Being or being. Being

BEING(Greek εἶναι, οὐσία; Latin esse) is one of the central concepts of philosophy. “The question that has been posed since ancient times and is now constantly posed and causes difficulties is the question of what being is” (Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 1). Ontology - the doctrine of being - has been the subject of the so-called since the time of Aristotle. "first philosophy". Depending on how one or another thinker, school or movement interprets the question of being, its connection with knowledge, with nature (physics) and the meaning of human existence (ethics), the general orientation of this direction is determined. In different cultural and historical eras, a special language was formed to express different definitions of existence. Concepts "existence" , "essence" , "existence" , "substance" are derived from “being” and represent its various aspects. But at the same time, there were stable traditions. Thus, ancient philosophy, especially the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, for many centuries determined the general nature and methods of dividing the very concept of being. Their approach turned out to be decisive for philosophy not only of the Hellenistic era and the Middle Ages (for the concept of being in Arab-Muslim philosophy, see Art. Existence ), but survived until the 17th and beginning. 18th century The revision of the ancient tradition, which began already in the first centuries of Christianity, but did not then lead to the creation of an alternative ontology, on the eve of the New Age occurred mainly along two lines. On the one hand, it was prepared by the nominalism of the 13th–14th centuries and deepened by English empiricism of the 17th–18th centuries. and was completed in Kant's transcendental idealism. On the other hand, the principles of not only medieval, but also ancient thinking were revised in German mysticism (starting with Eckhart and ending with the era of the Reformation), as well as in pantheistic and close to pantheism movements of philosophy of the 15th–17th centuries, often associated with mysticism and hermeticism - Nicholas of Cusa, G. Bruno, B. Spinoza, etc. The revision of the ancient and medieval understanding of existence led to 16th–17th centuries to the creation of a new logic and a new form of science - mathematical natural science. Within the framework of the Kantian-positivist line, a new one is created - a deontologized, axiological justification for ethics, physics and philosophy of history. In turn, the pantheistic tendency in the 1st half. 19th century results in the German idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and in the 2nd half. 19th century and the first third of 20 - in naturalistic-voluntaristic pantheism (A. Schopenhauer, E. Hartmann, A. Drevs, etc.), which was continued in the philosophy of life - H. Driesch, A. Bergson, F. Nietzsche. The result of this centuries-long process was the deontologization of nature, knowledge and human existence, a reaction to which made itself felt in the 2nd half. 19–20 centuries, when there was a turn to ontology in the neo-Leibnizianism of I. Herbart and R. Lotze, the realism of Fr. Brentano, in phenomenology, existentialism, neo-Thomism, Russian religious philosophy.

BEING EXISTS AS A CONCEPT OF ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY. The concept of being first appears in a theoretically reflected form among the Eleatics. There is being, but there is no non-being, says Parmenides (“On Nature”, B6), for it is impossible either to know or express non-being - it is incomprehensible. “For to think is the same as to be... You can only say and think what is; existence exists, but nothing is..." ( Lebedev A.V. Fragments, part 1, p. 296). Being, according to Parmenides, is one and eternal, and therefore motionless and unchangeable - characteristics that are opposite to those endowed with the things of the sensory world, the world of opinion - multiple, transient, mobile, changeable. For the first time in the history of philosophical thinking, the Eleatics contrasted being as something true and knowable to the sensory world as mere appearance (“opinion”), which cannot be the subject of true knowledge. The concept of being, as the Eleatics conceptualized it, contains three important points: 1) there is being, but there is no non-being; 2) being is one, indivisible; 3) existence is knowable, but non-existence is incomprehensible.

These principles were interpreted differently by Democritus, Plato and Aristotle. Having revised the thesis of the Eleatics that being is one, Democritus thinks of being as plural - atoms, and non-being - as emptiness. But at the same time, he left in force the main theses of the Eleatics - there is being, but there is no non-existence, being is knowable, and non-being is incomprehensible. Even the principle of the unity of being was preserved by Democritus in relation to each atom - for Democritus it is indivisible. The opposition of the sensory world as mere appearance to being in itself has also been preserved, with the amendment that the truly existing - atoms - are given by Democritus not to logical thinking, but to abstract representation, as evidenced by the appearance of atoms (concave, convex, round, anchor-shaped, rough, angular or with hooks), as well as a physical explanation for their indivisibility.

