Chapter IV
The Discovery and the Meaning of Being
(source: W. Norris Clarke, SJ., The One and the Many, 2001)
In its primary existential meaning, “being” is a noun derived from the verb “to be”. Thus, a being = that which is, or exists, is real, as in the existential propositions: “this is”, “that is,” “This girl is pretty.” The secondary non-existential meaning (St. Thomas) of “is”, wherein it functions as a copula to join together a subject and predicate. Ex. X is Y. But since the object of metaphysics is real being, our concern here is the primary existential meaning
In the definition, “that which is”, there are two irreducible yet inseparable aspects: the “is” of actual existence and the “that which”, the subject which exists. This latter is called essence. Most western philosophers focus more on the “what” it is. St. Thomas focuses more on the “is” as the ground of all else and the center of his whole system (existential Thomism).
What does “is” mean? This is impossible to define by anything clearer, because outside of it there is nothing. Implicitly, we already know what it means, because we know how to use it meaningfully. It is not easy to spell it out explicitly. Metaphysics tries to do this. One way is by paraphrasing, e.g. presents itself: a being presents itself in some way. It presents itself as standing out from the darkness of non-being into the light of being.
Reflective awareness of being. In ordinary life the term and its meaning are so pervasive that we become used to it, take it for granted, lose our explicit awareness and appreciation of its richness and wonder. Heidegger calls this the “forgetfulness of being.” We get so preoccupied with what things are and how we can use them, so much so that we drop out of consciousness the basic wonder, “the wonder of all wonders, that anything is at all.” Poet Shelley (before Heidegger) says: “The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being.”
Two main paths toward evoking the explicit awareness of the “is” of being:
Take note, that all metaphysical systems do not have such an explicit term. Some have an implicit equivalent, like “all.” Some philosophers like Plato, Plotinus, the “negative theology” philosophers (God is beyond being), and the oriental philosophers (the Ultimate is Non-being or the Void), hold that the ultimate reality lies beyond the whole domain of being in mystery, which can only be pointed to in silence and cannot be grasped by our limited human concepts. For them, “being” means limited essence or form, and so the Ultimate escapes such limits. St. Thomas has overcome this dilemma, since for him the fundamental component of being is that act of existence itself, which lies beyond all limiting essences and forms. The act of existence pervades all of them but irreducible to any one of them. Thus, he can speak of God as pure Subsisting Act of Existence that is, but is beyond all limiting essences or forms.
Personal Awakening to the Wonder of Being. To be a good metaphysician, one must move beyond the abstract understanding of the meaning of being toward an existential “awakening” to experience what actual existence means in the concrete for the whole person. In the light of this intuitive experience one can take reflective possession of its meaning, generalize it to the whole realm of actual existents. And then one develops it into the fully explicit metaphysical understanding of being as that which is.
3. Being and the Spirit as Correlative
To search the meaning of being, the metaphysician becomes aware that being is the ultimate objective correlative of the pure desire of the spirit to know, co-extensive with its scope, that which defines it as intellect. Intellect is radically for being, oriented toward it by a natural aptitude, or “connaturality” for being.
The necessary corollary of this is that being itself is for intelligence. Its ultimate fulfillment requires that it be brought into the light of consciousness. Being must be unveiled or revealed to the mind or spirit. This unveiling of being to the mind is truth. This is called aletheia by the Greeks. Therefore, the fundamental intellectual vocation of every mind-endowed being (the human being) is to unveil being, to bring it into the light of consciousness and speak it out in a logos, or meaningful word. That is why for Heidegger, “Man is the spokesman of Being”. The human being is planted in the midst of it (Dasein) to listen to it with reverence and speak out its name and meaning truthfully. Therefore, the human being is called to question about being and accepts his responsibility for listening to it with reverence and speaking out its meaning in a recreative human logos.
Being as inexhaustible mystery: The veiled-unveiled. By the word “being” the human mind expresses all that there is, but indistinctly, indeterminately. We can never know any real being exhaustively in this life. Thus, being for us is always half-light, half shadow or mystery, the known-unknown. Our whole intellectual vocation is to draw being gradually, by individual and communal effort, from pre-rational ambiguity into fuller and fuller light, into logos. This task can be completed only by being lifted up to share the total vision of the ultimate Source of all being – God.
