin was on this track as well,


“On the contrary when they hear of a such a hope of posterity and that the glory of their own offspring would be equal to heaven and its stars, when they hear these things, they do not think about their own goods, about the grace of continence, about the mortification of their members, but instead they regard all these things which contributed to their own gain as loss in order that they might gain Christ.” (Orig. Comm Rom, 4.6.7)

Origen assumes that the promise to Abraham and Sarah of an offspring would be “equal to heaven and its stars” in their “glory” is actually understood as the promise to “gain Christ,” drawing on the language of Phil 3:8. Significant here is the immediate context of Phil 3:8 in which Paul is discussing becoming like Christ (3:10) and attaining the resurrection from the dead (3:11)

John Collins points out that the stars in Dan 8:10 are the host of heaven, which in comparison to Dan 12:3 implies that those raised from the dead in vindication will be associated with the angels.

A similar idea is found in regard to the destiny of the righteous in 1 Enoch 104:2-6:

“But now you shall shine like the lights of heaven, and you shall be seen; and the windows of heaven will be open to you… and you are about to be making a great rejoicing like the angels of heaven.”

In the Testament of Moses we also find the affirmation of the astral immortality of the faithful as it states in 10:9: “God will raise you to the heights. Yes, he will fix you firmly in the heaven of the stars.”

In context of a discussion of the seven ordered eschatological rest promised for those who “keep the ways of the Most High,” 4 Ezra 7:97 states, “The sixth order, when it is shown to them how their face is to shine like the sun, and how they are to be made like the light of stars, being incorruptible from then on.”

Within the reception of the Deuteronomic vision in early Judaism we find a coherent narrative through which the promise of Abraham could be read. We find the setting up of the cosmic polis, where the celestial bodies (or angels of god) were “allotted to all the nations under the whole heaven (πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν τοῖς ὑποκάτω τοῦ οὐρανοῦ)” (Deut 4:19; 32:8-9), while Israel was Yahweh’s inheritance (κληρονομία) (Deut 32:9). 

In early Jewish reception of this tradition, the cosmos was understood as the “greatest of commonwealths (πόλις ἡ μεγίστη)” where the celestial bodies were appointed as rulers (ἄρχόντας) who were to mimic (μιμουμένους) the rule of the “Father of all (πάντων πατρός),” exercising their rule in law and justice (δίκην καὶ νόμον) (Spec. Laws 1.13-19). These celestial rulers (ἄρχοντα) were to “preside (or rule) (χρή) over his subjects (ὑπηκόων) as a father over his children (πατέρα παίδων) so that he himself may be honored in return as by true-born sons, and therefore good rulers may be truly called the parents of states and nations (ἐθνῶν) (Spec. Laws 4.184-188).”

2 Baruch later discusses the vindication of the righteous. After the dead are raised in 2 Bar. 50:1-4, the destiny of those that were righteous is discussed in 2 Bar. 51:

“their splendor will be glori(fi)ed in changes, and the appearance of their face will be turned into the light of their beauty, so that they may be able to acquire and receive the world which does not die, which is promised to them (51:3) … When, therefore, they [speaking of the unrighteous] see that those over whom they are now exalted, who will then be exalted and glori(fi)ed more than they, they will be transformed: the latter into the splendor of angels (51:5) … and time will no longer age them (51:9). For they will dwell in the heights of that world, and they will be made like the angels. And they will be made equal to the stars … and from light into the splendor of glory (51:10) … and there will then be excellence in the righteous surpassing that in angels (51:12).”

Here in 2 Baruch, the angelic transformation of the righteous is spoken of in terms of “being made equal to the stars” (51:10). Baruch’s reason for this is so that “they may be able to acquire and receive the world which does not die, which is promised to them” (51:3).

In The Special Laws 1.13-19 we find further explanation on Philo’s conception of the astral gods of Deuteronomy and their role in God’s cosmic πόλις:

“Some have supposed that the sun and moon and the other stars were gods with absolute powers (θεοὺς αὐτοκράτορας) and ascribed to them the causation of all events. But Moses held that the universe (κόσμος) was created (γενητός) and is in a sense the greatest of commonwealths (πόλις ἡ μεγίστη), having magistrates (ἂρχοντας ἔχουσα) and subjects (ὑπηκόυς); for magistrates (ἄρχοντας), all the heavenly bodies (οὐρανῷ), fixed or wandering; for subjects (ὑπηκόους), such beings as exist below the moon, in the air or on the earth.

The said magistrates (ἄρχοντας), however, in his view have not unconditional powers (αὐτεξουσίους), but are lieutenants (ἄρχοντας) of the one Father of All (τοῦ πάντων πατρὸς ὑπάρχους), and it is by copying (μιμουμένους) the example of His government exercised according to law and justice (δίκην καὶ νόμον) over all created beings that they acquit themselves aright; but those who do not descry the Charioteer mounted above attribute the causation of all the events in the universe (κόσμῳ) to the team that draw the chariot as though they were sole agents.

From this ignorance our most holy lawgiver would convert them to knowledge with these words: ‘Do not when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars and all the ordered host of heaven go astray and worship them- Deut 4:19.’  Well indeed and aptly does he call the acceptance of the heavenly bodies as gods going astray or wandering … in supposing that they alone are gods … So all the gods (θεούς) which sense descries in Heaven must not be supposed to possess absolute power (αὐτοκρατεῖς) but to have received the rank of subordinate rulers, naturally liable to correction, though in virtue of their excellence never destined to undergo it.”

 (Philo, Spec. Laws 1.13-19), then the celestial- sun, moon, and stars [Deut 4:19; 1 Cor 15:41]). Paul likens the resurrection body to that of the sun, moon, and stars (1 Cor 15:40-42), even going so far as referring to the resurrected ones as “those who are of heaven (οἱ ἐπουράνιοι, 15:48).”

Here, Philo describes the κόσμος as the “greatest of commonwealths (πόλις ἡ μεγίστη),” a kind of heavenly government akin to a Greco-Roman city-state where celestial rulers (ἄρχοντας) are delegated rule over subjects (ὑπηκόυς) that consist of all those who live below the heavens. Philo does not deny the divinity of the celestial bodies, but in his use of Deut 4:19, the logic given to not worship them is simply that they are not gods with “absolute powers (αὐτοκρατεῖς),” but are appointed rulers (ἄρχοντας) under the one God who is “Father of all (του πάντων πατρὸς ὑπάρχους)”. The celestial bodies are to carry out their rule by mimetic (μιμουμένους) participation in God’s own rule of the κόσμος in justice and law (δίκην καὶ νόμον)


The Apocalypse of Abraham, re-narrates Abraham’s counting of the stars from Gen 15:5 in the context of an ascent to heaven where he is welcomed above the stars. In Apoc. Abr. 20.3-5 the Eternal Mighty One addresses Abraham:

“‘Look from on high at the stars which are beneath you and count them for me and tell me their number!’ And I [Abraham] said, ‘When can I, for I am a man.’ And he said to me ‘As the number of the stars and their power so shall I place for your seed the nations and men, set apart for me in my lot with Azazel’.”

Here Abraham’s seed is promised not merely the number of the stars, but their power, which is understood in terms of the rule over nations and men, which seem to have been allotted to the Eternal Mighty One or to Azazel and his company.

So…What are Angels made of ? How do they exist ?

I write on that HERE


I’ve also written HERE on reasons to believe that Angels actually exist