If the world is a cosmos, then it is one more instance of the kind of being that belongs to every animal and plant in it. And if that is so, there is nothing left to display any other kind of being. Try it: take inventory. What is there? The color red is, only if it is the color of some thing. Color itself is, only if it is some one color, and the color of a thing. The relation “taller than” is, only if it is of two or more things. What has being but is not a thing must depend on some thing for its being. But on the other hand a mere thing, mere matter as we call it, using the word differently than Aristotle ever does, is an impossibility too. Relatively inert, rock-like being is the being of a part of what comes only in wholes–cosmos, plant, or animal. And all man-made things must borrow their material from natural things and their very holding-together from the natural tendencies of the parts of the cosmos. To be is to be alive; all other being is borrowed being. Any comprehensive account of things must come to terms with the special being of animals and plants: for Lucretius, living things are not marvels but a problem which he solves by dissolving them into the vast sea of inert purposelessness. For Aristotle, as for Plato, wonder is not a state to be dissolved but a beckoning to be followed, and for Aristotle the wonderful animals and plants point the way to being itself, to that being qua being which is the source of all being, for we see it in the world in them and only in them.
Thus when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what makes a thing a thing, he narrows the question to apply only to living things. All other being is, in one way or another, their effect. — IEP
If we look around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be. — Heidegger
I think that it's because, for Aristotle, and the ancients generally, the cosmos itself was alive. I don't know if it's really pantheistic, although not far from it - more that there was the sense that man's relationship with the cosmos was 'I-Though' rather than our customary 'I-it' relationship (Martin Buber). But I think it's fair to say that for Aristotle, the Cosmos itself was ensouled, for, as a whole, it displays the attributes of all other living beings. The idea of the cosmos as inert matter governed by physical laws was yet to be arrived at. — Wayfarer
Thus when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what makes a thing a thing, he narrows the question to apply only to living things. All other being is, in one way or another, their effect. — IEP
A table, a chair, a rock, a painting– each is a this, but a living thing is a this in a special way. It is the author of its own this-ness. It appropriates from its surroundings, by eating and drinking and breathing, what it organizes into and holds together as itself. This work of self-separation from its environment is never finished but must go on without break if the living thing is to be at all. Let us consider as an example of a living this, some one human being. Today his skin is redder than usual, because he has been in the sun; there is a cut healing on his hand because he chopped onions two days ago; he is well educated, because, five years ago, his parents had the money and taste to send him to Harvard. All these details, and innumerably many more, belong to this human being*. But in Aristotle’s way of speaking, the details I have named are incidental to him: he is not sunburned, wounded on the hand, or Harvard-educated because he is a human being. He is each of those things because his nature bumped into that of something else and left him with some mark, more or less intended, more or less temporary, but in any case aside from what he is on his own, self-sufficiently. What he is on his own, as a result of the activity that makes him be at all, is: two-legged, sentient, breathing, and all the other things he is simply as a human being. There is a difference between all the things he happens to be and the things he necessarily is on account of what he is. Aristotle formulates the latter, the kind of being that belongs to a thing not by happenstance but inevitably, as the “what it kept on being in the course of being at all” for a human being, or a duck, or a rosebush. The phrase to en einai is Aristotle’s answer to the Socratic question, ti esti? What is a giraffe? Find some way of articulating all the things that every giraffe always is, and you will have defined the giraffe. What each of them is throughout its life, is the product at any instant for any one of them, of the activity that is causing it to be. That means that the answer to the question “What is a giraffe?”, and the answer to the question “What is this giraffe?” are the same. Stated generally, Aristotle’s claim is that a this, which is in the world on its own, self-sufficiently, has a what-it-always-was-to-be, and is just its what-it-always-was-to-be. This is not a commonplace thought, but it is a comprehensible one; compare it with the translators’ version, “a per-se individual is identical with its essence.”
This identification of soul as form and 'whatness' in a living thing implies continuity as well as profound difference between living and non-living things. All things, even inanimate ones, must have some form, or they would not be anything at all. But living things have a distinctive and superior kind of form, called ‘soul.’ For a living thing is far more integrated, more one whole, than a non-living thing. The unity, and hence the identity and the being, of a non-living thing is little more than the contiguity of its parts. If a rock, for example, is divided, we simply have two smaller rocks. In a living thing, on the other hand, the members of its body constitute an organic whole, such that each part both conditions and is conditioned by the other parts and the whole. A living thing is thus one being to a far greater extent than a non-living thing. It evinces a higher degree of unity, of integration, of formal identity, and its soul is this very integration of its parts into one whole. As such the soul is the reality of the living thing, that in virtue of which it is what it is and so is a being: “For the reality is the cause of being to all things, and to live, for living things, is to be, and the soul is the cause and principle of these” (De An. Β.4, 415b13–14). Life in living things, then, is not a character superadded to their mere being. Rather, life is their being, the higher, more intense mode of being proper to living things as distinct from others.