4. The Primary Division of Being: Real and Mental
“Being” means that which is. But as soon as we press it hard for clarity and apply it to all the things we know, in the mind and outside of it, then it breaks up into two basic irreducible orders: real and mental being. They are defined in contrast with each other.
Real Being. It is that which is present by its own intrinsic act of existence outside of an idea. This means that it is present not just as being thought about, but on its own, so to speak. It is what exists, in the strong sense of the word, and is the ordinary meaning of being unless specified otherwise. It has two modes: (1) a complete being, or substance, which can be said simply to be as a whole entity subsisting in itself and not as a part of any other being; and (2) any part or attribute of a real being which cannot be said to be in itself, on its own, but only to be in another. E.g. She is a pretty woman.
Mental Being. It is that which is present not by its own act of existence but only within an idea. St. Thomas says, “Its being is its to-be-thought-about” by a real mind. Main divisions: (1) past and future as such, which were and will be, but are not; (2) content of dreams; (3) abstractions, which are drawn from the real but as abstract exist only in the mind, e.g. man, life, etc. (4) mental constructs, which can never exist outside the mind but help us to think about the real; mathematical entities (numbers, circles, squares, etc.), logical relations, negations (blindness, nothingness), hypotheses for testing plans for action, etc.
Priority of Real Being. Since mental being cannot be present save by being thought about by a real mind and can only be understood by reference to the mind thinkingit, it is radically secondary, dependent, parasite on real being, which is primary. Real beings (real minds) can generate ideas, ideas of themselves cannot generate real beings. All mental beings are in some way derived from and refer back to the order of real being. They are present in real minds, but they are not themselves the “really real,” as Plato thought they had to be in order to ground eternal truths and values.
Take note, that the recognition of the distinction between real and mental being is the first crucial step to the ordering of our experience to render it intelligible. To be able to tell the difference between the two is the fundamental mark of sanity. To confuse them is the mark of insanity.
Criterion of Real Being vs. Mental Being. Ordinarily, we are able to distinguish real beings from mental beings. What criterion do we use? Every metaphysician must come to grips with this question. According to St.Thomas, the only adequate criterion for discerning the presence of the real being, is that of action. What is real is what can act on its own, express itself in action, is the center and source of its own characteristic action. I know myself as real because I am aware of myself as acting – desiring, thinking. I know other beings as real because I am aware of their acting on me, actively responding to me, invading me and determining me. Real beings make a difference in the real world. Ideas, images, etc., on the other hand, cannot act on their own. I control them by thinking about them, rejecting them, changing them as I will. Real beings, in their actions to me and mine on them, have real consequences which I have to cope with; ideas do not, unless I act on them.
5. Being As Self-Revealing Through Action: Every Being Is Active.
This an important development in our understanding of what it means to be real. This is an essential key in understanding the thought of St. Thomas as a whole. It is through action, and only through action, that real beings manifest or ‘unveil’ their being, their presence, to other and to me. All the beings that make up the world of my experience reveal themselves as not just present, standing out of nothingness, but actively presenting themselves to others and vice versa by interacting with each other. This leads us the metaphysical conclusion that it is the very nature of real being, existential being, to pour over into action that is self-revealing and self-communicative. Existential being is intrinsically dynamic, not static.
There two steps to reach this insight: (1) By observation. I observe that this is going on at all the levels of the beings of the world open to my experience: on the inorganic level all the elements are giving off bursts of energy, influencing each other, combining each other, etc.: on the plant and animal level all living things interact with each other and reproduce themselves to the community of existents – life is by nature expansive; on the human level it is natural, a built-in drive within us, to interact and share with each other by communication, working with each other, and at the highest level by affectionate, caring love, which is then productive of new members of the community of existents. (2) By metaphysical reflection. I come to realize that this is not just a brute fact but an intrinsic property belonging to the very nature of every real being as such, if it is to count at all in the community of existents. For let us suppose that there were real existing being that had no action at all. First of all, no other being could know it, since it is only by some action that it could manifest or reveal its presence and nature; secondly, it would make no difference whatever to any other being, since it is totally unmanifested, locked in its own being and could not even react to anything done to it. An if it had no action within itself, it would not make a difference to itself. It would thus be indistinguishable from nothingness. In a word, it might just as well not be. If all beings were such, there could not be a universe at all. To have a universe, a community of real existents, its members would have to communicate with each other, be linked together somehow and all communication requires some kind of action. A non-acting, non-communicating being is for all practical purposes equivalent to no being at all. To be real is to make a difference.
