Being
23rd installment to my philosophical system.
Being stands before all things as they are in themselves. From whence did this great abstraction come? Man, of course, and his desire to see existence made like his hand—that is, something knowable to him, though it be ultimately obscure to him and very much unable to meet the task of being fully known.
Being is, and was for Hegel, the starting point from which all philosophy leaped. I liken it to the abstraction of all abstractions: everything in it taken from existence as it is known to us living creatures in conscious experience.
Being implies existence, which further implies an essence; here, essence is merely the predicate of being—whatever quality, label, or adjective we would like to apply to it. It is something which can come to us only in experience, but which can be abstracted and treated beyond experience, and known as a necessity prior to it from the implication (and necessary deduction) of its existence.
What being represents is nothing more than the whole of ontology. What does it mean to exist, and what are the properties of existence? It is a subject whose matter is so vast, intricate, and abstract that to even speak of it is akin to speaking on God—a subject which everyone knows of, but which nobody knows anything about.
As a single individual thrown into the world as the kind of being that I am, I am forced to make my way through it in a manner that seems most likely to perpetuate my being. Being as a concept, insofar as it exists for conscious subjects to ruminate upon, is what all things pertain to, but which do not concern it in a concrete sense.
Being simply pervades all things by the very nature of its abstract generality; it has its hands in every cookie jar, but doesn’t really want the cookies—only a place to rest its hands in. Abstracted from existence known to us in our existence, being is what the universal is to the single individual who only knows of the essences, or particulars, of reality—which are manifested in the cognition of the world.
Like all abstractions, the seeds of its life are in the human being as such; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the term human in English is usually followed by being, meant to indicate the materiality, or the tangibleness, of this individual thing, this subject, that actually exists.
The term “being” derives from the Old English bēon (to be)—which I would argue is the most fundamental verb in every language. To be is a state of existence, a present tense infinitive that is a verb—an action that presupposes there is a being that recognizes its own being and which assumes the character of its being in its continued existence.
If nothing existed, there would be no thing by which to distinguish other things from each other. If there was only one being, there would be nothing but pure, absolute subjectivity—the I would be the only existent thing to be recognized, and that would immediately be followed by that which is the negation of the I: the “not I.” It is from this most basic kernel, or fundamental primitive, that existence has any intelligibility at all. In that sense, absolute subjectivity is pure being—for it is not mediated by the objective, but simply is as an innate predicate of its being.
Now, Kant famously argued against this kind of ontological argument (against God in his case) by stating that being cannot be a predicate of a thing which is actual but not known in experience, and I would suspect he did so because he did not believe that analytical a posteriori knowledge was possible—analytical here meaning a predicate concept that is contained in the subject concept (for example, the famous “All bachelors are unmarried,” or “All bodies take up space”; things which are true by definition of the subject concept but which do not require experience to know them as true), while a posteriori here means cognitions which are empirically known—but I think he focuses too much on the epistemology of predicates and definitions.
In the case of being—which can only have actual existence in the knowledge of said existence—it is, without a doubt, true that being implies existence analytically, insofar as being is cognized within a conscious entity no matter the form or aspect that entity exists in, and which is deduced from the fact of that entity’s experience of being. Granted, this is a petitio principii (begging the question fallacy) under traditional logic—for the premise of being is already contained within the premise of that being’s recognition of itself in experience, therefore becoming self-knowledge—but whoever said we had to listen to logic?
As far as I’m concerned, all claims about being are known a posteriori, but are considered analytically from the beginning; in fact, most ancient philosophers assumed their ontology from the start by beginning all their investigations with predications of the experience in question—in so doing, narrowing the scope of the investigation and deducing all things from those initial prejudices of experience. I am not here denying synthetic judgments, but rather saying—in the context of being!—that experience of being, which goes on to become knowledge, is predicated analytically from the start; that is, defined as already being (the analytic side) while only being known in the experience of said being (the a posteriori side). Thus, being (just like Kant’s synthetic a priori transcendental categories—born as a prerequisite in man in order to structure experience in the first place) is (so far as I know) the only analytic a posteriori claim which is true by the nature of us experiencing it as such in the first place.
