What Is Being? Ontology, Existence, and the Question of Reality

Direct Answer

Being is what everything that exists has in common: the sheer fact of existing, as opposed to what a thing is, how it is, or what it does. When we say "the table is," "you are," "God is," we are ascribing being. Being is thus the most general concept of all — every other concept applies only to some things, but being applies to everything. It is also, for that very reason, the hardest to say anything about.

The question "What is being?" divides philosophers. Aristotle answered by analyzing the ways things are — his categories — and identifying substance as the primary sense of being. Heidegger complained that philosophy had forgotten the question of being itself and asked it anew in Being and Time. The phenomenologists, beginning with Husserl, tried to approach being through the structure of experience rather than through abstract categories. Being, everyone agrees, is the most fundamental topic of metaphysics — and the most elusive.

Historical Context

The question of being is philosophy's oldest. The Presocratics asked what the world is made of; Parmenides went further and asked what "is" means: "Being is; non-being is not." Plato distinguished being from becoming — the eternal forms from the changing world of appearance. Aristotle systematized the inquiry: metaphysics is "first philosophy," the study of being as being, and his categories (substance, quality, quantity, relation, and the rest) map the ways in which things can be.

The medieval tradition deepened the question with the distinction between essence and existence: what a thing is, versus that it is. Thomas Aquinas held that in God alone essence and existence coincide; in creatures they are distinct. Modern philosophy shifted attention: Descartes asked about the being of the self, Kant asked what it means for something to be an object of experience, and Hegel made being the first category of his logic. The twentieth century brought the phenomenological turn — and with Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), the question of being became the question of the century.

Key Concepts

Being (to on, Sein). The fact or mode of existing shared by all that is; the most general subject of metaphysics.

Existence (Dasein, Existenz). For Heidegger, existence is the mode of being proper to human beings — being that is concerned about its own being; existence is not a synonym for being generally.

Categories. Aristotle's inventory of the highest kinds of predication; to say what being means is, on his view, to map these ways of being.

Essence vs. existence. The distinction between what a thing is and that it is; the scholastic framework that modernity inherited.

The ontological difference. Heidegger's name for the distinction between being and beings — between the fact that things are and the particular things that are. Forgetting this difference is, on his account, the history of metaphysics.

Philosophical Perspectives

Aristotle's answer: being is said in many ways, but always relative to one central case — substance. Accidents (qualities, quantities, relations) are beings only because they belong to substances. To ask what being is, then, is to ask what the basic kind of being is: and the answer is the concrete individual — the horse, the human, the star — in which everything else inheres.

Husserl and the phenomenologists approached being through the "things themselves": by bracketing assumptions about what exists and describing how things appear, phenomenology claims to recover the structures of being as given in experience. Being, on this view, is not a concept to be defined but a presence to be described.

Heidegger radicalized the program. The question of being must begin from the being who asks it — Dasein, the human being whose being is an issue for it. Being and Time analyzes Dasein's existence (care, temporality, being-toward-death) in order to ask the question the tradition forgot. The later Heidegger went further, declaring that metaphysics itself — with its categories, substances, and essences — had covered over the meaning of being, and that thinking must learn to listen to being's "sending" in history.

Modern Reflection

The question of being returned to prominence in the twenty-first century through "speculative realism" and new ontologies, which reject the anthropocentric framing of being in terms of experience or language. Meanwhile, physics raises its own question: what is the being of space, time, and the quantum field? The old question "why is there something rather than nothing" is once again live in cosmology.

Being also remains the deep background of the meaning-of-life question. If what "is" is just the physical universe, being is a brute fact; if being has meaning or ground, existence may be meaningful. Heidegger's answer — that being is time, and human being is being-toward-death — remains one of the most influential and unsettling proposals in philosophy. Whether one follows him or Aristotle, the question of being is not optional: every other philosophical question presupposes it.

Related Thinkers

• Aristotle — being as substance and categories
• Edmund Husserl — phenomenology and the things themselves
• Martin Heidegger — the question of being and Dasein
• Jean-Paul Sartre — being-in-itself and being-for-itself

Related Quotes

• "There are many senses in which a thing may be said to be, but all are related to one central case: substance." — Aristotle, Metaphysics (paraphrase)
• "The question of being has been forgotten; it must be asked anew." — Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
• "To the things themselves!" — Edmund Husserl, phenomenological slogan

Sources

• Existence — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Martin Heidegger — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Edmund Husserl — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Aristotle — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Further Learning

• Continue with What Is Existence?, What Is Ontology?, and What Is Nothingness?
• Read Being and Time in the book library
• Explore the Understanding Reality collection