Plato proposed a different interpretation of existence. Like the Eleatics, he characterizes existence as eternal and unchanging, cognizable only by reason and inaccessible to the senses. However, being in Plato is plural; but these many are not physical atoms, but intelligible immaterial ideas. Plato calls them τὸ ὄντως ὄν (οὐσία) - truly existing. Plato calls incorporeal ideas “essences,” since essence is what exists (οὐσία is formed from the verb “to be” - εἶναι). Being is opposed to becoming – the sensory world of transitory things. “You need to turn away with all your soul from everything that becomes: then a person’s ability to know will be able to withstand the contemplation of being (“State” VI, 518 pp.). Claiming that non-existence is impossible to express or think (“Sophist” 238 c), Plato, however, admits that non-existence exists. Otherwise, he says, it would be incomprehensible how delusion and lies are possible - “after all, a false opinion is an opinion about something that does not exist” (ibid., 240 p.). Moreover: criticizing the Eleatics, Plato in his later dialogues emphasizes that if we take being as one, self-identical, unchangeable, then knowledge will turn out to be impossible, because it presupposes a relationship between the knower and the known: “If to know means to somehow act, then the subject of knowledge, on the contrary, it is necessary to suffer. Thus, being... cognizable by knowledge, as much as it is cognized, is also in motion due to its suffering” (ibid., 248 p.). For the sake of substantiating the possibility of knowledge, Plato contrasts being other , which is “existing non-existence” (ibid., 258 b); non-existence appears, therefore, as a principle of difference, a relationship, thanks to which not only the possibility of knowledge, but also the connection between ideas is explained. “...All ideas are what they are only in relation to one another, and only in this relation do they have essence, and not in relation to their similarities that are in us... On the other hand, these that are in us (similarities) of the same name (with ideas) also exist only in relation to each other” (“Parmenides” 133 c-d). Otherness is lower in status than being: it exists only due to its participation in being. In turn, being as an interconnected set of ideas exists and can be conceived only due to its involvement in the super-existential and unknowable To the One . The concept of being, therefore, is considered by Plato again in three aspects: being and non-being; being and knowledge; being and the One.

Aristotle retains the understanding of being as the beginning of the eternal, self-identical, unchangeable. But, unlike Plato, he seeks what is constantly present also in the changeable sensory world, striving to create a science of nature - physics. To express various aspects of being in concepts, Aristotle uses rich terminology: τὸ εἶναι (substantivized verb “to be”) – τὸ ὄν (substantivized participle of the verb “to be”) – existing (the concepts of “being” and “being” are interchangeable in Aristotle) ; ἡ οὐσία (a noun derived from the verb “to be”) – essence; τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι (substantivized question: “what is being?”) – whatness, or the essence of being, αὐτὸ τὸ ὄν – existing in itself and τὸ ὄν ἦ ὄν – existing as such. It is to Aristotle that such medieval concepts as esse, ens, essentia, substantia, subsistentia, ens per se, ens qua ens, etc. go back. In Aristotle’s teaching, being is not a category, because all categories point to it: “being in itself is attributed to everything that is designated through the forms of categorical statements: for in as many ways these statements are made, in as many senses being is designated” (“Metaphysics” V, 7). The first among the categories - essence - is closer to being than all the others: it is more of an entity than any of its predicates (accidents). “Essence is that which exists in the first place and is given not as some special being, but as being in its immediacy” (ibid., VII, 1). Essence answers the question “what is a thing”, therefore only essence has the essence of being and definition as a designation of the essence of being. If Plato considered intelligible ideas as essences, then Aristotle defines the first essence as a separate individual (“this man”), and the second essence as a species (“man”) and a genus (“animal”). Essence as an “indivisible species” goes back to Plato’s idea and is expressed in the definition of a thing. The first entity cannot be a predicate; the second essences “speak” only about essences, but not about other categories that serve as predicates of essence. Essence is something independent: existing in itself. “If something denotes the essence of a thing, it has the meaning that being for it does not consist in anything else” (“Metaphysics” IV, 4).

