The Great Idea for tonight's presentation is "Being."
The presentation will be in four parts.
In" PART I "we will discuss come distinctions between "is" and "is not." We will discuss why these terms uniquely concern philosophy. We will discuss a double thread identified by Robert M. Pirsig. "Plato is the eternal Buddha, seeking the one," claims Pirsig, "Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic, seeking the many."
In "PART II" we will again pick up Pirsig¹s double thread, with Spinoza seeking the one and Descartes seeking the many.
In "PART III" comments will be taken from seventeenth century metaphysicians--particularly Berkeley, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. Also we will discuss the nature of change.
In "PART IV "we will cover some nuances of reality, such as the difference between knowledge and opinion. We will explore what William James has to say on the nature of "thinghood." In conclusion, we will discuss the existence of René Descartes.
The words "is" and "is not" are probably the words most frequently used by anyone.
Their manifold significance seems to be of a very special kind, for whatever is said "not to be" in one sense of being can always be said "to be" in another of its senses.
Children and practiced liars know this.
Playing on the meanings of being, or with "is" and "not," they move smoothly from fact to fiction, imagination to reality, or truth to falsehood.
The study of being is a technical inquiry which only philosophers have pursued at length.
Berkeley gives one reason why they cannot avoid it:
"Nothing seems of more importance," he says, "towards erecting a firm system of sound and real knowledge . . . than to lay the beginning in a distinct explication what is meant by "thing", "reality", or "existene"; for in vain shall we dispute concerning the existence of things, or pretend to any knowledge thereof, so long as we have not fixed the meaning of those words."
In the whole field of learning, philosophy is distinguished from other disciplines--from history, the sciences, and mathematics--by its concern with the problem of being.
Though it often leads to subtleties, it also keeps the philosoher in deepest touch with common sense and speculative wonder of all men.
As a technical concept in philosophy, "being" has been called both the emptiest and the richest of all terms in the vocabulary of thought.
Both remarks testify to the same fact, namely, that it is the highest abstraction, the most universal of predicates, and the most pervasive subject of discussion.
William James is in a long line of philosophers which began with the early Greeks when he points out that "in the strict and ultimate sense of the word 'existence' everything which can be thought of exists as some "sort" of object, whether mythical object, individual thinker's object, or object in outer space and for intelligence at large."
Even things which do not really exist have being insofar as they are objects of thought--things remembered which once existed, things conceivable which have the possibility of being, things imaginary which have being at least in the mind that thinks them.
This leads to a paradox which the ancients delighted in pondering, that even nothing is something, even non-being has being, for before we can say "non-being is not" we must be able to say "non-being is."
"Nothing" is at least an object of thought.
Any other word than "being" will tend to classify things.
"All other names," Aquinas writes, "are either less universal or, if convertible with it, add something above it at least in idea; hence in a certain way they inform and determine it."
The concepts which such words express have, therefore, a restricted universality.
If we start with a particular of any sort, classifying it progressively according to the characteristics which it shares with more and more things, we come at last to being.
According to this method of abstraction, which Hegel follows in his "Science of Logic", 'being' is the emptiest of terms precisely because it is the commonest.
It signifies the very least that can be taught of anything.
On this view, if all we are told of something is that it is--that it has being--we learn as little as possible about the thing.
We have to be told that a thing is a material or a spiritual being, a real or imaginary being, a living or a human being, in order to apprehend a determinate nature.
Abstracted from everything else, 'being' has only the positive meaning of excluding 'non-being.'
There is an opposite procedure by which the term "being" has maximal rather than minimal significance.
Since whatever else a thing is, it is a being, its being lies at the very heart of its nature and underlies all its other properties.
Being is indeterminate only in the sense that it takes on every sort of determination.
Aquinas, for example, conceives "being taken simply as including all perfections of being;" and in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, 'being' without qualification as the most proper name for God.
When Moses asked God his name, he received as answer: "I AM THAT I AM . . . Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you."
Used in this sense 'being' becomes the richest of terms--the one which has the greatest amplitude of meaning.
In "PART II" we will again pick up Pirsig¹s double thread, with Spinoza seeking the one and Descarts seeking the many.
Whether one or many, both ways of thinking are relevant.
If everything exists only as a part of being as a whole, or if the unity of being requires everything to be the same in being, then whatever diversities there are do not multiply the meanings of "being".
Although he speaks of substance rather than of being, Spinoza argues that, "there cannot be any substance excepting God, and consequently none other can be conceived."
From this it follows that "whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God."
Since "there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute," and since God is defined as a "substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence," it is absurd, in Spinoza¹s opinion, to think of any other substance.
