First things first: on the priority of the notion of being.

Wood, Robert

In THIS PAPER I WANT TO CONSIDER three propositions:

1. "First to arise within intellectual awareness is the notion of Being." (1)

2. The human being is defined as "rational animal." (2)

3. Knowing involves "the complete return of the subject into itself." (3)

What are the conditions for the possibility of recognizing what is involved in those claims? In exploring them, I want to open up a way into Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle as well as Aquinas, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida--a rather ambitious task.

I

Instead of weighing in at the deep level, let us begin very simply and immediately with what is functionally, though not theoretically, indubitable, but which is also necessary for communicating the approach to and articulation of the theoretically indubitable. Let us begin with what is first, namely, the word "First" and with what is first in that, namely, the capital letter "F" as it appears on the printed page. After all, we could never practice Cartesian doubt, or at least know that we are doing so, without Descartes's having written about it. Even more, Descartes could not have formulated the method and the successive elimination of the dubitable without the French or Latin he employed in the application of the method and thus without knowing his ABCs.

Even though the three propositions listed above are grand in their scope, I prefer that we begin now at the most obvious and most humble level that in our grander aspirations we are prone to ignore. I begin with it because it is always already given but usually overlooked when we carry on our literate lives.

The capital letter "F" is an immediately given visual object, given outside in the environment where we each, alone and together, conduct our lives: it appears on a white page separate from its viewer across phenomenally empty space filled with light. It is a visual object on its empirical outside, but on its intelligible inside it carries a universal function as an alphabetical unit whose job is to enter into the construction of words (or function in the E-chart for visual testing). "F" is part of an alphabet, a constructed eidetic system, a system of conventionally fashioned universais whose meaning is invariant across all empirical instances, no matter how different they might be empirically. It appears visually on the current page as the upper case of ITCCentury Book "F" and subsequently in lower case "f" about fourteen times. It could also appear in a Gothic lower case "f" and upper case "F" or in any other typeface or handwritten script, empirical variations of which are endless.

What is remarkable, if we give it some thought--banal if we do not--is that the "f" is not only identical in all instances of its visual presentation, it is empirically different in each case of its being written, obviously if the typeface is different, but even when it is the same. Both as ingredient in and as apart from its different modes of empirical instantiation, its function is recognizable as identically the same. That seems to give the lie to nominalism at the very level of its names: we apprehend constructed universais that transcend their empirically available instances as a type of apprehension that operates in linguistic use generally and that we have come to call "intellectual."

The conditions for the possibility of such an operation is our apprehension of the universals involved in the universal orientation of our own powers, their corresponding kinds of objects, and the kinds of things that exhibit them. Each power, such as vision, is a power oriented ahead of time to all instances of the kind of feature correlative to the power; in the case of vision, it is color. Seeing, though individual in each seer, is universally oriented; but though universally oriented, it is actualized only in revealing individual instances of its corresponding type of object. (4) This undercuts, at the level of the existing individual, the alleged split between the universal and the individual, the healing of which can only be recognized through the kind of power through which the universal is recognized as such: the power of intellect. Note also that a biological reproductive line is the carrying on of a kind that we can recognize as such and thus as essentially the same despite the differences in its empirical instances. These last two observations--regarding powers and reproductive lines--pose the most fundamental challenge to nominalism.

Return to our starting point with the letter "f." It is part of an alphabetical system that is based upon a phonological analysis of spoken words. In such analysis we find five ideal instances of the ways in which the human oral cavity emits sound in speaking a given language: the vowels a, e, i, o, w, and such analysis identified also the nineteen ways in which these sounds can be clipped through what "sounds together with" the vowels, namely, the consonants (from the Latin cum and sonare): for example, sibilants or "hissings" c, s, x (at least in the sound identifying them as separate alphabetical units) or labials pronounced by the lips (Latin labia) b, m, p, and the like. It took an act of genius to perform the phonological analysis that covers all possible variants in a given language. It is a genius parallel to the one that discovered that all known and future metrical regularities could be deduced from a few axioms and postulates in the Euclidean system, or the genius that discovered the Periodic Table of Elements.

The first philosophical experience reported by Paul Weiss, the dean of twentieth century American metaphysicians, was when at age six he was introduced to the alphabet. He was astonished at the fact that everything that can be said can be said by using just twenty-six signs. Of course, there are different modulations in the phonological value of the letters or sounds depending upon the words in which they appear. For example, how--ough is pronounced depends upon the many different words in which it appears: through (ou), rough (uf), though (o), cough (awf), bough (ow); but, surprisingly, there is no sound for what that combination of letters immediately suggests: -ough (oog). So the alphabetic units have a somewhat loose relation to the sounds they were invented to indicate. (5)

Vowels and consonants combine into words that have a set of possible meanings determinable by definitions that fit a given word into a whole network of meanings. We are able to unpack the words we use in each definition in an ever-expanding network that extends to the whole of that about which we can speak.

