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Why must the question of being be raised again?

For Heidegger, the whole of Being and Time is concerned primarily with one question, what is the

meaning of being? A question that for Heidegger has been woefully overlooked through most of

Western philosophy until the 20th century. Nevertheless it is questionable why should need to examine

being, in some prevalent sense it appears to be self-explanatory. This is noted by Heidegger in the

prologue of Being and Time But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand theexpression 'Being'? Not at all, the dismissal of being as a concept requiring explanation necessarily

needs to be overturned, and an investigation into understanding the meaning of the concept

reawakened.

Heidegger describes how the concept of being has been abandoned since Aristotle and Plato, On the

basis of the Greeks' initial contributions towards an Interpretation of Being, a dogma has been

developed which not only declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but

sanctions its complete neglect. The concept of being at once for Heidegger is universally known yet

incredibly undeveloped, regarded by him as one of the most emptiest of concepts. The lack of

investigation into being is a problem therefore that needs to be clarified, it is something that no

ontological investigation can overlook. If the process of examination of being has been flawed or too

reliant on tradition, the presuppositions behind these mis-examinations has to be exposed, and a

process of discovery into the correct meaning of being undertaken, this is part of the discipline that

is philosophy.

Frede points out Heideggers identification of Aristotle and his doctrine of a manifold of meanings of

being that came to dominate Western philosophy, that it is Aristotle's doctrine of the categories of

beings that Heidegger refers to when he presents his view of the historical development of Western

thought that ended in complete forgetfulness of the question of being. Aristotle distinguished

between substance and attributes of substances, these categories being distinctions in the nature of

things. Aristotle's theory of the natural structure of reality is based upon the primacy of substances,naturally existing independent entities, to be then either means to be a substance or one of the

attributes of a substance, as such there is no unified sense of being that could be predicated of items in

all categories.There is only an "analogy of being" to indicate the centrality of thesubstance, without permitting a univocal definition of the term "being." Theconception of being across Western philosophy has been gathered around thenotion of substantiality, with substance remaining the central term in ontology.This framework has thus kept the concept of being empty and devoid of anydeeper meaning. However it is at this point possible to question whether thisframework has produced any negative impact on our notion of being, which hasserved what can be seen as functional purpose in investigation, for Heidegger to

provoke further investigation, it is necessary to identify how the concept of beingis lacking in any particular regard, and whether further investigation can revealanything further that can aid in a functional or pragmatic regard. One can arguethat such classifications of categories have lead to impoverished theories, suchas the Cartesian dichotomy between body/nature and mind, or in medievaltheology the distinction between essence and existence, however it'sshortcomings still need to be pointed out as a concept in itself.

In the introduction to Being and Time, three presuppositions are thus pointed outto demonstrate the emptiness of the concept of being, so that one can move onto a more detailed investigation. Heidegger first points out the maintained beliefthat being is the most universal concept, we have an understanding of being thatis included in conceiving anything which one apprehends in something whichis. However Heidegger points out the universality of being cannot be described

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as a class or genus, the 'universality' of Being 'transcends' any universality ofgenus. Aristotle acknowledged this, knowing this transcendental universality asa unity of analogy, but even though he put the problem of being in a differentlight for Heidegger, he failed to clear up the categorial interconnections and thismanifests itself in the understanding of being until the 20th century. That being isthe most universal concept does not make it the clearest for Heidegger, rather

the darkest.

Secondly, deduced from its universality it has been maintained that the conceptof being is undefinable. Being cannot be conceived as an entity, nor derivedfrom higher concepts a prior. Despite its undefinability, there is no elimination ofthe question of the meaning of being, simply we cannot present being asdefinable in traditional logic.

The third presupposition Heidegger presents is that it is held that 'Being' is ofall concepts the one that is self-evident. Whenever one makes an assertionsome use is made of being, with these expressions seemingly being intelligible.

However in these assertions we have an average kind of intelligibility, whichmerely demonstrates that this is unintelligible, we have surrounded ourselveswith an understanding of being without a clear meaning of being itself, provingfor Heidegger it is necessary to raise the question of being again.

Heideggers three pronged exposure of the strange simplicity we have assignedto the concept of being accurately reinforces his view that it requires additionalexplication. Ultimately he points out that when it comes to think about ontology,for Heidegger the traditional treatments have failed to distinguish between twokinds of questions we can ask: the ontic question that asks about the properties

of things, and the ontological question that asks about the ways or modes ofbeing. Thus an ontological inquiry into human being then will not look at theproperties possessed by humans, but rather the structures that make it possibleto be human, leading to Heidegger's conception of the human mode of existencedasein.

