Being, Essence, and Existence by John Smithin

(Notes for the Philosophy Cafe, December 14, 2024)

1.  Let’s start with a quote from Armand Maurer (1968, 7):

Throughout …  the history of western philosophy – from Parmenides to Heidegger – metaphysicians have tried to fathom the meaning of being. What does it mean to be or to exist? This is both the easiest and most difficult question to answer. Who can fail to know the existence or non-existence of the things he experiences …

 [THE ANSWER TO THAT IS … THE VAST MAJORITY OF PHILOSOPHERS!]

… At the same time who would claim to have plumbed the depth of the meaning of existence?  

[THE ANSWER TO THAT IS … A METAPHYSICAL REALIST!)

I think that Maurer should also have mentioned Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). In any event he goes on to say:

It is perhaps understandable that some modern philosophers have given up the inquiry into being …

Here’s the thing though - Aristotle thought that metaphysics was:

 … a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature …

But Heidegger’s book Being and Time (1927) was hailed as the ‘Destruktion of Metaphysics’, and the end of ‘foundationalism’. Also, I would say that Heidegger’s attempted ‘Destruktion’ was nothing new, even one hundred years ago. In the 18th century, both Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant had already made similar sort of comments about the end of metaphysics or, at least, serious problems with metaphysics that needed to be resolved. The distrust of metaphysics is perennial.

2.  Heidegger presumably thought that he had delivered the coup de grace, but was this so? Maybe what was going on was something like the process described by Etienne Gilson (1952, 1):

After defining metaphysics …  Aristotle was careful to add … ‘this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences, for none of the others deals with … being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attributes of this part’…

Gilson continues:

To cut off a part of being and to investigate … [its] … attributes … is a … legitimate undertaking … it is … one of the special sciences. But to invest any … part of being with the attributes of being itself …  to investigate the whole from the point of view of … [a part] … involves a contradiction. Anybody who attempts it is bound … to fail. When he fails, he … will probably blame his failure on metaphysics itself … [and] … conclude that metaphysics is a pseudo-science …

Gilson (1952, 154) was trying to promote the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas (he was a twentieth century Thomist). Here is what he (Gilson) said on the specific topic of being:

It may seem strange, and almost preposterous, to look back to the thirteenth century … [THAT IS, TO AQUINAS] … for a complete metaphysical interpretation of being … [in] … which neither essence nor existence is … irrelevant … Yet, such a return is unavoidable … all other philosophies have advocated either a metaphysics of being minus existence or a phenomenology of existence minus being.

A metaphysics of being minus existence was what had been offered by the Ancients, most of the Scholastics (other than Aquinas), and by the Moderns. The Existentialists of the twentieth century offered a phenomenology of existence minus being (phenomenology being a concept derived from Husserl). This however – unsurprisingly - led to Nausea (the title of one of Sartre’s novels), anguish, absurdity, despair, and so on.

3.  Maybe we don’t have to go all the way back to the thirteenth century. In the twenty-first century there has been a ‘Realist Turn’, as described by Rasmussen & Den Uyl (2020) in a book from 2020. However, if we are to understand the argument, and suggest Metaphysical Realism as an attractive option, it will be necessary to clarify in more detail what philosophers have meant by such terms as Being, Essence, and Existence.

4.  The obvious place to start is with the meaning of the word ‘being’ itself. There are two uses of the word in the English language (and most other Indo-European languages). The first is as a noun, we can speak of a ‘human being’, or ‘being’ itself. The second is as a verb, the present participle of the verb ‘to be’. This is a source of confusion. In the first sense being is a thing, in the second it is an action. One mistake that philosophers have made, over the centuries, is to pick up on one or other of them, ignoring the alternative meaning. This is not good. We need take account of both senses of the term.

5.  We can also think about different senses of the word ‘is’. ‘Is’ is the third person singular of the verb ‘to be’. We can say, for example, that ‘Socrates is a man’. Here are we are talking about (what mediaeval philosophers called) the ‘quiddity’, or ‘whatness’, of Socrates – the kind of thing that Socrates is. This is the basic idea of what came to be called Essence. Socrates is ‘Some Thing’. On the other hand, we could also simply say that ‘Socrates is’, with only two words in the sentence. We might fancy it up a bit by saying that ‘Socrates is Being’, but this is redundant. What is at stake now is Existence itself. These term Essence is also connected linguistically with the verb ‘to be’, esse in Latin. Existence, presumably, derives from the Latin existentia.