In Aristotle's ontology, the essence of being is the precondition of relation. In the theory of knowledge, this leads to criticism of skepticism and relativism, which, according to Aristotle, place relation above being, and therefore recognize sensory knowledge (which is the relation of all things to the subject of perception) as true. “Whoever declares everything that appears to be true turns everything that exists into relationships” (“Metaphysics” IV, 6).

The duality of the Aristotelian doctrine of essence corresponds to the duality in the understanding of the subject of first philosophy - being as such. The latter can be considered, firstly, as a general predicate of all things, constituting the condition of predication in general; in this sense, it cannot be the essence of things: “Neither the one nor the existing can be the essence of things” (“Metaphysics” VII, 16). This is being understood as “ens” (as it was called in the Middle Ages); it is determined through axioms, the truth of which is established in philosophy, “general metaphysics,” and private sciences that study certain “parts” of existence accept these axioms as non-negotiable. The first among the axioms, formulated specifically by Aristotle and concerning the nature of being as such, entered the history of thought as the law of non-contradiction: “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be inherent in the same thing and in the same sense” (“ Metaphysics" IV, 3). According to Aristotle, this is the most reliable of principles. Secondly, being as such can be understood as the highest of all first essences; it is a pure act, a prime mover free from matter, which is characterized not as ens commune, but as ens per se (being in itself) and is studied by theology, as Aristotle calls the science of the “first being” - the Divine. The eternal and immovable first mover, the thinking of thinking, is, according to Aristotle, the final cause, the source not only of movement, but also of everything that exists: “All other existing things receive their being and life from divine duration” (“On Heaven” 1, 9, 279 a 17–30). Unlike Plato, Aristotle does not place a higher authority over being as such - the One, emphasizing that “the existing and the One represent the same thing and they have the same nature, since each of them accompanies the other... Indeed, they are one and the same - one person and a person, an existing person and a person...” (“Metaphysics” IV, 2). That which is devoid of unity (indivisibility, form, limit) is devoid of being. “Nothing infinite can have existence...” (ibid., I, 2).

The Neoplatonic understanding of being goes back to Plato. According to Plotinus, being as a condition presupposes a super-existential principle standing on the other side of being (τὸ επέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), and therefore knowledge. He calls this beginning the One (τὸ ἕν) and the good (τὸ ἀγαθόν). Only being can be thought; that which is above being (the One) and that which is below it (the infinite) cannot be the subject of thought, for “mind and being are one and the same” (“Enneads” V, 4, 2), says Plotinus , reproducing Parmenides' original thesis. However, unlike Parmenides, Plotinus points out that being is not a supreme principle, it comes from what is super-existent. Being is only a trace of the One, and the word “being” (εἶναι) comes from the word One (ἕν)” (ibid., V, 5, 5). Being is the first emanation, “the firstborn of the One” (ibid., V, 2.2). Therefore, if we say about any thing that it exists, then this is possible due to unity. Unlike Aristotle, whose perpetual motion machine thinks of itself, Plotinus’s One cannot be thought not only by the finite mind, but also by itself, for this would mean a bifurcation of the One into the thinking and the thinkable, i.e. by two. Being identical to the mind and therefore intelligible, being is always something definite, formed, stable: this reflects the spirit of Greek philosophy from the Pythagoreans, Eleatics and Democritus to Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. Plotinus says about beings: “These things are essences because each of them has a limit and, as it were, a form; being cannot belong to the infinite, being must be fixed within certain boundaries, must be stable. This stable state for intelligibles (beings) is determination and form, from which they also receive their being” (“Enneads” V, 1.7). Ancient philosophy perceives existence as good . The Platonists, according to Aristotle, attribute the nature of good to “one or being” (“Metaphysics” I, 7); Aristotle himself sees in existence the more good, the more being there is in it; the highest being - the prime mover - is also the highest good.

