⁂ Concepts · Being · No. 1
Being

Lal Bihari's case: a man present in the office, absent from the record.

Being

Existence considered in itself, rather than the study of any particular thing that exists.

Theme
Being and reality
Tradition
Greek
Term
τὸ ὄν · to on
Term fixed
c. 475 BC

In plain terms

Every other question is about some particular thing - what it is made of, what it does, how long it lasts. Being is the question left over when you stop asking about particular things and ask instead what it is for anything at all to be.

It sounds like a question with no content, and that suspicion is old and reasonable. But notice that existing is not one of a thing's features. You can describe a chair completely - its height, its weight, its colour, its cost - and nothing in that description tells you whether there is such a chair. Existence is not another item on the list.

So there is something that every existing thing has in common, which is not any of its properties. Whether that something can be investigated, or whether the word simply has no work to do, is the argument.

As a philosopher would put it

Being is the subject of ontology, and the difficulty is that it resists the treatment every other subject accepts. It is not a genus, since a genus is divided by differences and any difference would itself have to be; it is not a property, since Kant's objection in the Critique of Pure Reason is that existence adds nothing to a concept - a hundred real thalers contain no more than a hundred possible ones.

Parmenides set the terms by arguing that what is cannot not be, and therefore cannot come to be, change or perish, which makes the world of appearance a report we cannot trust. Aristotle's reply, that being is said in many ways, is the move most later work depends on: substance, quality, quantity and the rest are all cases of being, related to the primary case rather than to a single meaning.

Heidegger's charge in Being and Time is that the tradition took the question and answered a different one. It described beings, exhaustively, and let the question of what being itself means fall out of view - the forgetting of being, which he takes to run from Plato to the present.

Where you meet it

In 1976 a man from Uttar Pradesh named Lal Bihari went to apply for a bank loan and was told he was dead. An uncle had bribed a clerk to register his death and inherit his land. The paperwork was in order, so officially it stayed that way for eighteen years.

He was standing in the office. Nobody disputed that he was standing in the office. What he could not do was vote, hold land, open an account or be a party to a case, because the record - the only thing the state consults - said he did not exist. He added the word mritak, deceased, to his own name, and eventually founded an association of others in the same position.

The case shows what the argument is about and what it is not. Nothing the register did or failed to do added anything to the man or took anything away. Being counted is a property, and it can be given and withdrawn. Being is not, and that is exactly why it is so hard to say anything about.

What is actually disputed

Whether there is a question here at all.

Carnap's position, and the logical positivists' generally, is that sentences about being as such are not false but meaningless: they cannot be verified, and the appearance of depth comes from a grammatical accident by which a verb is treated as a noun. Quine narrowed the question to something answerable - to be is to be the value of a bound variable - which makes ontology a matter of what our best theories quantify over and closes the older enquiry rather than settling it.

Against that, Heidegger holds that the question is the one that matters and that its apparent emptiness is the symptom of having lost it. Aquinas and the medieval tradition hold something different again: that being is not empty but the most concentrated of subjects, and that the difficulty is ours rather than the subject's.

Commonly confused with

  • Existence c. 1020 Existence is that a particular thing is; being is what it is for anything to be at all. English blurs them and most other languages do not.
  • the soul Being is not a spiritual matter and nothing about it is religious, though a great deal of theology has been written in its vocabulary.

Defined against

  • Nothingness The pair Parmenides refused to allow, and the pair the question needs
  • Becoming Whether what is can also change is the first fight in the subject

Philosophers

  • Parmenides of Elea Made being a subject, and drew conclusions the senses cannot accept
  • Aristotle Being is said in many ways - the reply the tradition ran on
  • Martin Heidegger The charge that the question was forgotten rather than answered
  • Immanuel Kant Existence is not a predicate, and the ontological argument fails with it

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Existence c. 1020 · Essence c. 330 BC · Substance c. 330 BC · Becoming c. 500 BC · Nothingness c. 475 BC

Parmenides made being a subject rather than a background, around 475 BC; Aristotle named the enquiry first philosophy and Heidegger reopened it in 1927 on the grounds that it had been forgotten.