The distinction between living and non-living things is therefore not a mere ‘horizontal’ distinction, as if all things are equally beings, of which some are living and others are not. It is rather a ‘vertical’ or hierarchical distinction: a living thing is more a being than a non-living thing, in that it is more integrated, more a whole, more one thing. (p110)
For Aristotle, the hierarchical ordering of the different kinds of beings is based on the extent to which form predominates over matter in each. Non-living things have the lowest degree of form, of unifying selfhood, of activity that proceeds from themselves. Although they have some form, some nature, some behaviors of their own, without which they would be nothing at all, they come closer than all other things to being purely material, purely passive. A living thing, characterized by organic unity and the ability to nourish, maintain, and reproduce itself, is far more one, more active, exhibits a far higher degree of formal identity. A sentient living thing, an animal, exercises not only these life-functions but also consciousness, which, as the capacity to receive forms without matter, is a still higher degree of formality, of immateriality. A human being, in turn, has not only life and sense but the capacity for the wholly immaterial activity of intellection, which has as its content, and thus is one with, purely immaterial ideas. (p117) — Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition
Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by thought. If, taking any of these examples—say, justice, health, or strength—we ask, “How big is it? What color is it? How much does it weigh?” we are obviously asking the wrong kind of question. Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus ‘separate’ in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. But this does not mean that they are ‘located elsewhere,’ or that they are not, as Plato says, the very intelligible contents, the truth and reality of sensible things.
It is in this sense, too, that Plato’s references to the forms as ‘patterns’ or ‘paradigms’, of which instances are ‘images,’ must be understood. All too often, ‘paradigm’ is taken to mean ‘model to be copied.’ The following has been offered as an example of this meaning of παράδειγμα (parádeigma) in classical Greek: “[T]he architect of a temple requiring, say, twenty-four Corinthian capitals would have one made to his own specifications, then instruct his masons to produce twenty-three more just like it.” Such a model is itself one of the instances: when we have the original and the twenty-three copies, we have twenty-four capitals of the same kind. It is the interpretation of forms as paradigms in this sense that leads to the ‘third man argument’ by regarding the form as another instance and the remaining instances as ‘copies’ of the form. This interpretation of Plato’s ‘paradigmatism’ reflects a pictorial imagination of the forms as, so to speak, higher-order sensibles located in ‘another world,’ rather than as the very intelligible identities, the whatnesses, of sensible things.
But forms cannot be paradigms in this sense. Just as the intelligible ‘look’ that is common to many things of the same kind, a form, as we have seen, is not an additional thing of that kind. Likewise, it makes no sense to say that a body, a physical, sensible thing, is a copy, in the sense of a replica or duplicate, of an intelligible idea. Indeed, Plato expressly distinguishes between a copy and an image: “Would there be two things, that is, Cratylus and an image of Cratylus, if some God copied not only your color and shape, as painters do, but also … all the things you have—if he set such other things beside you? Would such then be Cratylus and an image of Cratylus, or two Cratyluses?—Two Cratyluses, it seems to me, Socrates.” He then remarks, “Do you not perceive how far images fall short of having the same features [τὰ αὐτὰ, tá aftá] as the things of which they are images?” (Crat. 432b5–c6, d1–3). An image, in Plato’s terms, then, is not another thing of the same kind as the paradigm, having characteristics in common with it. But παράδειγμα/parádeigma need not mean ‘model’ in this sense. It can also mean ‘plan,’ ‘design,’ ‘pattern,’ and it is in this sense that Plato refers to the forms as paradigms. To take the same example, the architect, instead of giving the masons a model capital and instructing them to produce twenty-three more, could give them instead a plan, a diagram, or even simply a set of specifications, and instruct them to produce twenty-four ‘such capitals.’ In this case the paradigm is the pattern, the design, the set of specifications, which is not itself a capital at all. The true paradigm, indeed, is the architect’s idea, of which the written diagram or specifications are merely a symbolic representation. — Eric D Perl Thinking Being, p31 ff
If we reflect on the notion of ‘appearance,’ it ceases to be obvious that there is no middle road, no intermediate between being and non-being. An appearance of a thing—for example, a reflection, as an appearance of that which is reflected—is not the thing itself, nor is it another thing, additional to the thing itself. When Socrates stands before a mirror, making a reflection, the reflection is neither a second Socrates nor another, additional person: there remains only one Socrates, one man. But neither is the reflection, what is seen in the mirror, simply nothing, and to see it is not to see nothing at all, or to suffer a hallucination. Appearance is not the same as illusion. It is coherent, in accord with ordinary usage, and in a significant sense true, to say, “I see Socrates in the mirror,” while realizing at the same time that I am not looking at Socrates himself at all. To see the reflection is both to see Socrates, as he appears here, and not to see Socrates, ‘himself by himself.’ Thus what is seen in seeing the reflection or appearance, both is and is not the real thing. And this is precisely how Plato characterizes the ‘in between’ status of the sensible, as that which is opined rather than intellectually known: “We said earlier, then, if something should appear [φανείη] such that it at once is and is not, this would be such as to lie in between that which purely is and that which altogether is not, and neither knowledge nor ignorance would be concerned with it, but that which we say is in between ignorance and knowledge” (Rep. 478d5–9). We should note the characteristically Platonic pun: that which appears, or as we might say ‘turns up,’ in between being and non-being, is, precisely, appearance itself. Sensible instances, therefore, as the multiple, differentiated appearances, given to sense, of the unitary forms that are apprehended by intellect, are neither reality ‘itself by itself,’ the intelligible, nor simply nothing, but ‘in between.’ — ibid
Knowledge and opinion, then, as distinct modes of awareness, are not directed toward two different sets of ‘objects,’ of which one is completely real and the other, incomprehensibly, less than completely real and yet not nothing. Rather, they are higher and lower ways in which reality may be apprehended. Opinion, the mode of apprehension correlated to appearance as distinct from reality ‘itself by itself,’ thus lies in between knowledge and ignorance. Here again, unlike Parmenides, Plato carefully distinguishes between ignorance, a total failure to apprehend reality at all, and opinion, an apprehension of reality as it appears and hence an imperfect apprehension of reality. The distinction between knowledge and opinion, therefore, unlike that between knowledge and ignorance, is not a simple opposition, but is rather a distinction between the perfect and therefore paradigmatic apprehension of reality, and a less perfect apprehension of reality. Opinion is thus analogous to seeing reality in a mirror, rather than to not seeing it at all, and sensible things, as what is given to this mode of apprehension, are analogous to reflections, neither reality itself nor simply nothing. ....
....If the levels of reality are levels of presentation and apprehension, then the many ‘ascents’ in the dialogues, the images of ‘going to’ the forms or true being, express not a passage from one ‘world,’ one set of objects, to another, but rather, as Plato repeatedly indicates, the ascent of the soul, a psychic, cognitive ascent, from one mode of apprehension to another, and hence not from one reality to a different reality, but from appearance to reality. — ibid
For Aristotle, the hierarchical ordering of the different kinds of beings is based on the extent to which form predominates over matter in each. — Eric D Perl Thinking Being - Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition
Anil Seth has this to say in Being You: A New Science of ConsciousnessSo the self ceases to exist when asleep.
Sounds about right. — Banno
Measuring conscious level in humans is not the same as deciding whether someone is awake or asleep. Conscious level is not the same thing as physiological arousal. While the two are often highly correlated, consciousness (awareness) and wakefulness (arousal) can come apart in various ways, which is enough to show that they cannot depend on the same underlying biology. When you are dreaming you are by definition asleep, but you are having rich and varied conscious experiences. At the other extreme lie catastrophic conditions like the vegetative state (also now known as “unresponsive wakefulness syndrome”), in which a person still cycles through sleep and wakefulness, but shows no behavioral signs of conscious awareness: the lights are occasionally on, but there’s nobody home. — Anil Seth
So there's regardless an ontological distinction accorded to humanity (acknowledging that his use of the terminology of ontology is very complex). — Wayfarer
That you’re still going on about this is borderline insane. — Mikie
rocks... are...beings. — Mikie
Aristotle certainly put the active principle above the elements being acted upon. I am not aware of any passage that expresses a ratio of the sort Perl is putting forth. — Paine
rocks... are...beings — Mikie
Am I take to it you're pan-psychist? — Wayfarer
Whether there is a difference between beings and things is another matter. I think there is. — Jamal
The formidable task that Heidegger sets himself in Being and Time is to respond to the question ‘What is Being’? This ‘Question of Being’ has a long heritage in the Western philosophical tradition, but for Heidegger, to merely ask what is Being? is problematic, as that emphasis tends to objectify Being as a ‘thing’ – that is to say, it separates off ‘Being’ (whatever it is) from the questioner of Being. This for Heidegger is making unhelpful assumptions of the nature of Being even before interrogating what Being actually is. Therefore, rather than asking ‘What is Being?’, Heidegger begins with the question ‘Whom is asking the question of Being?’ This question – the whom of Being – includes the possibility that the questioners themselves may actually contribute in some way to the Being under question. Heidegger’s starting point thus asks whom is this Being “that in its Being is concerned about its very Being.” (Being and Time, p.11)
That's basically the only point that was ever at issue in this argument — Wayfarer
Didn't mean to be insulting — Wayfarer
but I really don't think it makes sense to declare that anything that exists is 'a being' — Wayfarer
The only passage about Heidegger that I quoted in this thread was a snippet I found in a Philosophy Now article, to wit: — Wayfarer
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