Being

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BEING

Philosophy proceeds in part by the asking of large, imprecise, and overgeneral questions. In the attempt to answer them, the questions themselves come to be reformulated with greater clarity, and one large question often comes to be replaced by several smaller ones. The history of pre-Socratic philosophy is the best example of this process, and Being first appeared on the philosophical scene as part of it. To the question "What is Being?" the Parmenidean answer that there is Being and nothing else besides Being appears to have the merit of truth, even if it is tautological truth. What is, is; and what is not, is not. But what Parmenides' question in fact contains is a nontautological demand for the characteristics of what is, to which the answer that Being is one, unchanging, and eternal is appropriate. Since the objects we perceive are many, changing, and transient, they do not belong to the realm of Being. Parmenides thus fathered in broad outline a doctrine of Being from which philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and John Dewey have tried to rescue us. This is the doctrine that Being is a name.

"Being" as a Name

"Being" may be thought to name a property possessed by everything that is. Or it may be thought to name an object or a realm beyond, above, or behind the objects of the physical world; in this case, physical objects somehow exist by virtue of their relationship to "Being." Or again, "Being" may be the name of the genus to which everything that is belongs in virtue of the possession of the property of Being or of standing in relation to Being. The doctrine that "Being" is a name implies some kind of dualism, according to which the realm of Being is contrasted with that of the merely phenomenal. Variations on this doctrine are general enough to be put to a number of different uses in the attempt to solve quite different problems. Nevertheless, the basic doctrine is founded on a false assumption, for it obscures the facts that the verb "to be" has a number of different uses and that in its central and commonest use it does not ascribe a property, a relation, or class membership in any way. "Being" is normally a participle, not a noun. To break with normal usage without special justification is to be gratuitously liable to confusion. We can investigate the type of confusion generated by the acceptance of "Being" as a name, and also the type of clarification that came to be needed, by considering what Plato and Aristotle make of Being.

Plato and Aristotle

Plato was anxious to mark the distinction between properties and objects that possess properties. He located the former in the realm of Being and the latter in the realm of the transient. One reason for this distinction was that Plato accepted the identification of Being with the unchanging (in this case, the unchanging meanings of predicate, the Forms). As a consequence, he was forced to deny that physical objects "are"—they belong to a stage intermediate between Being and Not-Being, that of becoming. This is not the only paradox in Plato's analysis of the subject: The Form of the Good, which exists at a higher level than that of the other Forms, cannot just "be," either; it must exist "beyond being."

Thus, we can see in Plato one of the characteristic results of treating Being as either a special kind of object or a special kind of attribute, namely, that all sorts of ordinary uses of the verb "to be" must be qualified or rewritten. The outcome of the attempt to make what is mystifying clear is to make what was clear mystifying. The author who first attacked this kind of mystification was, of course, Plato himself. In the Sophist, the problem of negative judgment is handled in such a way that it is no longer possible to make Parmenides' mistake of supposing that when one speaks of what is not, one is speaking of what does not exist. Moreover, it is scarcely proper to speak casually of confusion and mistake at this stage in the development of philosophy. The first steps toward producing a logical grammar of the verb "to be" perhaps necessarily involved assimilating the different senses and uses of the words, and of consequently becoming caught up in paradox and learning how to free oneself. When Aristotle, in Book I of the Metaphysics, clarified earlier errors, he was able to do so only because he had learned from the efforts and missteps of Parmenides and Plato.

Aristotle made three crucial points about the study of Being as Being. The first is that the special sciences may make use of the concept of Being and of other similar fundamental concepts, but these concepts are not the objects of their inquiries—only philosophy has such fundamental concepts as the proper object of its studies. The second point is that to inquire about Being as Being is to attempt to isolate the unifying strand of meaning in the multifarious senses in which the word "is" is used. The third point is that this inquiry can be carried on only as an inquiry into a whole range of closely related fundamental concepts, in which the different species of cause and the notions of unity and plurality are foremost.