THE UNDERSTANDING OF EXISTENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES was determined by two traditions: ancient philosophy, on the one hand, and Christian Revelation, on the other. For the Greeks, the concept of being, as well as perfection, is associated with the concepts of limit, one, indivisible and definite. Accordingly, the boundless, the limitless is recognized as imperfection, non-existence. On the contrary, in the Old and New Testaments, the most perfect being - God - is unlimited omnipotence, and therefore here any limitation and certainty is perceived as a sign of finitude and imperfection. How acute the collision of these tendencies was in the first centuries of Christianity is evidenced, for example, by Origen, who, in the spirit of Greek philosophy, identified being with perfection and knowability: “For if the divine power were limitless, it could not know itself; after all, by its nature, the infinite is incomprehensible” (“On Principles” II, 9, 1). Attempts to reconcile these two trends or to contrast one with the other have determined the interpretation of existence for more than one and a half millennia.

Augustine stands at the origins of medieval philosophy and theology. In his understanding of existence, he starts both from Holy Scripture (“I am who I am,” God said to Moses, Exodus 3:14) and from Greek philosophers. “Being the highest entity, i.e. possessing the highest existence and therefore being unchangeable, God gave existence to those things that he created out of nothing; but being is not the highest, but has given more to some, less to others, and thus distributed the natures of beings according to degrees. For just as wisdom received its name from philosophizing, so from being (esse) essence (essentia) is called, albeit with a new name, which was not used by the ancient Latin authors, but is already in use in our times, so that our language also has what the Greeks call ousia "("On the City of God" XII, 2). For Augustine, being is good. God is good as such, or “simple good.” “All goods were created by good, but not simple, and therefore changeable” (ibid., XI, 10). Created things, according to Augustine, only participate in being or have being, but they themselves are not the essence of being, for they are not simple. “Simplicity is that nature which does not tend to have anything that it could lose” (ibid.). Since the highest essence is being itself, no other essence can be opposed to it, but only non-existence; therefore, evil is non-existence. Augustine considers the problem of being in relation to the dogma of the Trinity. Genesis is the first hypostasis, God the Father; God the Son is knowledge, and God the Holy Spirit is love. Thus, truth is the knowledge of being, and good (bliss as a subjectively experienced good) is aspiration, love for being.

U Boethius , Having developed a system of logic that formed the basis of medieval scholasticism, the concept of being becomes complete and is formulated in the form of a system of axioms. 1) Different things - being and what is; being itself is not; on the contrary, what is is due to being. 2) That which exists can be involved in something, but being itself cannot be involved in anything. 3) That which is can have something besides what it is itself; but being itself has nothing in itself except itself. 4) Different things - simply being something and being something in its essence (in eo quod est), for in the first case a random attribute (accident) is designated, and in the second - substance. 5) For everything simple, its being and what it is are one and the same; for everything complex, it is not the same thing (see: Boethius."Consolation of Philosophy" and other treatises. M., 1990, p. 162). Only in God, who is being itself, are being and essence identical; He is a simple substance that does not participate in anything, but in which everything participates. In created things, their being and essence are not identical; they have existence only by virtue of participation in that which itself is being. For Boethius, as for Augustine, being is good; all things are good, says Boethius, insofar as they exist, without being, however, good in their essence and in accidents. Like Boethius, for Thomas Aquinas the supreme principle is being, the act of which causes the universe to exist. “The first of creatures (primus effectus) is being itself, which precedes (as their condition) all other creatures, but which nothing precedes” (De potentia, q. 3, a. 4). Distinguishing between being and essence, Thomas does not oppose them, but, following Aristotle, reveals their common root: “We say “essence” because through it and in it the existing has its being” (De ente et essentia, cap. 2). Substances (entities) have independent existence, in contrast to accidents, which exist only thanks to substances. Hence, in Thomism, the distinction between substantial and accidental forms: the substantial form imparts simple existence to things, while the accidental form is the source of certain qualities. Distinguishing, following Aristotle, actual and potential states, Thomas considers being as the first of the actual states, following here the famous formula of Albertus Magnus: “The first among created things is being.” In a thing, Thomas believes, there is as much being as there is actuality in it. The spirit, or mind, the rational soul is the highest of created beings. Not being connected with matter, the human rational soul cannot perish with the death of the body, unless the Creator himself destroys it. The rational soul in Thomas bears the name “self-existent.” However, the highest among created beings - the rational soul - is not being in itself. “No creation is its own being, but only participates in being.” (Summa theologiae, q. 12, 4 p.). Being is identical with goodness, perfection and truth. Since ens et bonum convertuntur (being and good are reversible), then evil is non-being, it “exists only in good as its substrate” (Summa theologiae, q. 49, 3 p.). God, according to Thomas, is the cause of evil not substantially, but accidentally, since the perfection of the whole is impossible without the defectiveness of some parts.