Take note that we are not saying that ‘real being” is logically identical in meaning with “action,” but only that action flows over naturally from real being precisely as existent, is an intrinsic property of every real being. Agere sequitur esse. St. Thomas technically expresses it with precision: existence is the first act of the real being, action its second act, flowing immediately from the first. Aristotle himself saw this long ago when he defined a real nature as “an abiding center of acting and being acted on.”
Objection. Could there not be at least one being that could be totally self-sufficient in being and perfection that could exist without communicating with anything other than itself?
Response. Yes, there could be one, and only one such totally self-sufficient perfect being, which would be free to create or not create anything else – God. But in fact this being has poured over in action to create this universe in which we live. If it hadn’t, we would not be here to ask the question. And it we were here without the action of this being it would be totally inaccessible and irrelevant to us anyway. The presence of such totally static would be totally pointless, and certainly could not be the work of a wise creative God. Therefore, we live in a universe where all the real beings that count are dynamically active ones: self-manifesting, self-communicating action to connect up with other real beings, and form a community of interacting existents we call a “universe.”
Jacques Maritain calls this expansive dynamism of the act of existence as a certain ontological “generosity.” Real beings go out of themselves in action for two reasons: one, because they are poor, as finite being they seek completion of themselves from other beings; two, because they are rich, in that they exist and possess some degree of actual perfection and have intrinsic tendency to share this in some way with others. Without this dynamics, there is no universe. But it seems that the ultimate reason is that it is the very nature of God himself to be self-communicative love, and since all other real beings are in some way images, participation of the divine goodness, they all bear the mark within them, according to the nature of each, of this divine attribute. Thus, to be is to be generous, in some way.
Conclusion on the Meaning of Being
“Being” in its strong primary sense as real being means that which is, i.e., actually exist in the real order, is present as standing out of nothingness with its own act of existence outside of an idea. It actively presents itself to other real beings by its characteristic self-manifesting, self-communicating action on them, and in return receives their action on it, thus becoming a member in the interconnected community of real existents we call the universe.
6. Action As The Key To Our Knowledge Of Real Beings
As action links real beings with each other to form a universe, it also connects our minds and the whole cognitive apparatus with the world of real being outside of us. Since we did not make things ourselves, all knowledge of the real must pass the bridge of action as the primary self-manifestation of real being. I know the existence of real beings by the fact that they act: myself by my own actions, within myself and on the other world; other real beings by their action on me, and on each other as observed by me. I know the nature of other real beings as this kind of actor on me and on others. Thus, I do not know the hidden natures of things as they are in themselves apart from their action on me (Kant). But I do know them as they really do manifest their existence and their natures by their real action on me. Action is precisely the self-revelation of being. Action that is indeterminate, that reveals nothing about the nature from which it proceeds, is not action at all. Hence, all action is necessarily essence-structured action.
This knowledge of being through action is a genuine realism, but never complete one. This can be called relational realism. What it renders is how the real world is related to us and we to it. These relations are quite real, what really is the case, verifying the requirement for truth – the conformity of mind to reality. Our knowledge both of ourselves and of other real beings is thus a knowledge of beings as agents.
However, our human knowledge is necessarily incomplete for two reasons: (1) No action of any finite being, especially material being, can fully express its nature in a single act, but must reveal it progressively through many actions, and never totally or exhaustively to us. (2) Our own cognitive structure, in particular, our five external sense channels, has its own built-in limits, or range of receptivity, beyond which it cannot pick up what is there, but not accessible to us, not revelatory to us, e.g., the spectrum of light waves and sound waves that we cannot pick up with our eyes and ears. We humans must resign ourselves to a mode of knowledge that is genuinely expressive of the real, of what is, but is humble beginning perspectivally from a given point in space and time, and always developing. Despite all these limitations on the completeness of our knowledge, there is still an immense amount that we do know about reality, together with its implications for intelligibility and can know further in a constantly expanding penetration into the inexhaustible fullness of being.