"If there were any substance besides God, it would have to be explained," he says, "by some attribute of God, and thus two substances would exist possessing the same attribute," which is impossible.
Spinoza¹s definition of substance, attribute, and mode or affection, combined with his axiom that "everything which is, is either in itself or in another," enables him to embrace whatever multiplicity or diversity he finds in the world as aspects of one being.
Everything which is not substance, existing in and of itself, exists in that one substance as an infinite attribute "or" a finite mode.
"The thing extended (rem extensam) and the thinking thing (rem cogitanten)," he writes, "are either attributes of God or affections of the attributes of God."
If, on the contrary, there is no unitary whole of being, but only a plurality of beings which are alike in being and yet are diverse in being from one another, then our conception of being must involve a system of meanings, a stem of many branches.
In addition to God "that substance which we understand to be supremely perfect" Descartes describes two kinds of finite substance.
"That substance in which thought immediately resides, I call Mind," he writes; and "that substance, which is the immediate extension of substance in space, and of the accidents that presuppose extension, e.g. figure, situation, movement in space, etc., is called Body."
All these substances, and even their accidents, have being, but not being of the same kind or to the same degree.
"There are, "according to Descartes," diverse degrees of reality, or (the quality of being an) entity."
"For substance has more reality than accident or mode; and infinite substance has more than finite substance." Its being is independent, theirs dependent.
The Greeks, notably Plato and Aristotle, began the inquiry about being.
They realized that, after all other questions are answered there still remains the question: "What does it mean to say of anything that it is or is not?
After we understand what it means for a thing to be a man, or to be alive, or to be a body, we must still consider what it means for that thing simply to be in any way at all; or to be in one sense and not to be in another.
The discussion of being, in itself and in relation to unity and trust, rest and motion, runs through many dialogues of Plato.
It is central in the "Sophist" and "Parmenides".
The same terms and problems appear in Aristotle¹s scientific treatise which makes "being" its distinctive subject matter, and which he sometimes calls "first philosophy" and sometimes "theology."
It belongs to this science, he declares, "to consider being "qua" being both what it is and the properties which belong to it "qua" being.
It is an historical accident that this inquiry concerning being came to be called "metaphysics."
That is the name which, according to legend, the ancient editors gave to a collection of writings in which Aristotle pursued this inquiry.
Since they came after the book of physics, they were called "metaphysics" on the supposition that Aristotle intended the discussion of being to follow his treatise on change and motion.
In one were to invent a word to describe the science of being, it would be "ontology," not "metaphysics" or even "theology."
Yet "metaphysics" has remained the traditionally accepted name for the inquiry or science which goes beyond physics or all of natural science in that it asks about the very existence of things, and their modes of being.
The traditional connection of metaphysics with theology seems to have its origin in the fact that Aristotle¹s treatise on being passes from a consideration of sensible and mutable substances to the problem of the existence of immaterial beings, and to the conception of a divine being purely actual, absolutely immutable.
In a science intended to treat "of that which "is" primarily, and to which all the other categories of being are referred, namely, substance," Aristotle says, "we must first sketch the nature of substance."
Hence he begins with what he calls "the generally recognized substances. These are the sensible substances."
He postpones until later his critical discussion of "the Ideas and objects of mathematics, for some say these are substances in addition to the sensible substances";
Yet he directs his whole inquiry to the ultimate question "whether there are or are not any besides sensible substances."
His attempt to answer this question in the twelfth book makes it the theological part of his "Metaphysics".
In "PART III" comments will be taken from seventeenth century metaphysicians particularly Berkeley, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. Also we will discuss the nature of change.
While the Greeks emphasized substance or existence or essence, later philosophers emphasized our "ideas" of existence or essence.
This transformation of the ancient problem of being is stated by Berkeley in almost epigrammatic form.
Considering "what is meant by the term "exist"," he argues from the experience of sensible things that "their "essence" is "perdipi", nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them."
Locke, too, although he does not identify being with perception, makes the same shift on the ground that "the first step towards satisfying several inquiries the mind of man was apt to run into, was to make a survey of our own understandings, examine our own powers, and see to what things they were adapted."
For Kant the basic distinction is between the sensible and the supra-sensible, or the phenomenal and noumenal, realms of being.
From another point of view, Kant considers the being of things in themselves apart from human experience and the being of natural things or, what is the same for them, the things of experince.
The former are unconditioned, the latter conditioned, by the knowing mind which is formative or constitutive of experience.
