Being
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- For other uses, see Being (disambiguation). See also Ego (spirituality).
In philosophy, being (ie. be+-ing) is the English word used for conceptualizing subjective aspects fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with ideas about human "existence" and "living" —in which "being" or "[one's/a] state of being" is rooted in personal experience, and reflected in aspects of innate personal character. In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it refers to a discrete life form that has properties of mind (ie. experience and character) such that transcend that of mere organisms (that have only "life functions"). Given the origins of the term in Western philosophy, the term has deep historical roots in other languages: Greek to einai, Latin esse, Spanish ser, Fr. être, Ger. sein.
Being is the object of study of metaphysics, and more specifically ontology. In its most indeterminate sense, being could be understood as anything that can be said to be, which is opposed to nonexistence. For example one could ask: “why is there something instead of nothing?” (Leibniz, Heidegger, Wittgenstein). Where “something” implies being. For a metaphysician the main problem is not the scientific question of how the universe works, but why the universe (or anything such as a rock) is.
To say what being is, or is not, it has been much disputed in the history of philosophy. French Academy member Étienne Gilson wrote once that if a notion had to be universally recognized as the first of all principles of philosophy that would be being. Nevertheless such agreement does not exist and some philosophers consider the notion of being as worthless. Even those philosophers who accept the notion as first principle, do not agree in its sense. Hence, the philosophies of Parmenides, Leucippus, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Plotinus, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre understand the notion of being differently.
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[edit] 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). Hegel, however, did not think there was much hope for delineating a "meaning" of being, because being stripped of all predicates is simply nothing.
Heidegger, in his quest to re-pose the original pre-Socratic questions of Being (of why is there something rather than nothing), wondered at how to meaningfully ask the question of the meaning of being, since it is both the greatest, as it includes everything that is, and the least, since no particular thing can be said of it. He distinguishes between different modes of beings: a privative mode is present-at-hand, whereas beings in a fuller sense are described as ready-to-hand. The one who asks the question of Being is described as Da-sein ("there/here-being") or being-in-the-world. Sartre, popularly understood as misreading Heidegger (an understanding 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.
[edit] Being in Islamic philosophy
The nature of "being" has also been debated and explored in Islamic philosophy, notably by Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra.[1]
[edit] Quotations
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. - Carl Jung
Under the heading ‘Individuality in Thought and Desire’, Karl Marx, (German Ideology 1845), says:
"It depends not on consciousness, but on being; not on thought, but on life; it depends on the individual's empirical development and manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions existing in the world."
[edit] See also
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Look up being in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
- Atman
- Category of being
- Cogito ergo sum
- Creature
- Entity
- Essence
- Existence
- Existentialism
- Human being
- Hypostasis
- Infosphere
- Noumenon
- Object (philosophy)
- Ontology
- Ousia
- Phenomenon
- Substance theory
- Supreme being
- Fromm To Have Or To Be? 1976
- Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
- Heidegger, Being and Time
- Sartre, Essays in Existentialism and Being and Nothingness
- Pranopasana
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