Focus then upon the meaning of 'First' as the first word in the first proposition. It could be defined as the beginning of a numerical series, where "numerical" refers to a series of identical units determined by regular increments, and "series" is described as a type of sequential order, "order" as a coherent arrangement of factors, and "type" as a universal over against its instances, "coherent" in turn defined as ..., then "arrangement" defined as ..., "factor" as ..., "universal" as ..., "of" as ..., "in" as ..., "a" as ..., "where" as ..., "could" as ..., "defining" as ..., "or" as ..., "network" as ..., "refer" as ..., "be" as ..., "as" as ..., et sic ad systema verborum completa. The definitional network is eventually seen to cover the whole linguistic system that itself refers to how the Whole within which we find ourselves presents itself within a given linguistic tradition. We could go back to the original definition of "first" and follow out not only the word "numerical," but also "definition," "beginning," and all the other accompanying words. Of course, as the definitional net widens, there could be different ways of defining the terms: here is where hermeneutics and hypotheses enter the picture. Each definition involves its definers that in turn have to be defined, and so forth. The attempt to work out the place of any given thing in a definitional system is a helpful exercise in making explicit the implicit understanding involved in language use.

The situation is complicated by the fact that many words have more than one meaning--the Oxford English Dictionary lists a massive set of meanings for the word "heart": eight pages, twenty-three columns. That, I would maintain, is because this term lies at the heart of language; and that is because its referent lies at the heart of our lives. Which meaning is being employed can only be determined as it enters into a given sentence. A sentence as a combination of words pins down a possible plurality of meanings to the function they take on in specific propositions.

What makes a proposition out of a string of words is, fundamentally, the combination of nouns and verbs that anchor, inter alia, adjectives and adverbs. In the three declarative sentences we are examining, the combination of nouns, verbs, and so on makes a truth-claim. And the truth-claim of a proposition is verified insofar as it is revealed in judgments as corresponding to what is the case. In the current paper I claim that the propositions I have generated in the preceding paragraphs correspond to what is the case with regard to written language.

Of course, the phonological analysis given above indicates that what writing presupposes is speech in which the function of written units can be identically instantiated in sound. The text is something to be read, either out loud in my delivering it to an audience or in an individual's silent subvocal reading. So the alphabet and its employment in sentential functions bridges two fundamentally different sensory media: visual and audible. Writing translates the temporal flow of speech into the spatial fixity of a text. When one reads what is written or hears another read it, there is a translation from the spatial arrangements we call writing to the temporal unfolding in reading, reversing the original relation where the temporality of speech was translated into the spatiality of writing, replicating ad extra what originally occurred as the transcription of the temporality of sound into the spatiality of the brain.

The identically same meaning now appears through sound generated from the mouth of a reader across the space within the range of audibility for its audience--or it is subvocally pronounced by the silent reader. It appeared in the audible mode when the writer addressed its original audience. It can be sounded out by voices with different pitches, modulations, and timbres. The wonder here--and the basic difficulty for a thorough-going empiricist--is that the identically same meaning is found, not simply in variation of kinds of print and their instances but in the completely different medium of sound produced by empirically different voices. We spontaneously recognize identical sameness in differing empirical instances of differing kinds within a given medium and within a completely different medium, through all the empirical modulations in each medium.

We might add here a consideration of Braille where the spatial fixity involved also involves another radical difference in the medium: textured surface accessible to touch; yet the same functions are identical across the three media and the differentiated appearance (minimally spatiotemporal location) within the same medium. We might further add the visual communication of meanings, apart from writing, in sign language. Here is the same visual medium as statically inscribed writing, but in the moving temporal form of hand-signs.

Further, what speech and writing presuppose is induction into a specific linguistic tradition. Sentences in a given language admit of indeterminately many instantiations, but they also admit of being translated--mutatis mutandis--in indeterminately many different languages, such as our initial sentence, my English translation from a proposition in Latin of Thomas Aquinas: Primum quod cadit in intellectu est ens. "First to occur within intellectual awareness is the notion of Being."

It is with poetry especially in mind that I added the mutatis mutandis qualification for translation. In each culture, poetry, as the language of indwelling in the life-world, draws upon connotative, that is, associative rather than simply definitional, meanings of words as it draws upon the sonorousness of its language to provide another kind of meaning: emotively associative meaning. But there is also variation in the conceptual network defining each term employed both in differing cultures and within a given culture, complicating both translation as well as more complex communication in any language.

So propositions or their translatable truth-claims transcend instantiation in ethnically specific sentences. In principle, the cognitive meanings involved are accessible to any human being, across all linguistic differences. The translatability of language indicates our identity in nature with all other humans who individually and culturally have their own identities. We are all identically human in nature but not empirically identical human beings.

Continuing now with the Latin, note that the Latin term cadit introduces us to another kind of meaning: that of metaphor. The first meaning of cadere is "to fall"; but here, as metaphor, it refers to an occurrence within intellectual awareness. It is important, especially given the original meaning of cado, that the in is properly translated to correspond to Aquinas's intention--but, more important, to what is the case. Cadit suggests coming from without; but in Latin, the in with the ablative intellectu indicates rather what happens within intellectual awareness. The notion of Being arises a priori within intellectual awareness and does not come from without. That is a hermeneutical point about translating Aquinas. We will later consider the truth and implications of the content of the proposition.