"The sole aim of pure reason," Kant writes, "is the absolute totality of the synthesis on the side of conditions . . . in order to preposit the whole series of conditions, and thus present them to our understanding "a priori"."
Having obtained these "conditions," we can ascend through them "until we reach the unconditioned, that is, the principles."
It is with these ideas of pure reason that metaphysics, according to Kant, properly deals.
Instead of "being", its object consists in "three grand ideas: God, Freedom, and Immortality, and it aims at showing that the second conception, conjoined with the first, must lead to the third as a necessary conclusion."
Hegel, on the other hand, does not approach the problem of being or reality through a critique of knowledge.
For Hegel, as for Plotinus before him, the heart of metaphysics lies in understanding that "nothing is actual except the Idea" or the Absolute, "and the great thing is to apprehend in the show of the temporal and the transient, the substance of which is immanent, and the eternal which is permanent."
Plotinus calls the absolute, not the Idea, but the All-one, yet he tries to show that the One is the principle, the light, and the life of all things, just as Hegel reduces everything to a manifestation of the underlying reality of the Absolute Idea.
The central question which is faced by anyone who goes beyond physics, or natural philosophy, is a question about being or existence.
It may or may not be asked explicitly, but it is always there by implication.
The question about God, for example, or free will or immortality, is first of all a question about whether such things "exist", and "how" they exist.
Do they have reality or are they only fictions of the mind?
Similarly, questions about the infinite, the absolute, or the unconditioned are questions about that primary reality apart from whose existence nothing else could be or could be conceived, and which therefore has an existence different from the things dependent on it for their being.
Here again the first question is whether such a reality exists.
Now we will say a few words about change, or the distinction between being and becoming.
The sophists often regarded change as irrational and unreal.
Galen charges the sophists with "allowing that bread into blood becomes changed as regards sight, taste, and touch," but denying that "this change occurs in reality."
The familiar paradoxes of Zeno are "reductio ad absurdum" arguments to show that motion is unthinkable, full of self-contradiction.
The way of truth, according to Parmenides, Zeno¹s master in the Eleatic school, lies in the insight that whatever is always was and will be, that nothing comes into being out of non-being, or passes out of being into nothingness.
The doctrine of Parmenides provoked many criticisms.
Yet his opponents tried to preserve the reality of change, without having to accord it the fullness of being.
The Greek atomists, for example, think that change cannot be explained except in terms of permanent beings, in fact eternal ones.
Lucretius, who expounds their views, remarks that in any change, "something unchangeable must remain over, that all things be not utterly reduced to nothing; for whenever a thing changes and quits its proper limits, at once this change of state is the death of that which was before."
That "something unchangeable" is thought to be the atom, the absolutely indivisible, and hence imperishable, unit of matter.
Change does not touch the being of the atoms, "but only breaks up the union amongst them, and then joins anew the different elements with others; and thus it comes to pass that all things change" that is, all things composite, not the simple bodies of solid singleness "when the clashings, motions, arrangement, position, and shapes of matter change about."
In a conversation with Cratylus, who favors the Heraclitean theory of universal flux, Socrates asks, "How can that be a real thing which is never in the same state?"
"How can we reasonably say, Cratylus," he goes on, "that there is any knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding?"
When he gets Glaucon to admit in the "Republic" that "being is the sphere or subject matter of knowledge, and knowing is to know the nature of being," Socrates leads him to see the correlation of being, not-being, and becoming with knowledge, ignorance and opinion.
"If opinion and knowledge are distinct faculties then the spheres of knowledge and opinion cannot be the same . . . If being is the subject matter of knowledge, something else must be the subject matter of opinion."
It cannot be not-being, for "of non-being ignorance was assumed to be the necessary correlative."
Since "opinion" is not concerned either with being or with not-being" because it is obviously intermediate between knowledge and ignorance, Socrates concludes that "if anything appeared to be of a sort which is and is not at the same time, that sort of thing would appear also to lie in the interval between pure being and absolute not-being," and "the corresponding faculty is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but will be found in the interval between them
This "intermediate flux" or sphere of becoming, this "region of the many and the variable," can yield only opinion.
Being, the realm of the "absolute and eternal and immutable [Ideas]," is the only object that one "may be said to know."
In "PART IV" we will cover some nuances of reality, such as the difference between knowledge and opinion. We will explore what William James has to say about the notion of "thinghood." In conclusion, we will discuss the existence or René Descartes.
Plato¹s division of reality into the realms of being and becoming has a bearing on his analysis of knowledge and opinion.
The division relates to the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible, and between the opposed quantities of certainty and probability, or necessity and contingency, in our judgments about things.