Aristotle recognized that we use "is" to deny as well as to affirm, and to ascribe properties as well as to ascribe existence; and in various passages he makes use of these distinctions to clarify conceptual points. He recognized, as did the Scholastics, that in ascribing properties to a subject we sometimes imply the existence of that subject and we sometimes do not. But in his willingness to recognize the diversity of uses of "is," Aristotle almost too easily accepted the view that we can speak of abstract entities as well as of physical objects without allowing the former "separate" existence. Aristotle said very little, in fact, about the common thread that binds together the various uses of "is."

Scholastic Philosophers

The non-Aristotelian medieval writers who insisted on a single meaning for "is" unintentionally provided a reductio ad absurdum proof of the correctness of the Aristotelian approach. Both nominalists and realists, at least in their extreme and consistent versions, asserted that properties and objects exist in the same way: properties for the nominalists were merely collections of objects, and objects for the realists were merely properties of properties. For the nominalist Eric of Auxerre, "Being" was simply the collective name of all the individuals that exist taken together and was logically equivalent to "this and this and this …," while for the realist Odo of Tournai, individuals were accidents of properties that are substances, and the realm of Being was a realm only of properties.

Abelard to some extent reasserted the Aristotelian distinctions (and suggested some new ones of his own), but it was Thomas Aquinas who returned to the pure Aristotelian tradition. Thomas refuted once again the view that Being can be either a genus or a property.

In his Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Thomas diagnosed Parmenides' mistake and applied his conceptual insights to related problems, notably in his refutation of Anselm's Ontological Argument. But Thomas's position necessarily has a complexity lacking in some other writers who have been equally careful, for although he could not accept Anselm's view that to know what God is is to know that he is, he also could not reject the identification of God's Being with his essence. According to Thomas, with all finite creatures it is the case that what they are—their essence—is one thing, and that they are—their existence—is another. But God simply is Being—Esse Ipsum Subsistens. Because this is so, Thomas was obliged to agree with Anselm that if God exists, he exists necessarily. But from this it does not follow that God does exist. That there is such a being, who is Being, is shown, according to Thomas, by a posteriori proofs. And of course in Thomist terms it is improper to think of God as just a being, one entity among others. The difficulty here, however, is derived from difficulties that are implicit in the notion of the God of monotheism and not from difficulties in the notion of Being itself.

Central Questions

We are now in a position to discriminate different kinds of questions about Being raised by the Greeks and the Scholastics.

is existence a predicate?

How should we characterize the difference between ascribing existence to a subject and ascribing a property to a subject? Is "is" ever a predicate? If it is, what sort of predicate? Later writers who have discussed this problem include René Descartes, in his version of the Ontological Proof; Gottlob Frege, with his clarification of the nature of predicates; G. E. Moore, with his argument that "existence" is not a predicate because we cannot, for example, significantly replace "growl" with "exist" in all the quantified and negated forms of "Tame tigers growl"; and W. V. Quine, with his analysis of Being as "to be is to be the value of a variable." This list of names points up the fact that these questions are susceptible of solution only within the philosophy of logic, and the solution depends upon an adequate characterization of names, predicates, variables, functions, and so on. It is also clear that it is of primary importance to discriminate the metaphysically noncommittal "is," formalizable by means of the existential quantifier, from other uses of the verb "to be" that are far more committed in their implications. Noncommittal uses of the verb appear in ordinary language in such expressions as "There is a prime number between six and eight," "There are three basic colors," "There is a mountain more than 29,000 feet high." Other uses of the verb "to be," however, are far more committed. For example, in the statement "Rachel wept for her children because they were not," "to be" is equivalent to "to be alive." Clearly, however, if I say "There is such-and-such a prime number," there is no such implication; hence, this sense of "there is" must be different.

One finds that all analyses of existential assertions that treat them as predicative are generally unsatisfactory. Briefly, the reason for this is that predicates refer to properties, and properties are what discriminate individuals from each other and enable us to pick out similarities and dissimilarities, and hence to classify. But Being cannot be a property in this sense, for it is not something that it is logically possible for two objects either to have or not to have in common. Two objects cannot be said to resemble each other in virtue of their both being, and since existence is not a shared property, it cannot characterize a class of objects. For this reason, Being can be neither a property nor a genus.