Continuing with the metaphor, the word "metaphor" is also a metaphor whose original meaning is "carrying over" (from the Greek meta and phoreiri). Intellectus and its derivative English "intellect" are metaphoric as well, though here, contrary to the case with cadit, the metaphor is effaced and is not necessarily known when we follow the meaning. According to Aquinas's etymological guess, intellectus comes from intus or "within" and legere or "to read": intellect is the capacity through which one reads universal meanings within the sensory.

Such meanings are, first of all, the universal meanings of immediate sensa: consider the whiteness of the page and the blackness of the words written on it or the peculiarities of the sound of the voice as one might read the written words to an audience. Universal meaning is also expressed and therefore has to be interpreted through gathering the meaning of the words through the sensa, through the written page. We will return to the notion of intellect later in terms of the truth of what is being said about it in the proposition that we are considering.

Looking back over what we have distinguished, we find a hierarchy: the alphabet, the empirical instances of sights in writing and reading and sign language, of sounds in speaking and hearing, in textures of writing in Braille; then, after the alphabet, the word composed of alphabetical units; then the sentence composed of words; then the proposition distinct from ethnically specific sentences, though only accessible by being imbedded in a particular language; and finally, the termination of the series in the judgment of truth or falsity. (6)

II

We began together outside each of our own inwardnesses, fixed "outside" on the words on a page or on the sound of a voice reading them. In so doing, as we automatically do, we drew upon our own native English. Thus we are situated outside of our personal privacy in a space of common meanings as language incarnates our inner apprehension of meaning in sensory media, in the sights (written or signed) and the sounds or embossed textures of our language mediated by and centrally mediating our particular cultural life-world. Language as sensorily embedded bears witness both to the essentially incarnate nature of our thought and to our inhabitance of a public space of meaning. We live our lives outside our conscious inside in the public space of meaning presented through encounters "out there" in the sensory surround.

Meaning in this sense involves the apprehension of the universal carried by the sights and sounds and textures of language. To pursue further the notion itself, note that it involves being beyond the here-and-now of bodily encounters, open to space and time as encompassing wholes, for we always implicitly understand that the letter "f," in our opening example, as well as the words and sentences into which it enters, can each be instantiated any time and any place where its instances can be produced and thus encountered.

Space and time are encompassing forms present in all human wakeful life, empty without empirical filling and beyond any filling we achieve. Infamously, Bishop Usher in the seventeenth century, working in terms of biblical chronology, went back to 4004 B. C. as the reputed beginning of time. Now, through patient empirical observation, inference, and instrumental construction, our awareness of time has expanded to some 13.8 billion years. And, in parallel fashion, our awareness of space has expanded empirically from the azure dome above--who knows, maybe the staggering equivalent of a month's journey!--to more than fourteen billion light years across, correlative to the age of the universe. The forms of space and time, since they always refer us to what lies beyond and encompasses empirically filled space and time, cannot derive from experiences of particular spaces and times but, as Kant rightly notes, are brought to particular experiences as a priori to any conceivable humanly conscious operations. (7)

This a priori points to the ground of our considerations thus far in the second a priori that appears in our first proposition: the notion of Being. Space and time, as forms we bring to bear upon experience, specify ahead of time the context within which human intellectual awareness operates. The reference to the whole of space and time is grounded in a reference, provided by the notion of Being, beyond empty space and time to include all instances found within those forms and to everything about all instances. Though it is only actualized when throwing light on what is sensorily given from without, the notion of Being cannot come from without, because it refers us to the whole of what-is, for outside Being there is nothing. (8) That is why for the primum cognitum, for what first occurs in intellectual awareness, Aquinas used the phrase in intellectu rather than in intellectum, the latter indicating coming into the intellect from without, the former indicating an arising within intellectual awareness.

The notion of Being, making its appearance in human awareness, has absolutely unrestricted universality: it covers everything that is and everything about everything. Its unrestrictedness is indicated by our ability to ask, beyond any putative limit, what might lie beyond that limit. (9) It even opens up the question whether there might be something that exists beyond space and time in absolute difference from anything finite, something we could never imagine--but then we cannot even properly imagine our own awareness.

The notion of Being is in cognitive identity with thought: (10) to think is to think Being, beyond all appearances and beyond all finitude--beyond all appearances because it refers to the whole of each thing only partially revealed through our sensory filters and cognitive inferences. Animals live wholly in relation to the sensorily manifest surface guided by their organically based appetites. The notion of Being also directs us beyond all finitude, because we can ask of any putative limit what lies beyond the limit. The first answer is that, as intellectual beings, we ourselves lie beyond the limit. Whether there is something else beyond finitude is another and quite significant question--the most significant of all. (11)

As we initially awakened, at whatever age, to intellectual apprehension, the notion of Being, like the notions of space and time that it grounds, was empty. It was, as Nietzsche noted and Hegel accepted, "the last trailing cloud of evaporating reality." (12) It expresses the initial emptiness of our orientation toward the Whole. However, the notion of Being actually has additional content, a formal one that guides all rational activity. Along with the notion of Being there arises within intellectual awareness the principle of noncontradiction which has the unrestricted universality of the notion of Being which it articulates. As Aristotle formulates it: "A being cannot both have and not have the same property at the same time and in the same respect." (13)

