Being

Being (Einai / Esse / Sein) — The most fundamental question of metaphysics and the proper object of ontology (from the Greek ón, “being,” and lógos, “discourse”). It distinguishes being — the fact of existing, that by which something “is” — from a being or entity, that which exists. Leibniz framed the decisive question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. In Greece, Parmenides inaugurated the theme by holding that “being is; non-being is not,” conceiving being as one, eternal, immobile, and indivisible, since thought and being coincide. Aristotle replied that “being is said in many ways” (pollakhôs legetai): the categories — substance, quality, quantity, relation, and others — articulate these ways of being, with substance as the primary sense. In Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas distinguished essence (what a thing is) from existence (the fact that it is): in God they coincide, for He is the very act of being (ipsum esse subsistens); in creatures they are really distinct, which is why creatures receive their existence. In the twentieth century, Heidegger charged that philosophy had forgotten the question of being (Seinsfrage) by confusing it with beings, ignoring the “ontological difference” between being and that which is. A simple example illustrates the distinction: I can list every entity in a room — table, book, air — yet none of them tells me what “to be” means. Closely related concepts are essence, existence, and nothingness.

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