Being: Encyclopedia II - Being - Being in historical philosophy

Being - Being in historical philosophy

Being - Being and substance in Aristotle

Among the first inquiries into what "being" encompassed was that undertaken by Aristotle. The term "substance" in Aristotle was a precise metaphysical term denoting an individual thing about which specific assertions may be made.

Since the Aristotelian view of matter is negative, the "substance" or "being" is a real thing that exists. Since matter renders things more obscure to our perception, it follows that the true essence of an object is independent of matter, its "being" is independent of the material world.

To Aristotle, only spirits and God are independent of matter, and thus these entities are purely "substance" or "being." This is the origin of the phrase "One in substance with the Father" or modernly "One in being with the Father" in the Catholic Nicene Creed.

Being - Being in continental philosophy and existentialism

Some philosophers deny that the concept of "being" has any meaning at all, since we only define an object's existence by its relation to other objects, and actions it undertakes. The term "I am" has no meaning by itself; it must have an action or relation appended to it. This in turn has led to the thought that "being" and nothingness are closely related, developed in existential philosophy.

Existentialist philosophers such as Sartre, as well as continental philosophers such as Hegel and Heidegger have also written extensively on the concept of being. Hegel distinguishes between the being of objects (being in itself) and the being of people (Geist (philosophy). Hegel, however, did not think there was much hope for deliniating a "meaning" of being, because being stripped of all predicates is simply nothing. Heidegger, in his quest to pioneer the path by which we might learn how to meaningfully ask the question of the meaning of being, distinguishes between different modes of being, which are present-to-hand (or objective presence - the kind of being possesed by objects), readiness-to-hand, which is the kind of being possessed by tools, and Da-sein ("there-being"), which is the kind of being possessed by the beings which we ourselves are. Sartre, popularly understood as mis-reading Heidegger (a reading supported by Heidegger's essay "Letter on Humanism" which responds to Sartre's famous address, "Existentialism is a Humanism"), employs modes of being in an attempt to ground his concept of freedom ontologically by distinguishing between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Being in historical philosophy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki