The Existential Pluralism of Étienne Souriau. Brief Introduction to the Philosophy of Ways of Existence

Abstract

During the darkest years of the SecondWorldWar, the French esthetician Étienne Souriau (long forgotten and recently rediscovered) developed an original pluralist ontology based on the notion of “mode of existence”. Unlike the better-known Jamesian pluralism (which I will assume as an “ontic” variety of pluralism), Souriau’s perspective is characterized by the fact of being an “existential” pluralism, namely a pluralism of the “modes” (or “genres”) of existence. How many modes are there? In his original inquiry into being, Souriau introduces two different existential “cycles”: within the former, which aims at investigating the “ontic realm” starting from the phenomenon’s mode of being, he distinguishes three modes of existence “in aseity” (phenomenon, thing and soul) and “in abaliety” (imaginary, possible and virtual).