The Problem of "Existential Neutrality" - "On Being and the One" Ch. 1 from "Being and Some Philosophers" by Etienne Gilson

Stephen Alexander Beach

(... words)

Sorry this post is incomplete. I will rectify that soon with the last few pages. 

On Being and the One

A Simple Definition of Metaphysics

Aristotle defines metaphysics as that study which considers being in its most universal and abstract qualities, or being as a whole, aspects of being universal to all things. This is distinct from any other science which only takes a part of being and investigates it insofar as it is that particular aspect. "Thus the mathematical sciences deal with quantity, the physical sciences with motion, and the biological sciences with life, that is to say, with certain definite ways of being, none of which is being as being, but only being as life, as motion, or as quantity." 

Now what happens when people do not understand this simple outline? Gilson points out that to try to understand the whole from the perspective of one of its parts will only lead to failure. And in this failure they may conclude that the whole field is useless or impossible. [Here I think of Descartes trying to understand metaphysics from the starting point of the subjective mind ... ultimately leading to metaphysics rejection in the 19th century.] In Gilson's words, "But to invest any conceivable part of being with the attributes of being itself, and to investigate the attributes of the whole from the point of view of any one of its parts, is to undertake a task whose very notion involves a contradiction. Anybody who attempts it is bound ultimately to fail. When he fails, he himself or his successors will probably blame his failure on metaphysics itself; and they then will conclude that metaphysics is a pseudo-science, which busies itself with problems impervious to the light of human reason." 1

Two Metaphysics Principles

Gilson lays out two principles which cannot be transgressed without falling back into the errors mentioned. First, that objective being must be the first principle of our knowledge of the world and our thought about it. [Again, instead of Descartes' notion of the self thinking being as the first metaphysical principle.] Second, that past views of metaphysics which are skeptical should be blamed on its philosophers who did not understand or rejected principle one, just mentioned. Gilson pauses for a minute, though, to point out that there is a paradox, or even absurdity, in that the greatest of minds cannot grasp that which is the source and presence in all thought. They misunderstood being and yet being is the sine qua non for thinking and truth at all. 

What is Meant by "Being"?

Having read so far in the chapter Gilson intuits that one might wonder what he means exactly when he uses the word "being." And so he explains ... In a first sense as a noun referring to an individual thing or to all things as a whole. 2 In a second sense being can be considered a verb, "to be", in reference to the action of a thing in existing and staying in existence. 

Existential Neutrality

Now there is an interesting relationship between these two. One cannot experience the act of to-be by itself, but rather only indirectly through a being already existing. The verb is known only through the noun. Yet the opposite it true, one can conceive of a type of being apart from actually existing. [Although I will say that even these imaginations use experience of actually existing being to create these non-existing being.] "Since being is thinkable apart from actual existence, whereas actual existence is not thinkable apart from being, philosophers will simply yield to one of the fundamental facilities of the human mind by positing being minus actual existence as the first principle of metaphysics." [Herein lies the fundamental problem of all Rationalist philosophy.] 

In a certain way, Gilson mentions, beings are always conceived apart from to-be because we cannot directly conceive of to-be, as mentioned above. Here he turns to Kant, who emphasized this paradox to the extreme. If one considers that we do not have a direct concept of the act of to-be, then if we did it would have to be a separate idea in our minds which is added to our notion of the thing itself. Therefore, to-be, since we don't know it in that way, and even if we did, is superfluous to the understanding of a thing. "... Kant wants us to understand that there is no difference whatsoever between the conceptual content of our notion of a thing conceived as existing and the conceptual content of our notion of identically the same thing, not conceived as existing." 3

Again, if one follows this track of logic then there is no real difference between a thought of something and it actually existing, because to-be is something external. "There is nothing we can add to a concept in order to make it represent its object as existing; what happens if we add anything to it is that it represents something else." Gilson sums up this view as, "In short, actual existence cannot be represented by, nor in, a concept." He refers to his as "existential neutrality". 

[If I could add my own thought in there for clarity, this logic follows if one starts with the premise that one can conceive of a being without conceiving of the act to-be. First, this is not the case because you cannot conceive of nothing. Everything in the thought first has come from actually existing beings before we can manipulate it in the imagination, Second, a solution to this is just to make a distinction, that while it is true that we do not experience the act of to-be directly, we do experience it indirectly through the existence of things. And so we do actually experience it. We experience it as unified with the being, or we couldn't know the being at all. So one cannot extract these two realities from one another, as Kant is doing.] 