Though this principle is always operative, we come to awareness of it only through developed experience. In order to formulate the principle, we need the sensory appearance of things and the operation of language we have already analyzed, its flow through speech, and its fixity in meaning. Several other factors are involved. Recognizing "a being" implies its being one of many. Further, we identify a being by its endurance over time in displaying the sensory features as immediately given properties that our sensory system gathers together in phantasms, modes of holistic and multifaceted appearance. "Can" plays in relation to "is" as possibility; and "not" involves a negation that here becomes impossibility. "Property" involves an aspect of a being that itself may be observed in different respects at a given time and that may appear in a different respect at the same time or at a different time, but only as a dependent aspect of the thing whose property it is. "Time" involves being simultaneous with, prior to, and after. "And" as well as "both" involve joining several items. And each of the terms involves sameness in the empirical differences from which they abstract and a difference from both the empirical instances and other terms compatible with a generic sameness. Being, Becoming and Fixity, Sameness and Difference, Unity and Multiplicity, Possibility and Impossibility, Negation and Affirmation, Thing and Property, Joining and Separating, Past-Present-Future, Appearance and Reality (Part and Whole), and Awareness in all the aspects operative within it: these various concepts are involved in recognizing and being able to formulate the principle of noncontradiction. (14)

Not only the principle but also the recognitions involved in formulating it are first rendered explicit in Aristotle. They remain the basis for all rational thought and the languages used to express it. Even Kant, with his restriction of knowing to the phenomenal order, nonetheless claims at least the thinkability of the noumenal, with the understanding that whatever is thought about has to be noncontradictory in itself and with everything knowable in the phenomenal order. (15)

III

Granted that our mind originally is emptily oriented toward the Whole of what-is via the notion of Being, the question is how that emptiness is to be filled in. There is a dialectic of positions in the history of philosophy that turns on the question: Is Being a genus? Thinking of it as the highest genus, one would abstract from the Aristotelian categories of entity (ousia) and properties (symbebekota) as being-in-itself and being-in-virtue-of-another respectively. Empirically, color does not exist in itself but only as a feature of a colored thing. The concept of Being as abstracted from those two modes--being-in-itself and being-in-virtue-of-another--would be the emptiest of all concepts. Nietzsche calls it, rightly, "the last trailing cloud of evaporating reality." Duns Scotus claims it had one characteristic that covered univocally all beings, from the lowest of creatures to God: being-outside-of-nothing. (16) Hegel reserves the minimal, univocal meaning for the concept of Determinate Being or the plurality of beings that was preceded by Becoming as the first concrete concept, a synthesis of Being and Nonbeing, both equally empty. (17) Such a synthesis occurs for Plato in genesis, or Becoming, as a mixture of being and nonbeing. (18)

Parmenides is the first to isolate the notion of Being and proclaim its identity with thought. In so doing, he implicitly enunciated for the first time the principle of noncontradiction involved. He developed his understanding of Being from the seemingly self-evident declaration given him by a goddess: "It-is and It-is-not is not" or "There is being but no nonbeing." (19) To claim that nonbeing is is to posit a contradiction. So understood, the principle of noncontradiction excludes the two overarching features of everything in our usual experience, namely, plurality and change. Regarding plurality, as Spinoza later observes, "All determination is negation"; each determinate thing is not every other. (20) Further, since every extended thing has a plurality of aspects, for Parmenides, Being itself must be unextended, neither a one among many nor a one composed of many aspects. (21) It could not therefore be spatial since space involves a plurality of possible positions. Secondly, change involves things not being what they were and not being what they are going to be, that is, change involves the nonbeing of past and future and the nontemporally extended, ever-moving now. So Being excludes both space and time. Again, as Parmenides' follower Melissus observes, Being has to be unlimited because there is nothing outside to limit it. (22) So Being considered apart from all nonbeing or Being as a nature beyond all beings is undivided, unchanging, beyond space and time, and infinite. This may be seen as the first instance of a negative onto-theo-logy (to employ Heidegger's expression), a determination of the nature of the divine through developing the logic of the notion of Being. (23) Its central problem lay rather obviously in the unintelligibility, because of the contradictory character, of anything outside pure Being. This observation will be taken up by Hegel.

Plato in the Sophist has the Eleatic Stranger say that it is through the notion of Being that, as the Theaetetus has it, the philosopher has his eyes fixed on the character of the Whole. (24) He announced that he had to lay patricidal hands on father Parmenides (25) by distinguishing between absolute nonbeing and the relative nonbeing of difference (thateron). (26) Difference would apply both to the region of spatiotemporal things, which, according to Parmenides' analysis, are mixtures of being and nonbeing, and to the realm of Forms that stand beyond the negativity involved in spatiality and temporality, but which are constituted, through the notion of the relative nonbeing of difference, as (to employ de Saussure's expression) "a system of differences," but also as a system of identities in their differences, specifically and generically. (27)

