Ontology as a question addressed to the being of beings

The multiple meanings of being

“Being” is said in multiple senses, says Aristotle at the beginning of the fourth book of his Metaphysics, he enumerates in this same passage, a list of concepts each of which receives the name of being in a different way each time. “Such a thing is called a being because it is a substance, another because it is a property of the substance, another still because it is a conveyance towards the substance, or a corruption of the substance, or a privation of substantial forms, or a quality of substance either because it is an efficient or generating cause either of a substance or of what is named relative to a substance or because it is a negation of something one of the qualities of a substance or of the substance itself” reports Franz Brentano.

The impossibility of a unitary science of being

Pierre Aubenque structures his large volume devoted to the problem of being in Aristotle around his failure to constitute a “One” science of being (which he calls first philosophy), in other words, to ensure a sure foundation for his metaphysics. Although the multiple meanings of the word being are expressed in relation to a single term (pros hen), they do not necessarily make it a gender or a homonym.

The question of the foundation

In metaphysics, in Aristotle as later in René Descartes, the role of ground is played by “Substance”. But more generally, to seek the foundation or principle is to ask oneself what things are ultimately based on and therefore, step by step, go back to the first cause or first uncaused principle. In the order of knowledge, the search for the foundation consists in discovering on what (the solid element) one can lean to begin to think, thus Descartes who bases all his reasoning on the “cogito“, or Heidegger who momentarily based Being and Time on a “metaphysics of Dasein”. Scholasticism will use, by reformulating them, the four Aristotelian causes (material, formal, final, efficient), to induce, following the example of Aristotle (with the need for a first engine), the four proofs of the existence of God.

In the brief period of “German Idealism”, with major thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, nothing less than the “question of being” is played out, in an Idealism which is characterized by a “will” or a “claim” of “System”, which singles it out in the history of philosophy according to a commentary by Gilbert Gérard. In its formal quest, this question of the system, will confer on German Idealism, its unity, above the differences in temperaments of these protagonists. Of the three philosophers, this last commentator considers the Hegelian system as the only truly accomplished one.

Nietzsche’s Nihilism and the Will to Power constitutes, according to Heidegger, the ultimate form of the deployment of the “metaphysics of subjectivity” initiated by Descartes.

Martin Heidegger will call “Fundamental Ontology” or “metaphysics of Dasein” his own attempt in Being and Time to establish a more solid foundation for metaphysics.

Ontotheology

While for Kant, who would have created it, the term “onto-theology” simply designates a speculative form which aims to deduce the existence of God from its concept, it becomes the internal law of being in Martin Heidegger, in its reinterpretation of the history of metaphysics, and this from the Greek origin. In 1957, Heidegger gave a lecture entitled Onto-theological constitution of metaphysics in which he brings out the fact that all metaphysics inquires into the totality of beings (in their being) and under that hierarchical of the order which determines the reason (God, first cause), even if it turns its back on theology. Heidegger speaks of this onto-theological structure as a “destinal” feature of all metaphysical thought.

Because of its “onto-theological” structure, metaphysics, well before the introduction of Christianity, has been obsessed from the outset with the question of the ground which aims at the supreme being, an aim which is accompanied, according to Heidegger, by the “forgetting” of what is neither a being nor beingness in itself, but Being itself otherwise called “ontological difference”.

The analogy

For Scholastic, who invested a lot in this concept, it was essential, in order to offer, through its use, to consider the possibility of a rational discourse, on the “supreme being”. It was a question of firmly establishing metaphysics as the “science of being qua being”, hence the development of a science which would be neither “univocal” nor “equivocal”, namely “a analogical science, or “analogy of attribution” conceived as the hierarchical mode of a gradual participation of beings in being according to their dignity.

The constitutive and permanent features of metaphysical ontology

To the already listed features of metaphysics such as the necessity of a foundation, the revelation of its systematic structure with analogy and onto-theology, Heidegger adds (discovers), the forgetting of being and its destiny character.

Forgetting of being

From the beginning (at least since Plato) the question in search of being (of its modalities) has replaced the question of meaning. The most immediate consequence of this forgetting is the permanence, unquestioned in metaphysics, of a fund of ontological concepts, which runs through the whole history of philosophy, concepts such as “being”, ‘substance’, ‘movement’, ‘time’, ‘Life’, ‘Self’ in favor of false evidence, latent dogmatism.

For Heidegger, the “forgetting of being” begins with the thought of being as “subsisting being” and permanent in Greek metaphysics, which crystallizes in medieval Scholasticism, to be taken to its ultimate consequences in the modern science and technology. From then on, following his long meditation on Nietzsche, Heidegger will experience the “forgetting of being”.

The destiny character of metaphysics

“Under the sign of positive science and its technical application, this oblivion rushes towards its completion, leaving nothing more to remain beside it which can benefit from a more authentic being in some world reserved for the ‘sacred'” writes Hans-Georg Gadamer. For Heidegger, metaphysics is no longer just a philosophical discipline, but becomes a historical power, in its own right, (in its essence) which reflects a destiny of being.

The man of metaphysics is no longer dealing with “things”, nor even with objects, Gegenstand, but with everything that in a perspective utility has a vocation to enter into the available fund, which Heidegger calls Bestand. Now it is all beings, including man, who in the modern world take their place as “human capital” in the horizon of utility.

“Technique” in the sense of “Gestell” or “Device”, holds man in his power, he is by no means its master. Modern man is required by and for the principal unveiling, which puts him on notice to unveil the real as fund.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)