How do we prove our existence? The question may seem frivolous as this is something that needs no proof except when you ask yourself simple questions such as, ‘How do we know this existence is not a dream?’ ‘Can I prove you exist and are not in my imagination?’
The idea and the attempts to prove we do exist from pure logic occupied many thinkers through the seventeenth centuries to our own day, and they came up with some very innovative answers. Using nothing but logic we had the idea that thoughts exist and since thoughts and the question, came about within a mind the mind exists and by extension the body that surrounds the mind. Another was that we exist in god’s mind and that necessitates life itself.
Most philosophers came to the same conclusions, that somehow god was involved in much of this, except one. One isolated, sometime excommunicated, struggling philosopher who concerned himself with how we gain knowledge in the first place. Spinoza simply analysed our existence pointing out that no matter how we conceive of our life, or who we give credit to for it, everything comes to us through our senses and they are deriving everything through nature around us (nature in the widest possible sense of the universe).
We cannot know anything nature does not already (without logic) know. We cannot discover anything nature does not allow to be discovered. Spinoza pointed out that to all intents and purposes god and nature are one and the same. So are we. Whatever god may be, whatever nature is, we cannot be divided off from them by so much as a hair’s breadth.