|
Home
Word
of the Day
Archives
Clever
Clue of the Month
The
Cruciverbalist
Links
Daily
Email
|
|
ETRE (EH-truh)
Existence Common
clues: Raison
d'_____; French 101 verb; Being in Bordeaux; To be, in Toulon;
Irregular French verb Crossword
puzzle frequency:
7 times a year Video: Raison
d'etre (Reason For Being)
As
far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to
kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being
~ Carl Jung, “Memories,
Dreams, Reflections”
In
philosophy, being is the object of study of metaphysics, and more
specifically ontology. In its most indeterminate sense, being
could be understood as anything that can be said to be, which is
opposed to nonexistence. For example one could ask: “why is
there something instead of nothing?” Where “something”
implies being. For a metaphysician the main problem is not the
scientific question of how the universe works, but why the
universe (or anything such as a rock) is.
As
speech utterances in the English language, questions such as the
above only have meaning if the utterer and the hearer both can
code and decode its words into concepts understood by both of
them, raising questions of how they acquired such understandings.
One is the concept of nothing. As nothing cannot be known by any
means or method it must mean, in the context of the question,
that a specific named object is present or not present in the
observer's experience of a set of objects, conditions for which
English uses "is" or "is not." The object
therefore cannot be the same, at least in language, as its being
present, as it may or may not be present. French Academy member
Étienne Gilson summarized this long-known characteristic
of the experienced world as follows:
"...the
word being is a noun ... it signifies either a being (that is,
the substance, nature, and essence of anything existent), or
being itself, a property common to all that which can rightly be
said to be. ... the same word is the present participle of the
verb 'to be.' As a verb, it no longer signifies something that
is, nor even existence in general, but rather the very act
whereby any given reality actually is, or exists. Let us call
this act a 'to be,' in contradistinction to what is commonly
called 'a being.' It appears at once that, at least to the mind,
the relation of 'to be' to 'being' is not a reciprocal one.
'Being' is conceivable, 'to be' is not. We cannot possibly
conceive an 'is' except as belonging to some thing that is, or
exists. But the reverse is not true. Being is quite conceivable
apart from actual existence; so much so that the very first and
the most universal of all the distinctions in the realm of being
is that which divides it into two classes, that of the real and
that of the possible."
Whether
or not an object is present in a set; that is, exists there as a
being, is based on universal experience or evidence of it.
Existing objects are present to the experience of anyone. It is a
legitimate goal therefore for philosophers of being to try to
find a principle or element – a "something" –
accounting for the presence of the object over the other
possibility, its non-presence. Instead, the philosopher
encounters a problem:
"Now,
if the 'to be' of a thing could be conceived apart from that
which exists, it should be represented in our mind by some note
distinct from the concept of the thing itself .... In point of
fact, it is not so. There is nothing we can add to a concept in
order to make it represent the object as existing; what happens
if we add anything to it is that it represents something else."
Where
being, the noun, is readily accessible to experience and
classifiable, being, the participle, is not:
"In
short ... philosophy may perhaps be able to tell us everything
about that which reality is, but nothing at all concerning this
not unimportant detail: the actual existence, or non-existence,
of what we call reality .... If he himself [the philosopher] did
not exist, he would not be there to ask questions about the
nature of reality ... on the other hand, this fundamental fact,
which we call existence, soon proves a rather barren topic for
philosophic speculation ... It certainly looks like a waste of
time to speculate about an object which is clearly recognized as
inconceivable"
This
is not a rejection of existence by Gilson, a leading modern
metaphysician in the classical tradition: "philosophers are
wholly justified in taking existence for granted ... and in never
mentioning it again ...." In Gilson's view, the participial
being is a given, a primitive of experience, not subject to proof
or investigation, as it is the grounds of proof. A thing must be
real, or exist, before anything true or proved can be said about
it.
However,
Gilson concedes some doubt on the possibility of being wrong:
"yet, this is taking a chance, for, after all, being itself
might happen not to be existentially neutral. In other words, it
is quite possible that actual existence may be ... an efficient
cause of observable effects ...." He then launches into a
history of attempts to conceptualize the inconceivable from the
ancient Greeks to the present. Some philosophers who have had
more noteworthy theories are Parmenides, Leucippus, Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, Plotinus, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Being"
|
|
|