Plato goes on to note that both Becoming (kinesis) and the fixity (stasis) of Forms are so being cannot be identical with either under penalty of the other not being. However, though not identical with, they both participate in being. They are both the same in being and different in mode of being. Plato goes on to observe that Difference is both different from Sameness and participates in it by being the same as itself, so Sameness is different from Difference and is itself the same as itself: Sameness and Difference are co-implicated. (28) The separation of the Forms from their individual instances, the so-called heavenly character of the Forms, is brought down to earth in the Parmenides when Plato has Parmenides say: No Forms, no language. (29) Forms are the intelligible ingredients in language that is embedded in the flow that comes from our mouths in speech. (30)

In the Sophist Plato also has the Eleatic Stranger claim that the definition of being is the capacity to act and to be acted upon (31)--a protean definition that sees the individual being, not as an isolated thing, but as systematically related through its powers to all that it can act upon and can act upon it. To be an individual is to be a cluster of powers as universally oriented toward the kinds of things and aspects correlative to the powers. As Leibniz saw, each thing has to have within it its compossibility with everything else. (32) The task of experimental science would be to submit each individual of a certain type to tests that show what as a matter of fact its cluster of powers is. This allows the scientist to know, in an increasingly refined manner of knowing, the kinds of things and powers in their factual interrelations.

In the history of Platonism, Plato's declaration in the Republic that the Good is epekeina tes ousias, (33) has been regularly but incorrectly translated as "beyond being" and has generated a tradition of nonsense in claiming that God is beyond being. I say "nonsense" because to say something is beyond being is to position it within being understood as what is the case. I say "incorrectly translated" because Plato also refers to the Good in the same dialogue as phanotaton tou ontos, as "the most manifest (region) of being," (34) and he identifies ousia as the realm of Forms correlated to nous. (35) To on covers both ousia and genesis, or becoming, and the Good as well. I suggest that the correlate that is beyond nous is eros as a relation of the whole person to the absolute End and Source.

For Aristotle, the question of questions is: What is being? (36) In his view, being cannot be a generic concept since genera are abstracted from the conceptual content that falls under their domain as the species are abstracted from their instances: the higher and more extensive the genus, the greater the abstractness. For Aristotle being is not a genus because it includes all that from which one abstracted to get the hierarchy of species and genera of progressively wider extension. (37) Being is the concrete totality of things and forms. However, the nature of being is most fully realized in the highest Form, noesis noeseos, Self-Knowing Knowing or Self-Thinking Thought. (38) It is inferred and projected to the top of the hierarchy of the ways in which form rises above the matter it articulates. Form does so in living things where it dominates by organizing matter. In cognitive agents, awareness, rising above matter, involves form-possession without the matter of its object. In animal awareness, cognition involves possessing form with the conditions of matter (individuality, change, spatiotemporal location), while in intellectual cognition, the form of intellect (as, "in a way, all things") transcends the here-and-now and is thus able to attend to the form of the known as universal, apart from the conditions of matter. (39) For Aristotle, it is in the human intellect, in imitation of Self-Thinking Thought, that Plato's Forms have their locus. (40)

Aquinas assimilated Aristotle's thought but went considerably beyond him. For Aquinas, being as ens is esse habens, that which has existence. (41) This describes, first of all, ens commune as object of human knowing. Aquinas distinguishes esse or "to be" from what possesses it, namely what something is or its essence. Essence limits the level at which a being participates in being. In a Scotist understanding, that makes no sense; to be is like pregnancy: it either is or is not. In Aquinas's understanding, following Aristotle, being is found in the whole collectively and in each thing taken distributively. There is, consequently, a hierarchy of modes of participating in being, depending upon the degree to which form rises above matter and the degree to which potency comes into actuality, that is, the way in which a thing becomes what it was meant to be.

The notion of Being is without limit, since we can question beyond any putative limit. This poses a new question: how can finite being be at all? It is precisely the excessus of the notion of Being beyond what is common to all finite beings that leads to the question of the possibility of Absolutely Infinite Being. The limitation of esse by essence points to a Ground in Ipsum Esse Subsistens, subsistent Existence Itself or Esse as a Nature. (42) By reason of the way the notion of Being functions, every intellectual being, in knowing, implicitly knows God, but not as God. (43) That implicit knowledge is the underlying orientation toward the whole of Being.

In this analysis, there is a distinction between the concept of being and the judgment of being that concerns esse or existence which is always individual. (44) The analysis of concepts does not yet touch the existence of individuals which fall under the concept. For Aquinas the space of divine omniscience is the realm of pure Esse participated in by beings (entia) that have esse in a finite mode. The ens that first occurs within intellectual awareness as its proper object still points beyond itself to Esse as a Nature. This escapes Heidegger's critique of ontotheo-logy, or the attempt to understand the divine through an analysis of the logic of the notion of Being. Aquinas escapes the critique because esse is transconceptual and always individual, reached not by means of the universal concept but by means of existential judgment.