Of course some philosophers—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, for example—have talked as though Being were a property shared by actual objects but not possessed by possibilia. There is no objection to talking like this, provided that it is noticed that the word property is not now being used to refer to distinguishable characteristics of real things. Hence, the assertion by such philosophers that Being is a property is not compatible with the Thomas Aquinas–Moore view that it is not, given the two different senses in which the word is used.

abstract entities

How do we characterize the status of abstract entities, numbers, possibilities, fictions? These are all different problems, each of them complex. They are envisaged as part of the problem of Being, partly because of our ordinary use of "There is/are" in, for example, "There are two possibilities" or "There is a prime number between six and eight," and partly because of a misunderstanding involved in describing certain possibilities by such terms as "real." When we apply the adjective "real" both to possible states of affairs and to actual states, we suggest that there is a realm of reality wider than the merely existent. This is one source of the belief that there is a genus Being, of which the existent and the nonexistent (such as the possible) are species. Everything called real belongs to the realm of Being. The mistake lies in not seeing the difference between the way in which "real" functions as an adjective and the way in which "reality" functions as a noun. If I call a dollar bill real, I contrast "real" with "counterfeit." If I call a painting "a real Vermeer," I contrast it with a copy. But I do not ascribe to dollar bill and painting the common property of "being real," in virtue of which they belong to the same realm, that of "reality." To say that there is a kind of Being in which both what exists and what does not exist can share is obviously to commit the same mistake. But at this point we have returned to the question of whether Existence and Being can be properties, which belongs to our first group of questions.

the characterization of being-as-such

Can we find any characteristic that belongs to everything that is and that may therefore be said to characterize Being-as-such, rather than individual objects? Here again, one must distinguish two kinds of questions. Aristotle pointed out that of any object whose existence I affirm, I shall also be able to say that it is one, that it is an object. That is, by picking out something for the purpose of saying that it is, or that it is such and such, I pick it out as an individual. But just because this is so, individuality or unity is not something that it is logically possible for a given object to possess or not to possess any more than existence is; hence, they are not properties any more than existence is. The Aristotelian question of what concepts must be applicable to anything that exists must not, therefore, be identified with the question of whether there are any properties that belong to everything that exists.

There might, of course, have been some property that belonged to everything that existed just as a matter of contingent fact. The world might have been such that everything was green or cubic, or made of blancmange. But this would be philosophically uninteresting (quite apart from the fact that in most such worlds there would be no philosophers). It has been held, however, that it is necessary on, for example, metaphysically epistemological grounds that everything that is shall be of a certain character. Hence Plato's view in his middle period that only Forms exist, and hence Leibniz's view that there are only monads, and George Berkeley's view that to be is always either to be percipient or to be perceived.

absolute being

Is there a being who exists without the limitations of finite beings and who may therefore just be said to be? This is the question of God's existence.

realm of being-as-such

Is there—beyond, over, and above the being of individual objects—a realm of Being-as-such? If so, what is its character? The belief that there is such a realm has always haunted metaphysics. The notion that Aristotle held such a belief has pervaded the history of metaphysics. This misinterpretation of Aristotle has similarly been foisted upon Thomas, and a neo-Thomist myth of the history of philosophy has been constructed in which the four questions that have already been distinguished, all of which are genuine questions, are merged into this fifth question, whose character is much more dubious. It then becomes possible to suggest that there is a single problem: "What is Being?" to which different philosophers have given rival answers. The kind of metaphysics to which reference is being made can be found in Jacques Maritain's Preface to Metaphysics, where Maritain is ostensibly expounding Thomas. In order to treat Being as a subject matter, however, Maritain invokes what he calls the intuition of Being, a notion that cannot be found anywhere in Thomas. Thomas, as we have already seen, never treated "Being" as the name of an independent subject matter and thus had no reason to suggest any means of becoming aware of the existence of such a subject matter.

