Ancient
Greece & You
Joe Greenwald, Champlain Valley
Union High School, VT
The Philosophy of Being
The History and Viewpoints of Being
To ask such questions as "what defines
Being?" a brief history of the subject must be given. Two
of the most famous philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, are also
two of the most studied philosophers in this area. One might
think of Socrates, but how much is really Socrates and how much
is Plato in the Socratic dialogues? Even what Xenophon wrote
of Socrates may not be wholly trusted, as the information is
still not directly from Socrates himself. Other ancient Greek
philosophers such as Parmenides and Pythagoras are also studied,
though not to the same extent. More than a thousand years after
the time of Plato, Aristotle, and their peers, their work was
priceless, although controversial as great minds like Anselm
and Thomas Aquinas began to search for the answers to the same
questions the Greeks had attempted to answer long before. To
do this they used the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle as stepping
stones so as to continue the logic of some of the most brilliant
men ever. The time of Aquinas and Anselm was unlike that of Plato
and Aristotle, because the growth of the mind was an endeavor
that held much respect in ancient Greece, whereas in the medieval
world (Anselm dates 11th to 12th centuries, Aquinas lived in
the 13th century), during the Crusades and other such brutal,
destructive happenings, the mind was often neglected in favor
of a broadsword or another such weapon. Yet despite flaws such
as this, the medieval era did harvest minds such as are rarely
seen. And so our history begins with some of the first recorded
thoughts on the nature of Being.
Plato, when discussing Being, saw that
first one must realize there is a distinct difference between
properties, and objects that have properties. Only after this
was thoroughly understood, could the study of Being be made:
Plato was convinced that objects exist only in the world of the
transient, whereas properties existed at a higher level. To Plato,
properties were in the realm of Being, and objects were not.
He was forced by logic into denying that objects "are"
as a consequence of his following Parmenides in the belief that
Being was eternal and unchanging. He did attempt a compromise,
however, by placing objects between Being and Not Being, putting
them in a state of "becoming". He used this same pattern
when saying that the Form of Good existed on a higher level than
everything else that was Being. This concept Plato placed in
a category above Being; it was more than Being.
Aristotle did not focus as much as Plato
on the place of objects in relation to Being and did not place
the teachings of Parmenides at the forefront of his arguments.
He made three points to address the subject, instead, which were
later used as the outline of a method of analysis for Being.
These three points are as follows:
- All sciences touch on the concept of Being
as it is related to their studies, but only the science of philosophy
inquires directly into Being.
- To inquire directly about Being is to
attempt to find the strand spans and connects all the many uses
of the word "is".
- The only way to inquire about Being is
to inquire into a variety of closely associated concepts, the
most important of which are the many kinds of causes and the
ideas of unity and plurality.
Aristotle spent his time on the subject
thinking about the various uses of the word is. He recognized
that sometimes when we use the word "is", existence
is implied, whereas sometimes it is not. Aristotle was also of
the opinion that we may speak of objects and properties without
allowing for their formerly stated separate states of existence.
And with that we leave Plato and Aristotle
for a time to focus on the works of the medieval Scholastics;
then more specifically on the difference in views between Anselm
and Thomas Aquinas.
The Scholastics consisted of those who
called themselves nominalists, and their virtual opposites: the
realists. Surprisingly enough, both the nominalists and the realists
came to the same conclusion as to the nature of Being, despite
their coming to this conclusion from opposite directions: the
nominalists believed that properties were collections of objects
and realists believed objects were merely properties of properties.
So both factions came to the same conclusion: that there is only
one meaning ascribed to the word "is". They reached
this conclusion by saying (nominalists) that properties were
of objects, or (realists) that objects were properties, so therefore
they were essentially the same either way. It's as if one person
calls a note F sharp and the other calls it G flat: both ways
the pitch is the same.
However, this whole deduction is only a reductio ad absurdum
that proves just how valid the Aristotelian method was simply
because the word "is" does not have only one meaning.