7. The Person As The Best Model For Understanding Being
The object of metaphysics is the understanding of what it means to be for all beings. Still, the method and the results will differ somewhat according to what method of approach and primary model of being one takes to guide one’s inquiry. Ancient philosophers tended to look on the world from an impersonal, objective view point. Aristotle’s own preferred point of reference tended to be, not the inorganic world of what we could call physis, but the living world of biological organisms tending toward their fulfillment, though with Plato and Aristotle human nature became more and more the center of focus. In medieval philosophy the centrality of the person came more and more to the fore, especially through the detailed study of human morality, the virtues, etc. But the medieval approach still tended to focus more on what is common to all human beings, rather than on the uniqueness of the individual person, the “I.”
In modern philosophy, with Descartes, the focus of attention shifts dramatically toward the subject and the subjective side of being, as seen and experienced from within, not just as an object in front of us to be captured by abstract universal concepts. In fact, the whole history of philosophy, including metaphysics, in the West can be seen as the slow emergence of the subject over the object as the center of focus and intelligibility. Finally, the priority shifted so much toward the subject that the objective aspect of being and the world outside of the human subject turned into predominantly the product of our own human thought – with Kant and the German idealists, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc., and various contemporary forms of anti-realism, anti-foundationalism, and relativism. The drift in the wider culture toward the radical self-centeredness of the autonomous individual – in the individualist liberal tradition of John Locke, etc., that we see all around us today in various unhealthy forms – echoes the same drift in metaphysics.
This modern highlighting of the subject, the autonomous, self-conscious “I,” has resulted in rich phenomenological descriptions in contemporary philosophy of the inner life of the person as experienced and lived from within, which the medievals left undeveloped or took for granted. But the balance has swing too far toward the subjective as opposed to the objective to allow a properly balanced comprehensive metaphysical vision of reality as an intelligible whole. To take the person as the center of reference and fullest model of what it means to be is the best corrective for this, it seems to me. However, it is not just the subjective individualist dimension of the person but also its objective dimension as part of the wider human community, not just an “I” but an “I” also embedded in a “We,” and beyond that in the wider community of our whole earth as an environmental whole, and still further in the all embracing community of all real beings. The subjective and objective dimensions of being should come together in a harmonious balanced whole in the human person, a being with both an inside (not fully objectifiable in universal concepts) and an outside (more amenable to such analysis). Hence it seems wisest to try and understand the fundamental metaphysical concepts and attributes of being as first experienced from within by ourselves then applied by analogy to other beings both below and above us.
8. The Most Fruitful Starting Point For Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics: The “We Are” of Interpersonal Dialogue
Problem. Our above unfolding of the meaning of being as active presence presupposes that our human minds are actually able to get in contact with real being, to know it positively and faithfully in both its existence and its nature, even though incompletely, as see from our human perspective. Ancient and medieval philosophers, for the most part, took this for granted as evidently given by our success with dealing with the real world, and, for medieval thinkers – Christian, Jewish, and Moslem – as belonging to the very nature of human intelligence as a gift from God who has created the world through wisdom and make it intelligible through and through. Creation by a wise and loving God both of nature and of our own minds guarantees both the intelligibility of the universe and the basic ability of our minds to know it.
In modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, however, the strong separation between faith and reason and the skepticism about sense knowledge, influenced by the new mathematical physics, brought about an epistemological crisis of uncertaining and doubt the power of the human mind to know reality as it is – the famous ‘problem of the gap’ between mind and being and how to bridge it, if possible at all. After centuries of alternation between the extremes of overconfident rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and reductionist empiricism trusting only sense knowledge (Hume), the dominant synthesis became that of the agnostic rationalism of Immanuel Kant (1804). According to him, it is impossible for the human mind to know the real world as it is in itself: the world does not inform us, mold our minds to conform to it. Rather, we positively impose our own apriori unifying forms of both sense and intellect on the raw, in itself unintelligible manifold of sense experience that flows into us from the outside world and is all we can know of the real, since we cannot reach beyond appears in our own minds (phenomenon) to reach things-in-themselves (noumena). Hence we do not know the world of reality as it really is, we “know” it only as our human minds cannot help but structure it in terms of the built-in a priori structures of our own minds, mysteriously common and unchanging among all human beings – though there was no way Kant could really prove this without knowing real minds as they are.
Despite later Neo-Kantianism modifications of the original position of Kant himself (the built-in a priori forms common to all human minds now turn into a priori linguistic and cultural forms that evolve through time and differ from culture to culture = various forms of historical relativism), some form of Kantian skepticism as to the ability of the mind to know the real still lingers on the most modern thinking, withits tendency to imprison the human mind in its own subjective thinking. “We are world-makers through language,” as many contemporary philosophers put it today.