The Thomist interpretation of being is revised in the nominalism of the 13th–14th centuries, where the idea of ​​divine omnipotence plays a decisive role. According to Occam , God, by his will, creates individual things, without the need for ideas as their prototypes. Ideas arise as representations (conceptions) of things, secondary to them. If in scholasticism from Bonaventure to Thomas the object of knowledge is intelligible entities, then, according to nominalists, the thing itself is known in its individuality. Thanks to this, the ontological status of substances and accidents is equalized, and the theoretical ability loses its existential character; minds are no longer considered as the highest in the hierarchy of created beings. The mind is not being, but an idea of ​​being, an orientation toward being, a subject opposed to an object. The subjectivist interpretation of the spirit entails the conclusion that mental phenomena are more reliable than physical ones, since they are given to us directly - a thesis important for new European empiricism and psychologism. Nominalism largely prepared the interpretation of being in the philosophy of modern times.

Another factor that destroyed the ontology inherited from antiquity was the mystical movements of the 13th–14th centuries. Turning to Neoplatonism, the mystics, however, rethought it. In doing so, they proceeded from a peculiar interpretation of the dogma of the incarnation. So, according to Meister Eckhart , man is not just a creation (this is only the “external”, bodily man); as an “inner,” spiritual man, he is born in God and is the Son of God. The “Holy of Holies” of the soul, which Eckhart calls the “foundation of the soul”, “fortress”, “spark”, is not created, but divine; according to Eckhart, it is even “before God,” and in order to comprehend it, God must become more than God ( Quint J. Meister Eckehart. Deutsche Predigten und Traktate. München, 1955, S. 163 ff.). Reviving that. motives of Gnosticism, Eckhart creates the doctrine of mystical pantheism, in which the difference between creature and creator is eliminated, i.e. being and existence, as Christian theology understood it. “Insofar as something has existence, it is equal to God... I say: all creatures are His existence” (ibid., p. 192). Influenced by Eckhart Nikolai Kuzansky created the logic of paradox to express the Gnostic-pantheistic worldview of the Renaissance. Starting from Neoplatonism, he, however, does not define the One through its opposition to the other - the infinite: The One (the absolute minimum) is identical to its opposite - the infinite (the absolute maximum). “Maximality coincides with unity, which is also being” (see: Selected works in 2 volumes, vol. 1. M., 1980, p. 51). Hence the pantheistic thesis of Nicholas of Cusa: The One is everything. Just as for Eckhart the existence of creatures is the existence of the Creator, and man is the Son of God, for Nicholas of Cusa man is endowed with a divine mind, containing in a compressed form the entire existence of the world. Therefore, he abolishes the law of identity as a principle of finite (rational) thinking and puts in its place the law of the coincidence of opposites. That. the boundary between the divine existence, incomprehensible to man, and the created world of finite things is eliminated; the latter loses its certainty, which the law of identity provided it with. Along with the law of identity, Aristotelian ontology is also abolished, which presupposes the distinction between essence (as an unchangeable principle in a thing) and accidents as its changeable properties. The ontological status of essence and accidents is equalized, and the relationship turns out to be more primary than the essence; the being of a being is constituted through its relationship to another (an infinite number of “others”). Born in the 15th–16th centuries. functionalist ontology requires the assumption of the infinity of the world: definition through relation has no end, the series of “others” is fundamentally incomplete; becoming takes the place of being as an endless process. A new type of ontology is reflected in mathematics in the idea of ​​infinite calculus and in physics in the form of the law of inertia.