For example, take the phrases "the door is brown" and
"the man is here": one ascribes a quality to an inanimate
object whereas the other begins to define the state of Being
of a living being.
Many Scholastics spent much of their time
when thinking about Being not discussing the true nature of Being
but rather discussing the state of Being possessed by God. The
main attraction when studying this subject is the battle between
Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. The background for this battle is
this: Anselm, who lived some time before Thomas Aquinas, wrote
a book entitled Proslogion, which contained the now famous article
"Anselm's Ontological Argument", outlining a philosophical
and logical thought process that explained why God must exist.
Later, Aquinas read this and saw error in Anselm's reasoning.
Anselm stated that if God existed then
the questions of what and whether God existed could both be answered
with "God is Being". That would be what he was, and
that would be his state of Being. On this Aquinas agreed. From
there, Anselm took the fact that what God was became the same
as that he was when he existed and from that inferred that if
one could define God, one could then know what state of Being
God existed in. Since God is defined as being Being, then God's
state of Being was Being. This was where Aquinas disagreed. He
would agree that if God existed (was in a state of Being), then
he could be defined as Being, however he could not agree that
if God could be defined as Being that he was necessarily in a
state of Being. This argument has been carried on by others into
the modern age, and shall most probably be argued until some
irrefutable proof of the existence of God is found (which may
be never).
And with this philosophical discussion
of God, our history session ends, leaving us to draw our own
conclusions about the true nature of Being.
To begin to draw our own conclusions on the subject of Being,
we must ask questions. Questions that one would never think to
be able to answer through pure logic. Confusing questions that
when answered make less sense than they did as questions. Questions
that have no right or wrong answers as far as the human mind
can perceive.
We will discuss two such questions. The
first is one that can be answered very logically and without
leading to too much confusion: "Is existence a predicate?"
This can be translated into: can existence
be assigned to an object as one would assign a property? The
answer is no. The logic behind this answer is as follows:
- Assume that the statement is true (then
a contradiction can be found, resulting in a reductio ad absurdum
proof, not unlike that mentioned before)
- Then understand that if a property is
to be assigned, there are only two types of things it could be
assigned to: those that already possess the property, and those
that don't.
- Therefore existence can only be given
to those things that exist or those that don't exist.
- Since we can rule out giving existence
to things that already exist as a redundant action that would
change nothing, we see that we are left with those things that
do not possess existence.
- Then existence can only be given to those
things that do not exist, which is a contradiction because there
is nothing to give existence to because what we would give it
to does not exist.
That was a small sampling of the logic
used by such great thinkers as metaphysics has seen. From Socrates
to Thomas Aquinas to G.E. Moor, logic like this has been used
to answer questions that at first sight are seemingly unanswerable.
The second question we will analyze is
one that has been answered in many different ways by many brilliant
philosophers over the ages. It is the question that haunts students
and teachers of metaphysics, one that has no answer at all. The
question? "What is Being?"
Parmenides said it was One; Plato said
One and Many; Aristotle believed it to be Substance, and Descartes
was convinced it was Substance in the modes of thought and extension.
When answering this question, however,
we must first define what we are asking. What do we mean by the
word Being? Is "Being" referring to a property, or
is it naming something which may be one, or may be a collection
of many properties and/or objects?
Once these clarifying questions have been
asked, we realize that we are following the direction of Aristotle
without realizing it. We are attempting to find that unifying
strand that connects all the many uses of the word "is",
which is a different word but the same idea as "Being"
because they are both derived from the verb "to be".
The asking of such clarifying questions
also reveals the fact that when Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle,
Descartes, and all their philosophical peers (Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Hartmann, etc.) were not all necessarily answering the same question.
And so until the question is defined, the
answer cannot be given. Can logic bring us closer to defining
the question? Possibly, but maybe there are also limits on how
far logic can carry an argument. There are some math problems
which do not give the needed information to complete the problem.
Logic has limits. And I believe the defining and answering of
the question "What is Being?" (or should it be "What
is being?"?) is out of those limits, although it may eventually
be brought within the grasp of the human mind when more is known
about the universe.
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