For Spinoza, philosophers have previously begun with abstractions, whether sensory or intellectual. He proposes to begin, in the Aristotelian line, with being as the most concrete concept, which includes all that is. (45) Everything that we would call a being does not truly exist "in itself' (the definition of thing or substance) since, in the line of Aquinas, it is unintelligible without its ground in the encompassing single Substance, deus sive natura, that does not exist in virtue of anything more encompassing. (46) Things are modes or aspects of that single Substance. Spinoza understands the system of things as Natura naturata, nature being "natured" or continually produced by Natura naturans or Nature as an intelligible system. (47)

Hegel claimed that to think properly is to think like Spinoza, that is, to see everything rooted in the overarching reality of the divine. But, by reason of human freedom rooted in being projected toward being as a whole via the notion of Being, human existence shows that rationally free subjects are not simply distinct from but stand over against the Ground within which they are rooted. So Substance has to become Subject. Free subjectivity has to be included in the overarching Substance. (48)

Given our ability to question beyond any putative limit, the question arises of how being can be limited to any finite mode. For Hegel, the limitation involved is one way of seeing that "nonbeing is," for limited being is a negation of the anticipated infinitude of being and is thus a "contradiction" that must be resolved. (49) The notion of contradiction here follows Parmenides: any way in which even relative nonbeing is contradicts pure Being. Thus appetite as a lack is a form of nonbeing that is, which is a contradiction calling for resolution in eating. (50) For Hegel, only an absolutely Infinite Being giving being to finite being resolves the contradiction of finitude itself. The climax of Hegel's own System lies in Aristotle's noesis noeseos, the highest instance of being, now, as in Aquinas, rendered infinite and as ground of all that is. (51)

Now, Hegel takes the concept of being as a genus, abstracted from the Aristotelian categories of Substance or Thing as being-in-itself and Accidents or Properties as being-in-virtue-of-another. The Parmenidean set of negations (unchanging, undivided, infinite, nonspatial, and nontemporal) gives us an empty rather than a full concept of being. (52) It is just that emptiness which impels thought beyond the Concept of Being, initially as apart from all filling, toward Absolute Knowing as complete systematic conceptual filling. For Hegel, the empty notion of Being develops into the notion of Becoming, presented initially by Plato as a synthesis of being and nonbeing. (53) There follows a dialectical unfolding that progresses until the essential hidden potency of the notion of Being is shown by the generation of the interlocking set of concepts that displays the form of the cosmos that makes rational existence and flourishing possible.

Though claiming through this System to "think the thoughts of God before creation," (54) Hegel's Absolute Knowing is not omniscience. It is much more "modest": it displays the interlocking set of cosmic, anthropological, personal, and institutional conditions for the possibility of rational existence and flourishing. It is a framework analysis that situates rather than dictates the actual choices made by existing subjects. Hegel retrieves the ontological argument for God's existence by pointing out that the human being, as oriented toward the fullness of Being, is itself the ontological argument, the transition between concept and existence. (55)

However, in addition to Absolute Knowing, God's omniscience appears in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, but is not further developed. (56) God's knowing would involve an existential transcendence, beyond the Absolute Knowing of the conceptual system--a transcendence beyond, as correlate to actual, individual, finite existence within, the framework of the System. The conceptual analyses in Parmenides, Spinoza, and Hegel would then require supplementation through the judgment of existence. This is where Hegel could join with Aquinas.

Heidegger claimed that with Hegel metaphysics reached a kind of culmination. Heidegger's criticism of onto-theo-logy is directed against Hegel's conception and against the way of taking Parmenides' conception we have sketched out above. The question of Being is central to human being as Da-Sein, as the locus of the showing of Being among beings. (57) Apart from the limited range of the other sciences, metaphysics aimed at investigating being as being, understood as things and their most universal principles. Heidegger claims that, in this focus, metaphysics has issued in "the forgottenness of Being." (58) Using Descartes's image of the Tree of Knowledge where metaphysics functioned as the roots, Heidegger asks; What is the soil in which the roots are planted and from which the tree derives its nourishment? What is the ground of metaphysics? (59) Basically, it is the life-world of a people articulated by the poets.

Heidegger's orienting experience was of "startled dismay" (Erschrecken) at the forgottenness of Being in and through the tradition of metaphysics. (60) Things, he said, "have lost their being" and have become data or "standing reserve" for our projects. (61) Here he cites the proclamation of Stephan George: "Where word breaks off no thing can be." (62) Gabriel Marcel had the same type of experience: he said that things have lost their "ontological weight." (63) The possibility of nearness, proclaimed in poetry, is lost in placing things at a distance for intellectual and practical mastery. As the element of fish is water and of birds the air, the element of humanness is the nearness of things and the mystery in which they are rooted. (64)

What has been forgotten in the metaphysical pursuit is truth as a-letheia that opens the horizon for truth as correspondence. A-letheia points to the unconcealed that rises up from the Lethe, the essential hiddenness out of which things are manifest, not only in their individual fullness but in their essential interrelatedness within the Whole. The Lethe is the Mystery of Being. For Heidegger, conceptual being is not Being itself; its showing, as any showing, always involves a concealing. Heidegger attempts to get back to the ground of metaphysics, not in the concept, but in the Sinn des Seins, the sense of Being. (65)