6.  The most natural way to think about being, surely, is that it must possess both quiddity and existence. A being should exist, and it should be something. But, philosophers though the ages, with few exceptions, seem to have missed this. How did this come about? It goes all the way back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Parmenides (515–450 BC) and Heraclitus (c. 500 BC), who each took extreme and opposite metaphysical positions. These were, roughly, on the one hand that nothing ever changes (Parmenides) and, on the other, that everything is always in flux (Heraclitus) - with the implication that nothing much can be said about anything. I am sure that the natural reaction (again) to this is that both are wrong. But, philosophers, from the beginning, have never been able to sort this out satisfactorily. The way that Gilson (1952, 6) puts it is that:

… (T)he most fundamental need of the human mind …

seems to be to reduce explanations of reality to just one thing, or one cause. The ancient Greeks, for example, had this idea of four different elements, earth, air, fire, and water. But, even before the time of Heraclitus and Parmenides, there were theories which tried to reduce everything to just one of them, to water, to air, or to fire, etc. This does not work - for obvious reasons. Parmenides therefore decided that being itself was the one thing that ‘Every Thing’ must have in common. Having taken this step, however, it seems inevitable that he would proceed directly to one of the two metaphysical extremes. To quote directly from Parmenides (following Gilson):

… it is necessary that being either is absolutely or is not … 

But, if so, what happens to all the (actual) beings that are in existence at any point in time? They must have somehow ‘come into being’ at one point (implying that they ‘were not’ before), then they fade away, they are born, then they die, and so on. According to Parmenides, however, being just goes on for ever.

7.  We are all familiar with the way the later Christians solved the problem. Yes, they would say, people are indeed born, and then they die, but these individuals are just a composite. They are not ‘really real’ in some sense. They are composed of a material thing called a body, and an immaterial thing called a soul, the latter of which is eternal. When the body dies, the soul just goes on its merry way. Even the body does not disappear entirely, it can always be re-cycled, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. BUT all this radically devalues our own actual day-to-day existence and being, which is the only existence we know of. Gilson (1952, 9-10), the Christian, does clearly see the problem that this poses for the pagan Parmenides, and for most of subsequent philosophy, Christian or otherwise:

If we call existence that definite mode of being which belongs to the world of change … as … given in sensible experience it … becomes obvious that there is a considerable difference between to be and to exist. That which exists is not … that which is does not exist. From the … beginning of Western thought, it … appears that if being truly is, nothing should exist … there is nothing in being, as such, to account for the fact of existence.  If there is such a thing as existence, either it … [is] … kept side-by-side with being, as something wholly unrelated … or else it will … pass as what modern existentialists say … a ‘disease’ of being.

Western philosophy took up this idea and ran with it. There is some supposed to be some kind of theoretical blueprint, somewhere (the ‘Essence’), of what it means to be a human, or a horse, or a tree, or a stone. And this blueprint is what is ‘really real’. It is unchanging, and perfect. Compared to this, actual existence, including our own existence, does not add very much.

8.  It was Plato (428–348 BC) who coined the term ‘really real’ and had various names for the blueprint such as the Idea, the Form, and so on. Plotinus (204-270 AD), the archetypal ‘neo-Platonist’, continued this line of thought some centuries later, and it was transmitted to the Mediaeval Scholastics (other than Aquinas) as the ‘Problem of Universals’. Aristotle himself (384-322 BC) was ambiguous on the issue. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant came up with the notion of the ‘Noumenon’, or ‘thing-in-itself’. Kant was the key figure in the so-called ‘Critique of Knowledge’. According to Kant there is indeed a (sort of) reality (the Noumenon) which is there behind the scenes, so to speak (somehow outside space and time), but humans can never have full access to it – they cannot really know it. This harks all the way back to the ideas of Parmenides and Plato.

9. It is no wonder that Heidegger and the Existentialists would eventually reject this whole line of reasoning. Their own response, however, that of being as a ‘disease’ is no sort of solution. The true solution would have to be one in which both senses of the term ‘being’, that as a noun (what something is), and that as a verb, an action - the act of existence in the world of change - are fully considered. Hence, ultimately, I would argue, the necessity of metaphysical realism.

References

Heidegger, M. 1927. Being and Time, (as reprinted by HarperCollins: New York, 2008).

Gilson, E. 1952. Being and Some Philosophers (second edition corrected and enlarged), Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Maurer, A. 1968.  Introduction, to On Being and Essence (second edition) by St. Thomas Aquinas, 7-27, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Rasmussen, D.B. & D.J. Van Uyl. 2020. The Realist Turn: Repositioning Liberalism, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sartre, J-P. 1943. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (as reprinted by Washington Square Press: New York, 1992).