Hereandnow wrote: ↑September 7th, 2020, 9:22 pm
Read this to clarify (intended for TS)
Well, that response illustrates the problem. Phrases such as "being in the foundational sense," "being as such," and "eternal essences of all things" are meaningless phrases. The word "being" has two uses in English --- it is a noun denoting an existent, especially a living creature, and as a verb, the present participle of to be (to exist). There is no sense to "being as such" --- the term is only meaningful with reference to some particular existent. It does not denote some inchoate, mystical substance, some "essence," that permeates all tangible, perceptible things. Nor can any such mystical substances supply a foundation for any useful ontology. Speaking of "being" in that way does not constitute some revolutionary insight; it is merely a linguistic corruption contrived in an attempt to describe an incoherent idea.
That's what Heidegger said (as well as Husserl. A thing is an "predicatively formed affair of actuality"). He takes Being as such as a badly misunderstood concept. These mysterious intuitions, he said, one might have of Being are what he is trying to give some articulation to. He thinks we have to to understand Being as a foundational concept in an analytic of Time: I approach a thing, it IS there. What is it that constitutes this awareness of the thing before me? It is not some pure intimation of Being, for, as you say above, no sense can be made of this. He sees that before I even approach the thing, I am equipped with the ability to acknowledge it AS something, some reference to language, a foreknowledge of what couches and chairs ARE before we can analyze what it means that things ARE. The areness, if you will, is bound, in every case, always, already, bound to the pre understanding, so the question of what it means for something to be is analyzable to the temporal conditions that are in place in order for a "there is" or a "I am" to occur at all. this is why Heidegger's ontology is as foundational as it can get: wher a scientific account is about planets and chromosomes, the phenomenological ontology is about what it is for a thing to be at all, so that when you approach the microscope, there is a constitution, if you like, a paradigmatically informed apperceptive constitution that makes encounters at all maningful, and thus,the scientist's work meaningful.
That is supposed to "clarify" the meaning of "Being as such"? You seem to be agreeing that "no sense can be made" of that, then proceed to divert to a discussion of the ability we have to perceive or recognize things --- neither of which has anything to do with "being," as that term is normally understood. From there we get:
"The areness, if you will, is bound, in every case, always, already, bound to the pre understanding, so the question of what it means for something to be is analyzable to the temporal conditions that are in place in order for a "there is" or a "I am" to occur at all."
"Areness"? Is that some sort of synonym for "being as such"? You're just piling more gobbledygook on top of the previous gobbledygook. What it "means to be" is not "analyzable" at all; no analysis of that concept is necessary. It is a simple term, used to distinguish perceptible, tangible, cognizable denotata of terms from imaginary, fictitious, hypothetical, etc., ones. It is among the simplest, least problematic terms in the English lexicon.
"Analyzable to the temporal conditions that are in place"? Are you stating or implying that whatever exists, exists in some time and place? That is not true. Many things exist which have no spatio-temporal coordinates, e.g., numbers, love, beauty --- the things denoted by most other abstract terms. They exist if the terms denoting them have descriptive, explanatory, communicative utility.
You're trying to "reify" a verb used to mark a simple distinction into some sort of ethereal, mysterious substance --- conjuring up a problem where there is none.