Pondering "the ground of metaphysics" is Heidegger's own way of taking the notion of Being. It is correlate to a transintellectual relation of dwelling, of the drawing near of beings. In dwelling we find a correlate to the notion of the human heart in Stimmung, the attunement of the human being. Dwelling with one's whole being is represented traditionally, but not exploited philosophically, by the notion of the heart. (66) Heidegger goes back to reread Parmenides. Noein as thinking, he says, "is the apprehension that has man," being appropriated by the mystery of Being. (67) I am surprised that he did not make use of the opening line of Parmenides' work: "The steeds that bore me took me as far as my heart [thumos] would desire." (68) In his exploration of the poets, Heidegger concentrates, among other things, upon Rilke's notion of the heart as the correlate to "the globe of being." (69)

I would contend that the heart lies at the heart of Heidegger's thought. Heart is that center of being attracted, repelled, or rendered neutral by what one confronts. It is the default mode that guides our operations. It is that by which we are mastered, taken outside ourselves, touched, and possibly transformed. It is through the heart that we inhabit our life-world where things are set at a distance or are able to draw near. Thinking that is focused on recovering the forgotten Mystery of Being is appreciative thinking, thinking as thanking, meditative thinking that evokes presences. (70)

Heidegger further claims--without, to my knowledge, having pursued it further--that the thought of Being he is exploring may contribute to a further understanding of what Aquinas meant by esse. (71) Along these lines, what Josef Pieper called "the silence of St. Thomas" is the mystical rootage of Aquinas's heart in the presence of the divine Esse. (72) Prayer is the unfolding of the mind before such Presence that may appear more or less intensely as an arresting Presence or recede, as its default mode, into silence.

Derrida, as a descendent of Heidegger, argued against Benveniste's attempt to reduce Greek ontology to Greek grammar and defended the notion of Being as transcultural ground of the categories. (73) But further, for Derrida, the onto-logical difference between Being and beings is grounded in what he calls differance, the system of differences that is the network of language and the deferral of full presence in our relation to things. (74) Carrying out his deconstructive project, he aimed "to send metaphysics packing," (75) which he falsely claimed is Heidegger's aim. That is something Heidegger explicitly denies: what is required is a Zuspiel, a counterpoint to the tradition of metaphysics in relation to a second beginning that thinks the ground of metaphysics. Even for Heidegger, metaphysics is not a mistake but the answer to an essential call of human beings. (76)

IV

Finally, let us circle back to our initial three propositions. The notion of Being makes possible both apprehension of the universal and freedom of choice, according to Aristotle the two distinctive characteristics of the human being, whose mind "is, in a way, all things." (77) For Aristotle, such a being is zoion politikon, a necessary inhabitant of a tradition, reciprocally tied, in the Aristotelian tradition, to being zoion logon echon, having the capacity for rationality actualizable only through linguistically mediated tradition. Boethius's translation of the latter into Latin as animal rationale flattens out the Greek meaning, for logos has, in the case in question, two dimensions of meaning: it means discourse as well as the rational capacity for discourse. That would make the two Greek definitions closely related, for the zoion politikon is so by reason of the logos of language that mediates the tradition. As in Hegel, the universal structure of being a human subject is only actualizable through the objectifications of other subjects that endure, beyond their inevitable demise, in the form of institutions, beginning with the institution of language, the sensory immediacy of which we focused upon in the beginning.

So the notion of Being that first arises grounds our ability to understand; its establishing primordial distance from all finitude also grounds our ability to choose to pursue whatever we choose consonant with the available possibilities. Here we have chosen to examine the proposition that began our inquiry: "First to occur in intellectual awareness is the notion of Being." In the process, we have also illustrated our third proposition: that reflective knowing involves "the complete return of the intellectual subject within itself." In Aquinas's Latin, the reditio completa subiecti in seipsum makes manifest the essential parameters involved in being such a subject: sensory encounter, reference to the Whole of what is via the notion of Being, reference to Space and Time as encompassing wholes, linguistic mediation, transcendence of ethnic peculiarities involved in language and practice, responsible choice within and beyond those peculiarities, and the personal centrality of the heart. The return is within the subjectivity of awareness insofar as all its operations, even those directed to what lies without, are simultaneously within the field of awareness on the subjective side. The return makes us aware reflectively of the parameters involved in the total field of our awareness, aware of ourselves as the subject for which everything else makes its direct or indirect appearance.

The claim that Primum quod cadit in intellectu est ens, "that which first arises within intellectual awareness is the notion of Being," identifies that which makes us the animal rationale who develops through linguistic communication and who realizes the full parameters of his own being in the reditio completa subjecti in seipsum, aware of the essential parameters of his own functioning such as I have laid out in this paper. He is, as well, free to determine himself. The three initial propositions are not simply claims made by Thomas Aquinas, but deep truths involved in our being human.

Institute of Philosophic Studies, University of Dallas

(1) Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 5, a. 2. Henceforth ST. Translation mine.

(2) The expression is not found in Aristotle but arose in the Aristotelian tradition.

(3) Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, bk. 4, ch. 11. See also ST I, q. 84, a. 6.

(4) See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Science, trans. M. Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), [section] 401 z. Henceforth EPM.

(5) Given the irregularity between the written and spoken word, there could be two ways to spell fish: "ef, eye, es, aych" and ilghoti": 'gh' as in laugh, 'o' as in women and 'ti' as in composition.