But it is still possible to question what such a concept can tell us, and why it is needed if in an ontic

role it spreads little into the theories of understanding the world that we already possess. However it is

pertinent to push the problems of a simple understanding of being as relating to some of the continual

problems that afflict conceptual theories of the world. As mentioned before, the development of

Western philosophy orienting itself towards being as reality or thinghood, making the world a

sum total of independently existing entities can account for many of the difficulties philosophers havebeen unable to solve, difficulties especially not solved by subject-centered philosophies of the

Cartesian-Kantian tradition and that still exist today. For Heidegger, if there are basically two separate

entities of subject and object that occur side by side the problem of how contact occurs between a

thinking subject and an independently occurring world remains an insoluble problem. Kant for

example, left the main feature of ancient ontology intact, the centrality of substance, the independent

thing that existences through time remained the fundamental building block of all reality. In particular

Kant's attempt to prove the existence of an external world is under Heidegger's view, a indication that

Kant did not rigorously question the basis of traditional ontology enough.

In turn, the idealist seems to be condemned to immanentism, the problems of explaining the

transcendence of objects in relation to our minds in a way that makes sense. Heidegger thus arguesthat these problems only if one posits a fundamental rift between the isolated mind and an

independently existing realm of objects, while this seems to be a natural presupposition, Heidegger

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labels it the result of the philosophers mistaken stance and a splitting asunder of the phenomena.

The ontology of merely existing things is therefore cut back by Heidegger, arguing that occurrence

alongside is the only available ontological category to avoid that split. We should understand

ourselves as beings with a world that is characterised as a being among. Therefore we can take

Heidegger's view to quite a radical extreme and while it possible to disagree with Heidegger

ultimately his argument is to determine not an immediate an answer but to demonstrate the need to

investigate being and to pull into focus the ontological priority of the question of being.

In Heidegger's perspective progress in many areas has been slowed by the demarcation of subject and

object, that new questions of being are arising and need to be addressed. In biology there is an

awakening tendency to inquire beyond the definitions which mechanism and vitalism have given for

"life" and "organism", and to define anew the kind of Being which belongs to the living as such or in

theology beginning to understand once more Luther's insight that the 'foundation' on which its

system of dogma rests has not arisen from an inquiry in which faith is primary, and that conceptually

this 'foundation' not only is inadequate for the problematic of theology, but conceals and distorts it.

Heidegger points out how science has naturally followed the philosophical trail blazed by Aristotle

and Plato, that ontological inquiry is primordial and can lead the sciences to more than without it. The

question of being therefore ascertains the a priori conditions that science relies on to examine entitiesin a particular way, and also for the ontologies that provide the ontical foundations for the sciences

themselves. Without this question it is nave and opaque for the sciences to research into the being

of entities if it fails to discuss the meaning of being in general.

Nevertheless it is at this point we can call the scale of Heidegger's investigation into question. He

correctly raises the problems that science and mathematics face in investigating concepts of which

philosophical clarity has not been determined. Such conceptual problems can be perceived in modern

quantum physics. However it is wrong to perhaps say science is limited in any respect by the absence

of these questions of being. Certainly in areas such as scientific investigation into the processes of

consciousness such questions are very pertinent but in cases of abstract mathematics, the

subject/object divide is not considered, rather similarly with physics and chemistry abstract

frameworks are postulated to discerned data, a process that has reached a level of having to

incorporate our own limits of presence within the world. Whether or not Heidegger's elevated

questioning of being can have said to determined a path to such ways of thinking is debatable, but is

similarly difficult to argue that without them science could not have progressed in the way it has.

Such considerations however do not completely detract from the importance of Heidegger's aim. The

continued problems observed in the ontology derived from Aristotle mean that irregardless of whether

such subject/object divisions are valid and necessary there is a burning importance to examine and

develop the fundamental concept of being in an attempt to alleviate or even simply gain insight into

the possible nature and form of being itself. In this respect while Heidegger's overall project orschema might have failed as an complete account, certainly the concept of being is illuminated further

by the questioning of the basic ontology behind the history of Western philosophy.

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Daniel Anthony