The ancient Greeks, who took many naturalist stances with respect to ontology, posited being in its pure form, that is, as absent of presuppositions as was possible (although I must confess, I do not see philosophy as an impersonal subject of investigation—therefore it could never be truly pure).
Be that as it may, it should be noted here that Aristotle was very skeptical of the ontological claims made by the Pre-Socratics. He specifically thought of being in terms of actuals and potentials—but that only actuals existed in the concrete, while potentials were abstract possibilities that did not manifest in reality as it appears in our experience of it. All this mirrors my own conception of being as composed of its pure actuality in the abstract (ideal) and its essence in the concrete (material). However, unlike Aristotle, I do not find being as merely existing in a state of the actual only—rather, I view being as a constant interplay between static and dynamic forces, in which every potential is striving to become actual, and only does so when being is made actual in action.
Being cannot be approached rightly if it is viewed rigidly, for being is a constant agitation of objective experience which the subject must interpret in order for it to be objectified and made actual. Contingent particularity and necessary universality are the two poles of being from which every rationalization or empiricalization can come to us.
Every abstraction seems plausible at first until the actuality of reality forces us to confront and obey it. We are slaves to the material realm, and our master is the abstract, while the whip which rips our back anew is reality itself. All these long-winded expositions of what all this concrete stuff is fall flat whenever we strive to box it into a single aspect or category. To break out of the box of conformity and absurd practicality is to see being as a necessary contradiction itself. Being is contradictory because it has different ways of being interpreted; and all these interpretations serve very little in the way of furthering our understanding of it because, again, subjectivity is at all times confronted by that which is objective but which the subject cannot know objectively. Such is why I view the whole notion of dichotomizing reality as asinine. If being is to be approached with any pragmatism, it must move past the either—or convention and seriously consider the potential that reality itself is contradictory.
The greatest mistake in all philosophy has been man assuming that he could conceptualize the totality of his being in a definite, discrete, particular manner. It may seem unpragmatic to say that reality is contradictory—after all, doesn’t Occam’s razor reject that notion by only considering those things which require the fewest assumptions? Yes! But I would say that dialectic does away with the notion of the “fewest assumptions” and only assumes one presupposition that contains all others: that every idea runs against each other in the course of life, and only in recognizing that reason itself creates antinomies can we begin the process of overcoming all vague conceptions and bring them into subjectivity through our tarrying with them so long as we live.
Being is the long night of reason, where reason commits itself to various positions about itself which it cannot square and so destroys itself in the process in order to rebuild itself back up from the rubble of its own initially false conceptions. To think is hard enough, but to get at the core of existence through thinking alone is perhaps the hardest intellectual task a person can undertake.
I feel in this exposition I said many absurd things, but which I cannot ultimately counter or deny because of their immensity and necessity within the process of speculating itself. The notion of thinking always refers back to itself, and in that back-and-forth movement is the process of obtaining oneself in reasoning about the self. In order to describe reality simply, you must first reduce it to the point of absurdity and thus make it what it is not for the sake of convenience.
The dialectic knows no convenience, however, and only strives to process being in the motion of its progress in thinking it through. Reality is a singularity that expands each time a new conception of it is considered.
If man were honest with himself, he would not remain prideful in his state of learned ignorance—he would rather be ashamed to presume to know reality fully. What man has ever been able to move past his ignorance with anti-erudition—that is, erudition which is misunderstanding itself? Only those who treat misunderstanding as a necessary component in the path to understanding. Being is, in a word, dialectical (turning the absolute universal into a process or method by which to overcome all particulars that arise in reasoning about existence), and that is perhaps the best summation one can give it.