(6) See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Longmans, Green, 1957), 271 and following.

(7) See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969), A20/B34-B73, 65-91. Henceforth CPR.

(8) For an insightful presentation of the notion of Being, see Lonergan, Insight, 348-74. For an analysis of the way in which that notion grounds every distinctive operative property of humanness, see my "Being Human and the Question of Being: On the Unitary Ground of Individual and Cultural Pluralism," The Modern Schoolman, 87 (2009) 534-66.

(9) See Hegel, EPM, [section] 386 z.

(10) The first to articulate this notion is Parmenides. See below, 730-31

(11) Sartre considered human consciousness to be a lack "beyond Being," simply other than bodies as beings, and not related to anything else beyond. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Harper, 1965), lxv-lxvii.

(12) Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), 37. G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 82 and following.

(13) Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.1005b 19-20.

(14) The presuppositions of the formulation of the principle of noncontradiction I have just identified point in the direction of a project to explore the grounds of each of these divisions that would range very far into our cognitive experience.

(15) See Kant, CPR, A148/B188-A153/B193, 188-91.

(16) See Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Wolter and M. Adams (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 3.

(17) See Hegel, The Science of Logic, 105.

(18) See Plato, Republic 5.478e.

(19) Pre-Socratic Philosophers, ed. G. Kirk and J. Raven (London: Cambridge, 1966), frag. 2, 269.

(20) Baruch Spinoza, Letter to Jarig Jelles, 2 June 1674, cited in Itzhak Y. Melamed, Spinoza's Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 175, n. 2.

(21) Melissus drew this conclusion. See Pre-Socratic Philosophers, frag. 391, 302.

(22) See ibid., frag. 3-6, 299.

(23) See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 54.

(24) See Plato, Sophist 254a; Theaetetus 174a and 175a, in Plato, vol.7: Theaetetus, Sophist, trans. H. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1977).

(25) Sophist 241d.

(26) Sophist 257a-259d.

(27) Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 120.

(28) See Plato, Sophist 259a.

(29) See Plato, Parmenides 135c.

(30) See Plato, Theaetetus 208c.

(31) See Plato, Sophist 247e.

(32) Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology, in Leibniz: The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. R. Latta (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), [section] [section] 56 and 57, 248.

(33) Plato, Republic 6.509B.

(34) Ibid., 5.478e.

(35) See ibid., 6.509b.

(36) See Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.1028b5.

(37) See ibid, 998b22.

(38) Ibid, Metaphysics 12.1072b20.

(39) Aristotle, On the Soul, 3.424al7, 430a7.

(40) Ibid, 3.429a27.

(41) See Thomas Aquinas, On Truth, bk. 1, ch. 1.

(42) Aquinas, ST I, q. 3, a. 4.

(43) Ibid., I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1.

(44) Ibid., I, q. 85, aa. 1 and 2.

(45) Baruch Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, trans. R. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), 15 and 29.

(46) Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. R. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), Book 1, Prop. 15-16, 55-59.

(47) Ibid., Book 1, Prop. 29, note.

(48) See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. Miller (London: Oxford, 1977), [section] 17.

(49) Hegel, The Science of Logic, 136 and following.

(50) See EPM, [section] 426.

(51) The last line of Hegel's treatment of Spirit as the end of the System is a quotation in Greek of Aristotle's description of Self-Thinking Thought. See EPM, [section] 577.

(52) Hegel, The Science of Logic, 94. See also his treatment of Parmenides in Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vol. 1, 249-60.

(53) Hegel, The Science of Logic, 105-06.

(54) Ibid., 50.

(55) See G. F. W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. and trans. P. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 167.

(56) Ibid., 419, 474.

(57) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 27, 67.

(58) Martin Heidegger, "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics," in Existentialism from Dostoevski to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufmann (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956), 217. Henceforth "The Way Back."

(59) See ibid., 206-21.

(60) See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: On Enowning, trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 11.

(61) See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 17-20.

(62) "Words," in On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 140.

(63) Gabriel Marcel, Existential Background of Human Dignity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 74-75.

(64) Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. F. Capuzzi, J. Glenn Gray, trans. D. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 195.

(65) Heidegger, "The Way Back," 217.

(66) See my Introduction to Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart, trans. R. Wood, Preface to the English translation by Paul Ricoeur (New York: Humanities Press, 1977).

(67) Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 150.

(68) Pre-Socratic Philosophers, [section] 342, 266; emphasis mine.

(69) Martin Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?," in Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 124.

(70) See Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans., F. Weick and J. Gray (New York: Harper, 1968), Parts 2 and 3, 138.

(71) Heidegger, "The Way Back," 210.

(72) Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas, trans. J. Murray and D. O'Connor (New York: Pantheon, 1957).

(73) See Jacques Derrida, "The Supplement of the Copula," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 182. Henceforth Margins.

(74) See Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Margins, op. cit., 7.

(75) Jacques Derrida, On Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 75

(76) See Heidegger, "The Way Back," 209.

(77) Aristotle, On the Soul 3.8.431b21-22.

Correspondence to: Robert Wood, woodr348@aol.com.