The kind of history of metaphysics to which reference is being made can be found in D. A. Drennan's A Modern Introduction to Metaphysics, which asserts that to the question "What is Being?" Parmenides replied that it was One; Plato, that it was One and Many; Aristotle, that it was Substance; Descartes, that it was Substance in the modes of thought and extension; and so on. Nevertheless, an awareness of the nonexistence of the single question of Being rids us of the misleading idea that we have here a set of competing answers to a single question.

The temptation to see the history of metaphysics in this light seems often to be provoked by an espousal of the metaphysics that makes "Being" a name. We can illustrate this point by considering two sequences in the history of modern philosophy. Hegel argued that Being is the most fundamental of concepts because the most elementary forms of judgment must involve some assertion of existence, no matter how bare. But, he continued, the notion of Being by itself is the emptiest of all notions. Merely to say of something that it is, is to say nothing at all about it; hence, the notion of Being merges into that of its apparent opposite, Nothing. It is not necessary to follow through the Hegelian scheme of categories to see that Hegel is, in fact, extremely cautious at this point. His extreme antidualism always led him to assert that there is nothing else beyond what we confront in experience. The Hegelian Absolute is the rational culmination of historical experience, not a power beyond and outside it. Similarly, for Hegel, Being is a concept expressed in our judgments of experience at a certain level, not the name of a realm beyond all judgments about experience.

In Nicolai Hartmann's philosophy, however, we find a misreading of Hegel parallel to the neo-Scholastic misreading of Thomas and Aristotle. In Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, Hartmann begins by stating a set of antinomies between, for example, the nature of consciousness as consciousness of what is other than itself and the nature of consciousness as self-contained, so that whatever consciousness is aware of is part of consciousness. That is, Hartmann describes consciousness in two ways that appear incompatible and then inquires how he may reconcile these two descriptions. Instead of asking whether the incompatibility is perhaps only apparent, however, he suggests that the problem arises, and is soluble, because both the knowing, conscious subject and the known object exemplify modes of Being, although different modes. Clearly, it is true that both knower and known are, but equally clearly—for reasons given earlier—this is not a property that is open to further study and that has strange characteristics that enable us to resolve antinomies. This, however, was Hartmann's conclusion, and he attributed it to Hegel. He merged Hegel's classification of different subject matters and his scheme of concepts in order to read him as a metaphysician who understood Being as having different grades and modes.

Just as Maritain misreads Thomas and Hartmann misreads Hegel, so Martin Heidegger has misread the pre-Socratics. Heidegger's own views have a mixed ancestry. Søren Kierkegaard, one of the important influences on him, in the Concept of Dread writes of dread as an experience whose object is Nothing. Usually in Kierkegaard this sort of statement appears to be a dramatically effective and logically innocent way of characterizing dread as objectless, but at times it seems as if Kierkegaard is no longer saying that dread has no object. Rather, he gives it a particular object whose name is "Nothing," thus making—but not as a joke—the mistake of the Red King in Through the Looking-Glass, who thought that if Nobody had passed the messenger on the road, Nobody should have arrived first. To treat "Nothing" as a name is like treating "Something" as a name and easily becomes a counterpart to treating "Being" as a name, as it does with Heidegger. Heidegger takes up Leibniz's question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" He objects that this question does not take seriously the fact that Being and Nothing necessarily exist together as contrasted and opposed powers. Heidegger allows that he is using "Being" and "Nothing" as names and is therefore involved in treating "Nothing" as if it were the name of something. He even allows that this is "unscientific," but he concludes that this is so much the worse for science and so much the better for philosophy and poetry. Being and Nothing are not objects, and Being is indeed sharply contrasted with beings. Logic presupposes Being and Nothing, but they lie beyond the grasp of logic. Heidegger treats what others have written of the indeterminateness of the concepts as evidence of the elusiveness of Being and Nothing.

Heidegger extends his metaphysics into the history of philosophy by finding his views anticipated in the thought of Heraclitus and Parmenides. The evidence for this claim depends partly on a set of unreliable etymologies that Heidegger thinks he has found for key Greek words, but even when Heidegger is plausible in his interpretation at the linguistic level, he is at the least anachronistic in his view of the kind of problem the pre-Socratics confronted. They progressively recognized as paradoxical, and therefore as needing reformulation, those very forms of utterance that to Heidegger are and remain fundamental.

If the philosophy of Being has bred not merely rival doctrines but rival views of the history of philosophy, it has also bred rival diagnoses of the errors involved in treating "Being" as a noun. A. J. Ayer has suggested that a misuse of the verb "to be" is the root of the error. This would imply, however, that standard forms of grammar embodied in ordinary usage are somehow philosophically normative—and this appears to get matters upside down. Linguistic distortion is certainly liable to breed confusion, but there is, in fact, nothing grammatically wrong with forming a verbal noun such as "Being" as an analogy with, for example, "riding." "Riding" is used as the name of an activity; why, then, should "Being" not be made into a name? It is surely because of the logical and metaphysical confusion involved that we want to criticize the linguistic construction and not because the linguistic construction itself is an error.

John Dewey diagnosed a twofold root of errors about Being. They are partly a survival from religious modes of thought, the retention of belief in a realm free from change and decay and separate from the realm of sense perception. This is explained by the fact that although mythological thought has been discredited, the impulses behind it still need satisfaction. Also, belief in changeless Being is a consequence of man's habit of abstracting truths from the contexts of practice and activity in which they were acquired (and where alone they have meaning) and treating them instead as belonging to a timeless realm in which they wait upon our apprehension. Dewey's diagnosis, however, while it may explain how we come to hold and retain confused views of Being, does not embody an explanation of why the views are confused, except perhaps to those who are already convinced in general of the truth of Dewey's pragmatism.

In order to clarify the issue, we must, in fact, make the sort of analysis of concepts that Aristotle used in the Metaphysics. We may expect any analysis of the concept of Being to vary with the general framework of concepts within which it is considered. Aristotelians, Hegelians, and Quineans will not all agree, but any analysis that fails to discriminate the different questions involved, and that fails to identify the confusion that results from merging them into a single question, will be doomed to conceptual error and very likely to a misreading of the history of philosophy as well.

Bibliography

texts

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by H. Tredennick. Cambridge, MA, 1945.

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Edited by W. D. Ross. Oxford translation. Oxford, 1948.

Cajetan. Commentaria in De Ente et Essentia. Edited by M. H. Laurent. Turin, 1934.

Cornford, F. M. Plato and Parmenides. London, 1935; New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957. A translation of the Parmenides.

Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty. New York: Minton, Balch, 1929.

Duns Scotus. Opera Omnia, 12 vols. Paris, 1891–1895. Vol. III, Quaestiones Subtillissimae Super Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis.

Hartmann, Nicolai. Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1925.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Science of Logic. Translated by W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers. New York, 1929.

Heidegger, Martin. Existence and Being. Translated by D. Scott, R. Hall, and A. Crick. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1949. Includes various works.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1934.

Kirk, G. S., and J. E. Raven, eds. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge, 1960. Ch. 10, Parmenides texts. Also contains translation and commentary.

Plato. Platonis Opera. Edited by J. Burnet. Oxford, 1899–1906. The Theaetetus and the Sophist. Translated by F. M. Cornford as Plato's Theory of Knowledge. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935; New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957.

Quine, W. V. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA, 1953.

Thomas Aquinas. De Ente et Essentia. Edited by M. D. Roland-Gosselin. Le Saulchoir, 1926. Translated by Armand Maurer as On Being and Essence. Toronto, 1949.

Thomas Aquinas. In Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Commentaria. Edited by M. R. Cathala. Turin, 1935.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Ottawa, 1941–1945. Translated by the Dominican Fathers of the English Province, 3 vols. New York: Benziger, 1947.

Wolff, Christian von. Philosophia Prima Sive Ontologia. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Officina libraria Rengeriana, 1736.

discussions of texts

Gilson, Étienne. L'Ètre et l'essence. Paris: J. Vrin, 1947.

Gilson, Étienne. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949.

Martin, Gottfried. Immanuel Kant: Ontologie und Wissenschaftstheorie. Cologne: University of Cologne, 1951. Translated by P. G. Lucas as Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1955.

Owens, Joseph. The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1951.