The distinctions between essence and existence and between substance and accident separate aspects or modes of being which function differently as objects for the knowing mind.
Aristotle, for example, holds that "there can be no scientific treatment of the "accidental" . . . for the accidental is practically a mere name."
"And," he adds, "Plato was in a sense not wrong in ranking sophistic as dealing with that which is not."
"For the arguments of the sophists deal, we may say, above all, with the accidental."
That the accidental is "akin to non-being," Aristotle thinks may be seen in the fact that "things which are in another sense come into being and pass out of being by a process, but things which are accidentally do not."
But though he rejects the accidental as an object of science, he does not, like Plato or Plotinus, exclude the whole realm of sensible, changing things from the sphere of scientific knowldege."
For him, both metaphysics and physics treat of sensible substances, the one with regard to their mutaboe "being", the other with regard to their being "mutable" their becoming or changing.
For Plotinus, on the other hand, "the true sciences have an intelligible object and contain no notion of anything sensible."
They are directed, not to "variable things, suffering from all sorts of changes, divided in space, to which the name of becoming and not being belongs, "but to the eternal being which is not divided, existing always in the same way, which is not born and does not perish, and has neither space, place, nor situation . . . but rests immovable in itself.
According to another view, represented by Locke, substance as such is unknowable, whether it be body or spirit.
We use the word "substance" to name the "support of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us; which qualities are commonly called accidents."
The sensible accidents are all that we truly know and "we give the general name substance" to "the supposed, but unknown, support of those qualities we find existing."
Some of these sensible accidents are what Locke calls "primary qualities"‹the powers or potentialities by which things affect one another and also our senses.
Hobbes exemplifies still another view.
"A man can have no thought," he says, "representing anything not subject to sense."
Hobbes does not object to calling bodies "substances," but thinks that when we speak of "an incoproreal body, or ( which is all one ) an incorporeal substance," we talk nonsense;
"for none of these things ever have, or can be incident to sense;"
"but are absurd speeches, taken upon credit ( without any signification at all ) from deceived Philosophers, and deceived, or deceiving Schoolmen."
Whenever a theory of knowledge is concerned with how we know reality, as opposed to mere appearances, it considers the manner in which existing things can be known by perception, intuition, or demonstration;
And with respect to demonstration, it attempts to formulate the conditions of valid reasoning about matters of fact or real existence.
But it has seldom been supposed that reality exhausts the objects of our thought or knowldege.
We can conceive possibilities not realized in this world.
We can imagine things which do not exist in nature.
The meaning of reality of real as opposed to purely conceptual or ideal being is derived from the notion of thinghood, of having being outside the mind, not merely in it.
In traditional controversies about the existence of ideas or of universals, the objects of mathematics, or relations it is not the being of such things which is questioned, but their reality, their existence outside the mind.
If, for example, ideas exist apart from minds, the minds of men and God, they have real, not ideal existence.
If the objects of mathematics, such as numbers and figures, have existence only as figments of the mind, they are ideal beings.
The judgment of the reality of a thing, James thinks, involves "a state of consciousness "sui generis"" about which not much can be said "in the way of internal analysis."
The focus of this problem in modern times is indicated by James¹ phrasing of the question, "Under what circumstances do we think things real?"
And James gives a typically modern answer to the question.
He begins by saying that "any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality."
He admits that "for most men . . . the things of sense . . . are the absolute real world's nucleus."
"Other things," James writes, "may be real for this man or that things of science, abstract moral relation, things of Christian theology, or what not."
"But even for the special man, these things are usually real with a less real reality than that of things of sense."
But his basic conviction is that "our own reality, that sense of our own life which we at every moment possess, is the ultimate of ultimates for our belief."
"As sure as I exist!" this is our uttermost warrant for the being of all other things.
"As Descartes made the indubitable reality of the "cogito" go bail for the reality of all that the "cogito" involved, so all of us, feeling our own present reality with absolutely coercive force, ascribe on all but equal degree of reality, first to whatever things we lay hold on with a sense of personal need, and second, to whatever farther things continuously belong with these."
We can in conclusion observe one obvious measure of the importance of "being" in philosophical thought.
The major "isms" to which historians of philosophy have tried to classify its doctrines represent affirmations or denials with respect to being or the modes of being.
They are such antitheses as realism and idealism; materialism and spiritualism; monism, dualism, and pluralism; even athesim and theism.
Undoubtedly no great philsopher can be so simply boxed.
Yet the opposing "isms" do indicate the great speculative issues which no mind can avoid if it pursues the truth or seeks the ultimate principles of good and evil.
Source: Philosophy-irc.org.
