DIALECTIC OF THE IDEA OF BEING
For Parmenides being is a plenitude, a density to be more precise. But this determined density becomes, with Melissus, indeterminate, and in the first hypothesis of Plato’s Parmenides, it becomes an emptiness.
Concerning the idea of being, the roles of Plato and Aristotle seem to have been twofold. First, we can find in them elements of a critique of the idea of being. According to Plato, being is on the same footing as nonbeing and is no easier to know than it; being is not the aggregate of beings but an idea that is other in relation to certain other ideas; it is one idea in relation to others. And Aristotle shows that the idea of being is not unique, no more than is the very idea of unity; one should not search for a unique being, but for each genre of being, that which is being and one; the idea of being will be the analogy of relations between each of these beings and the being of each.1 But second, Plato shows that this being is something irreducible by the very fact that it is a third term in relation to each of the terms in relation. It should also be noted that he speaks of a being that is being at its perfection. For his part, Aristotle, by means of his affirmation of something that is fundamentally being, by his theory of substance, prepares the way for the Neoplatonic conception of a hierarchy of beings and then the Scholastic conception.2
Descartes, following medieval philosophers who accepted a kind of equivalence of transcendentals, only brings to a completion the Scholastic conception when he identifies being and value, and builds a hierarchy of beings that is a hierarchy of values.
With Kant, we find a reversal of these different theories of being: being is not a relation, as the Platonic and Aristotelian critiques of the idea of being tried to pretend; it is not a quality and a value, as the constructive parts of these philosophies tried to pretend, followed by the Scholastics and Descartes. It is neither copula nor predication. It is position.
But, Hegel will add, repeating an idea found in Plato, this position emerges only through negation. Being is negativity at the same time as it is position.
But, Bergson will add in turn, negativity is second; or, in any case, negation is second; affirmation is first.
And this affirmation is an affirmation of a plenitude.
Now we find ourselves face to face with the affirmation of Parmenides, but this time pronounced in the face of a Heraclitean world.
BEING AND JUDGMENT
Plato and Aristotle have shown that it is necessary to distinguish between to be and to be true. This was all the more necessary since the verb “to be,” in Greek, meant both it is and it is true. But it is also appropriate to observe that the identity of these two meanings is well founded: to affirm that a thing is, is to affirm that the judgment that affirms it is true. The idea of being implies the existence of a being that affirms being. The idea of being, like every idea, only has a place in the world of judgments, the universe of discourse.
ANTINOMIES OF THE IDEA OF BEING
But it should also be said that, like every idea, the idea of being is the affirmation of something other than that which does the act of affirming, and has position through our thought of something that is outside of our thought, and is the position of something outside of position.
This something resists us and at the same time fulfills our desires; for Maine de Biran and Scheler, being is that which resists; for Marcel, along with Biran and Scheler, it is what fulfills our expectation.
Being is what happens [se produit] and what is permanent; and in order to grasp it the mind will always hesitate between the idea of a substance and the idea of an event.
Being is seen by its action, but there is a center, other than this action, from where it radiates.
Being is relative independence; but it is dependence at the same time; it is existence, which means that it detaches from an obscure depth, and it is knowledge—if we take this word in the sense that Claudel gives to it, as a participation or communion. In a first moment, being is closed in on itself as a here and now, and it is this that I have termed existence. But in a second moment it is participation in everything else, in relation to the other, to that which it is not, and which, however, it is. And it is this that I have termed knowledge.
Yet it would still have to be said that these antinomies themselves presuppose a rather artificial posing of the problem, as if we ourselves and being were opposite one another, whereas we are embedded in being and being is embedded within us. Between the thought of being and being there is a subterranean communication. The thought of being is being as well.
Fusion of the separated, separation of what is united—by this path one turns back toward the essence of Hegelianism.
We find this double function in judgment. The word being separates and at the same time unites.
It will thus tend to incline along one or the other of these slopes: thought will move toward analysis and will identify comprehension and dissection, or, moving toward synthesis, it will only be satisfied if it believes itself to be at the heart of the absolute.
BEING AND THE IDEA OF BEING
Nowhere do we see more clearly than in the idea of being what could be called the simultaneous marriage and divorce of language and reality. The most abstract and emptiest idea, the fullest feeling: one implies the other. (We could say the same thing about the ideas of here and now.)3 This happens in such a way that after having said that the idea of being is being, it would be possible to say that being is not; I want to say that there is such an abundance of being in being that it cannot be designated by the little word is.
1. Heidegger demonstrates how the analogy of being ought to be pushed even further than it has been by the Aristotelians and the Thomists. The being of human being is not instrumental being, nor the being of a truly subsistent, nor extended being. Here there are many kinds of different beings (Lecture Course of 1928–29 [Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27], lecture 8).
It is very characteristic of Heidegger that all the analogies of being (being of the human being, being of the instrument, being of the extended thing, being of truths) and all the ambiguities of being (being as essence, as existence, as relation, as affirmation of truth) are left in the shadows, left in the background, in the “is” of judgment, which is like a middle, indifferent “is.”
2. To take up again an example from recent philosophy, for Heidegger every perception implies an idea about the being of the perceived, or at least a sentiment, a presentiment, of the being of the perceived, as every usage of an instrument implies an idea, a sentiment, or more precisely a presentiment of the instrument.
But from here there ensue some difficulties within Heidegger’s philosophy. Does he not take as concrete what in truth is abstract? And how does one make out of these different ideas of being a single idea? And if it is true that there is only being if there is Dasein, can being be studied independently of Dasein? It could doubtlessly be admitted that, all the while affirming that the comprehension of being is a property of Dasein, being is independent of this comprehension. Heidegger has not sufficiently demonstrated this; he has surely reserved this for later work.
Whatever the case, like Plato and Aristotle, after critiquing the idea of a unity of being, Heidegger reestablishes this idea.
3. In his critique of the idea of being, as of the here and now, Hegel believed himself to be able to come to a conclusion about the indeterminateness of the feelings that these words express from the fact that the words are indeterminate. As Koyré has so well remarked, for Hegel language incarnates spirit, and the life of language is the life of spirit (see “Hegel à Iena,” Revue philosophique [1934]: 283).