If existential neutrality is true regarding our ideas of things, then Gilson points out that it is also true of philosophy as a whole. And so one's philosophical ideas no more apply to reality than a simple one. Now, Kant will agree that one hundred real dollars are different than potential ones, but that doesn't change the fact that if we follow his logic we end up at a place where we cannot verify the existence of ideas, even though real things do exist on their own. 4

Philosophies like this only consider the "to be" of a thing in the sense of a noun, that it is there, rather than as a verb, that it is an active force of continual existence. Gilson mentions that this is often done because the act of existence is not directly experienceable to us, and so people either mention it once at the very beginning of their thinking, or see it as not necessary or provable. 5 And so what happens when the actual existence is removed from metaphysics? 

The Development of the Concept of "To Be" in Parmenides 

Well, it is true that the early Greeks did not have a full understanding of being, but rather attributed the common identity in things to an element. It was Parmenides who then pointed out that instead of things sharing a common element, they all shared in being. 6 The problem is that elements are knowable in themselves through our common experience, water, for example, but "being" is not. "If I say that everything is water, everybody will understand what I mean, but if I say that everything is being, I can safely expect to be asked: what is being? For indeed we all know many beings, but what being itself is, or what it is to be, is an extremely obscure and intricate question." 

Parmenides, though, still made the identity of all things as a "to be" in the sense of a noun, and thus took this view of being to its ultimate and static conclusion that either all is, or nothing is. Gilson expresses Parmenides' philosophy beautifully. 7 The key to avoiding Parmenides' conclusions is inherent in the ambiguity of his phrase, "being is." "For indeed it is evident that only that which is, is, or exists, but it is not at once evident that only that which answers Parmenides' description of being is, or exists." 8 Again, in taking "being is" only in the sense of a noun then the whole world of sense and change must disappear as illusory. "If reality is that which is, then there is nothing real but being only, and, since we have no experience of anything which we may consider as absolutely one, ingenerable and indestructible, wholly homogenous, continuous and free from change, it follows of necessity that true reality is a pure object of the mind. Actual reality thus becomes the exclusive privilege of that object of thought to which alone our understanding can ascribe the attributes of being." 9

And so if we take the path of Parmenides' philosophy we hit an ultimate limit where we must hold that "to be" and "to exist" become two different things. This is because all of our experience of what exists is in the sensory world of change, and yet we cannot consider this to be according to Parmenides' definition. And so what is the world of experience? It is either nothing, something unrelated to being, or some type of twisted offshoot of it. Here Gilson points out that Plato is the continuation of Parmenides' idea, only he puts being fully in the immaterial realm, instead of the great sphere of being. 

The Development of the Concept of "To Be" in Plato 

Plato uses a phrase, "the really real" to designate that which most corresponds to being; in Greek, "ontos on". Plato, according to Gilson, struggles in his definition of the really real, and often resorts to the phrase, "its own self according to itself: auto kath auto." "The ultimate mark of true being lies therefore in 'selfhood.' Now to say this is merely to restate that relation, mysterious yet necessary, which Parmenides had already discovered between identity and reality." 10

And so for Plato it is the immaterial identity of things which is equivalent to its being. If this is the case, then his notion of the identity of things takes on the problem of Parmenides' sphere, it cannot change in any way given that to be is to be this particular thing, and to not be this identity anymore is equivalent to annihilation. "The permanency in self-identity is the chief mark of the 'really real,' that is, of being." 11 "In short, there is no difference whatsoever between being and self-identity." Hence we end up with Plato's forms. 12

[If I understand Gilson correctly, this is why Plato's One is not a being in the same way that Aquinas will call God ultimate being. This is because the notion of being as such and as an action has not be discovered yet. Rather, for Plato, things can have being if they exist in our physical world, but their identity is the source of this attribute. The identity is the really real in and of itself. And so Parmenides equated all things to being, as a noun, as the fundamental identity of things and Plato equated all things to being, as an immaterial noun, as the identity of things.] 

Being, for Plato, is equivalent to intelligibility. 

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1 - Gilson, Etienne. Being and Some Philosophers. 1

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