This atmosphere tends to be hostile or skeptical with respect to any attempt to do a genine metaphysics or philosophy of real being, such as realist metaphysicians like St. Thomas and Thomist claim to be dong. But this is a sterile cop-out, and cannot for long satisfy the innate, unrestricted drive of the human mind to know all being – all that there is to know about all that there is. As the great modern Thomist, Maritain, has put it beautifully, “There is a nuptial relationship between mind and reality” that longs to be consummated.
Solution. What is needed, to reassure the self-doubting contemporary mind of the natural affinity of the mind for the real and of the possibility of a metaphysics of rel being, is a starting point of metaphysics that involves a direct existential encounter with the real so luminous or self-revealing that it is not open to practical personal doubt or uncertainty. It must also be one that reveals at the same time that we actually know both the existence and, to a significant degree, the essence of some real being other than ourselves. The most fruitful such starting point seems to e the privileged case of the “We are” manifested in human interpersonal dialogue. The peculiar power of this experience is that it plunges us immediately into a world of active reality shared by others just as real as myself, with whom I can actively communicate, and whose natures are revealed in the same experience.
Unfolding The Experience. When I engage in a sincere dialogue face to face with another person, using a common language that neither of us has made up, and succeed in communicating intelligibly with my dialogue partner – sending, receiving from outside us through our senses and not under our control – the following implications emerge clearly.
a. I am in the presence of another real being just as real as myself, but distinct from me. It does not make sense to believe that I am projecting of constituting the reality of the other and its usage; for if that were the case, then it would be equally true of the other partner, and each would be making up the reality and message of the other – which is absurd.
b. We exist in a common fold of existence enveloping but transcending us both; reality is both one and many.
c. By the very fact that we successfully communicate and are conscious of it, I know a great deal about the basic nature (kind of being) of each of one us: we are intelligently communicating (thinking, talking) beings, using bodies for communication, i.e., embodied spirits, thus different from all other non-communicating beings coming into my consciousness. Kant and all others like him presuppose all the above in their actual living, but have no grounds in their philosophy for explaining how it is possible to know this, nor do they even try.
To know all this with evidence that cannot be practically doubted without falling into a “lived contradiction,” i.e., denying in theory and words what one is in fact living our successfully, is to know that m mind has the real capacity to know – incompletely though it may be – both the existence and nature of beings in the real world in interaction with me. All the rest of our knowledge opens ot from this starting point. This is enough to lunch a realistic metaphysics of being and follow where it leads. One advantage of this approach is that it plunges us immediately into real being as a community of distinct but intercommunicating centers giving and receiving from each other across the bridge of self-expressive action. In a word, it reveals to us that to be is to be together, actively present to each other. All real beings are doing this all the time. But it lights up with special clarity in the case of a fully conscious dialogue between two free persons.
Questions For Review and Discussion
1. What is the meaning of “a being”? What are its two distinct but inseparable elements.?
2. How can we reach explicit reflective awareness of the “is” in being? Do all metaphysical systems agree on his focus on actual existence as the central core of all real beings?
3. What is meant by the “vocation of human beings” as endowed with intellect arising from the relation of intellect to being? In what sense can being still remain a “mystery” for us?
4. Explain the difference between “real being” and “mental being”? Examples of each? What is the key criterion for our distinguishing between the two?
5. Explain the fundamental importance of action as the self-manifestation of being if we are to have a “universe”? Could there be at least one completely inactive being?
6. Finite real beings go out of themselves to relate themselves to others through action for two reasons: what are they? Does it make sense to speak, as Maritain does, of the “the intrinsic generosity of being”?
7. In the philosophical vision of St. Thomas, action is the key to a realist epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Why? Why can it then be called a “relational realism”? Why does it also follow from this vantage point that all our human knowledge of real beings must be incomplete, imperfect?
8. Why in this book do we take the person as the best model for what it means to be a real being? Compare briefly the ancient, medieval, and modern approaches to the philosophical study of being.
9. What is the point of choosing interpersonal dialogue as the preferred starting point for a metaphysical study of being? Why it is especially effective in refuting Kant’s attempt to block access to any realist theory of knowledge or metaphysics?