Being
(or Thing)
‘Being’ is supposed to express the most general
category under which all things fall. But Aristotle said (famously) that
‘being’ is said in many ways. In other words, there is no single kind or
category under which all other things fall. Rather, there are a number of
highest level (most general) categories, and ‘being’ can be said of each of them. For example, there is the
being of Substance, the being of Quantify, the being of Quality, and so on.
Each being is a fundamentally distinct kind of being. Strictly speaking, there
is nothing that all their members
have in common.
Aristotle was a smart guy, so when he says
something, I take what he says very seriously. But in this case, I think he
might have been misled by his use of language. Allow me to explain. Aristotle
uses language as a guide to ontology (that isn’t to say that was his only
guide, of course). For example, he noticed that we say of Socrates that he is a
Man. We say of Man, that it is an Animal. And we say of Socrates, that he is an
Animal. Thus, we notice that ‘is a’ expresses a transitive relation: if A is a
B, and B is a C, then A is a C. This leads to an awkward result when it comes
to saying what the highest level categories are. Substance, for example, is a category. But clearly Socrates isn’t a
category. Transitivity fails. So, it doesn’t make much sense to go higher up
than Substance.
But the mistake is in thinking that the transitive
relation expressed by ‘is a’ is exemplification rather than is a determinate of. When I say that
Socrates is a Man, ‘is a’ here expresses exemplification. But when I say that
Man is a Animal, ‘is a’ expresses is a determinate of.
It’s not true that Man exemplifies Animal (or being an animal). In other words,
is a is said two different ways! Man is
an Animal in the sense that Man entails Animal: or, necessarily everything that
is a Man is an Animal. But obviously Socrates isn’t Animal in that’s sense; it makes no sense to say
that necessarily, everything that is a Socrates is an Animal, for nothing could
be a Socrates. (Don’t be misled here by a third
sense of ‘is a’: we may say that Socrates is a Socrates just in the sense that
Socrates is identical to Socrates.)
So I suspect that Aristotle was misled into thinking that exemplification is a
transitive relation, which may have
contributed to his conviction that there is no highest level category under
which all things fall. I’m no Aristotle scholar, though. I’ll just say that I
don’t see a good reason from Aristotle to think that being is merely said in
many ways. (I’m very much open to correction on these points.)
Hume was also skeptical of there being a highest
category, but for him it was because we have no impression or direct awareness
of any feature or kind that everything shares in common. Philosophers these
days generally reject Hume’s empiricist condition on knowledge. But I’ll
explain in a moment why I’m inclined to think that if there is a common feature or kind that we grasp, then we should
be able to have direct awareness of it, though not necessarily by way of the
five senses.
Suppose there is such a thing as Being.
What is it? To say what it is I might cite an essential property that is unique
to it. For example, Being exemplifies the following
property: being the highest level category under which all things fall. The
trouble with this strategy is that I don’t believe anyone would grasp that property unless one already grasped
the meaning of ‘things’, and I don’t believe one would grasp that without already grasping the what
it is to be a Thing or Being in general. In other words, one would already have
to grasp Being itself before grasping this unique and
essential property of Being. I fear this generalizes for all unique and
essential properties we might come up with. We may grasp them alright, but only
because we already grasp Being.
The next strategy is to cite Being’s
essential parts and relationship to one another. For example, suppose Being =
being conscious or not conscious. Since everything is conscious or not
conscious, this disjunctive “property” expresses a general category under which
all things fall. I have a problem with this particular suggestion: Being seems
like it ought to be simpler than that. The same goes for the suggestion that
Being = standing in the exemplification relation. Although Being
may be necessarily co-extensive with standing
in the exemplification relation, this latter property strikes me more
complex than Being itself.
Peter van Inwagen proposed
to me that ‘Being’ names the property of being something such that it is
identical with it. One problem I have with this proposal is that I don’t know
what ‘it’ means in this context. See me answer to the Problem of Non-Selfexemplication.
It also strikes me as circular because it contains the word ‘something’. If I
knew what that meant, I think I’d
already know what ‘Being’ was supposed to mean.
That leaves just one possible strategy left that I
know of: point our mind’s eye directly to Being
itself. How might one do that? Here’s how. Consider triplets of things. You know: the book, the pencil, and the laptop
are together three. Now, consider
pairs of things. Ok, now consider singles.
I’ve just pointed your mind’s eye to the quantity, One. I believe this quantity
to be a simple property that everything has, and it’s a property we are
directly aware of when we are aware of anything. The property is so plain and
obvious to us that it’s hard to identify it without comparing it to other
properties of its same kind, namely Quantity. Thus,
I propose that Being = One. Each and every thing exemplifies One (or oneness,
or being one). So, Being is the same as the quantity,
One (oneness, or being one). I’ve pointed your mind’s eye to Being
by pointing your mind’s eye to the property, being one. That is, I’ve brought
our minds into direct awareness of Being itself.
I’ll end on a theological note. Some have thought
that Being is itself God. The idea was especially popular in the Middle
Ages, but some contemporary Thomists seem to hold it
(e.g., Barry Miller). I confess that I find that view hard to swallow (to say
the least). Being is a property that
everything exemplifies, but surely God is not a property. In my understanding,
God, if it exists, is a concrete
mental substance that is at the causal foundation of all other concrete
substances and whose essential attributes—e.g.,
knowledge, power, and goodness—are maximal in their degrees. So, Being is not God. Rather, Being is
Oneness, which everything, including God, exemplifies.