Being And Time: The Ontological Tradition

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The Presocratic philosopher Parmenides struggled with the Greek verb ἐστί (esti) which means “it is.” If I say “the unicorn is white” am I saying that there is a unicorn that exists? Or that a creature of my imagination is white? For the Greeks this sentence was ambiguous and there was not yet a clear distinction made in the language between an existential understanding (a being is) and a predicative understanding (a being has the property of whiteness). What complicated matters further was that if someone said “it is not” this seemed to cause a contradiction because you were saying something was before going on to say that it wasn’t. As a result, Parmenides argued that we can only think of what is and must avoid thinking about what is not. He went on to say that change and motion are impossible. His student Zeno invented humorous thought puzzles where swift-footed Achilles can never catch up to a slow-moving tortoise. But that’s a story for another time.

These thoughts on “is” and “is not” provide the context for why the unnamed visitor from Elea expresses confusion about the word “being.” Plato theorized that particular beings in the world had their cause in transcendental Forms from which copies of beings were created. For every type of being there is a form. Picture one of those rubber stamps that you cover with ink and then stamp out dozens of impressions on a piece of paper. There were stamps for trees, rocks, water, dogs and cats, beds, numbers, even one for human beings.

Aristotle rejects this idea with a humorous criticism:

[Plato teaches that] “corresponding to each thing there is a synonymous entity apart from the substances… both in our everyday world and in the realm of eternal entities…. [It’s] as though a man who wishes to count things should suppose that it would be impossible when they are few, and should attempt to count them when he has added to them” (Aristotle 990a).

In other words, if our explanation of beings involves postulating more transcendental beings, all we’ve succeeded in doing is doubling the number of beings now in need of explanation.

Aristotle will arrive at a different theory of being. He argues that the essence of a thing is “the primary cause of its existence” (Aristotle 1041b). The acorn causes the oak tree to be. Biological parents cause their offspring to be. Each effect is preceded by a cause which in turn is preceded by other causes and effects. But surely these causes can’t go back forever? There must have been a primary cause. This primary cause Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover, a causeless cause that kick-started the whole chain of events. This is the “god of the philosophers,” a single changeless eternal Being that is the ground of all being.

Aristotle’s way of looking at being will make its way into Neoplatonism and then early Christianity. It reaches a sort of maturity in the medieval period as the vertical “great chain of being” with plants and rocks at the bottom, animals and humans somewhere in the middle, all the way up to angels and God at the top. The medieval period still accepts the Greek view in which the soul is an immaterial substance bound to the material body and released from the body at death.

In his Meditations, Rene Descartes walks through a thought experiment to argue that the essence of our being is that of a thinking subject. He famously declares “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum). In doing so, his substance dualism equates the immaterial soul with the mind. From now on we tend to see our essence as an immaterial mental subject, one-step removed from, and gazing out at the material world of objects around us. This way of looking at our being comes to dominate the tradition. And it is what Heidegger wishes to destroy.

Next Post in Series: Destruction (forthcoming)

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