GENESIS IN PHILOSOPHY 17–18 centuries. As in the philosophy of the 17th century. spirit, reason loses its ontological status and acts as the opposite pole of being, epistemological problematics become dominant, and ontology develops into natural philosophy. In the 18th century together with the criticism of rationalistic metaphysics, being is increasingly identified with nature (from which the principles of social life are also derived), and ontology with natural science. Thus, Hobbes, considering the body as the subject of philosophy (natural bodies - products of nature and artificial bodies created by human will - states), excludes from the knowledge of philosophy the entire sphere that in antiquity was called “being” as opposed to changeable becoming. Deepening the tendency of medieval nominalism, Hobbes eliminates the connection between being and essence (substance): the latter, according to Hobbes, is only a combination of names through the word “is”. This means the denial of intelligible reality and extra-experienced knowledge: according to Hobbes, spiritual substances, if they existed, would be unknowable, but he does not recognize the existence of incorporeal spirits at all: spirit is a natural, subtle body that does not act on our senses, but fills space . Hobbes's nominalism is one of the sources of mechanistic materialism of the 17th–18th centuries. Being for Hobbes is identical to a single being, understood as a body, which is cognized by sensory perception, controlled through the correct use of words. If for Aristotle being was identified with the actual state and associated with the form of existence, now it is associated with the body, understood as matter and as such acting as the only legitimate subject of philosophical and scientific knowledge.

In rationalistic metaphysics of the 17th–18th centuries. being is considered as a substance, which is a self-identical, stable, unchangeable beginning. According to Descartes, only divine substance is truly self-existent, or the cause of itself (causa sui), from which thinking and extended substances are derived. But, like the nominalists, Descartes is convinced that only one reality is directly open to our consciousness: it itself. In the Cartesian formula “I think, therefore I exist,” the center of gravity is knowledge, not being (this is its difference from the Augustinian concept). Although Descartes defines spirit as a substance, he eliminates the soul as a connecting link between spirit and flesh and thereby abolishes the medieval hierarchy of the stages of existence. The concept of substantial form is expelled from metaphysics and natural philosophy - the teleological principle is preserved only in the sphere of the self-conscious spirit. Nature as a purely mechanical world of efficient causes is opposed by the world of rational substances as the kingdom of goals. This is how existence is split into two incommensurable spheres, which in mechanistic materialism will appear as independent realities of the natural and human, spontaneous-mechanical and expedient-reasonable.

Substantial forms, almost universally expelled from philosophical and scientific usage in the 17th and 18th centuries, continue to play a leading role in Leibniz’s metaphysics (in this is its closeness to the ancient and medieval understanding of being). Polemicizing with Descartes, Leibniz argues that the concept of extended substance is self-contradictory, for extension, being a passive, lifeless and inactive principle, represents only a possibility, while substance, the self-existent, is always reality. But if the essences are entelechy , then they are intelligible and are the subject of metaphysics, and not of empirical perception and mathematical construction: being and truth cannot be known through the senses. The source of the existence of the world and all the things that make it up is, according to Leibniz, an extra-worldly being - inside the world it is impossible to find the reasons why something exists at all and not nothing. Although essence coincides with being only in God, nevertheless, in finite things, essence, according to Leibniz, is the beginning of being: the more essence there is in any thing, i.e. The more actuality there is in it, the more “being” this thing will be. Hence the hierarchy of essences in Leibniz - in accordance with “the quantity of their real essence or the degree of perfection that they contain” (Izbr. filos. soch. M., 1890, p. 132). At all levels of natural existence, only simple (immaterial and non-extended) objects possess true reality. monads , as for bodies, which are always extended and divisible, they are not substances, but only collections or aggregates of monads (see ibid., p. 338). Since it is impossible to form an extended body from the sum of indivisible, immaterial units, Leibniz resorts to a phenomenalist explanation: bodies are only “well-founded” phenomena. Kant tried to answer the question of what the material-corporeal world is - a phenomenon in the perception of a monad or a “cluster” of monads. The nominalistic tradition, on which Kant relied, develops into transcendental idealism, the subject of which is not being, but knowledge, not substance, but the subject. Distinguishing between the empirical and transcendental subject, Kant shows that the definitions attributed to substance - extension, figure, movement - actually belong to the transcendental subject, the a priori forms of sensibility and reason which constitute the world of empirical experience. Human knowledge extends only to the world of experience; that which goes beyond the limits of experience - the thing in itself - is declared unknowable. Exactly things in themselves – relics of substances, Leibnizian monads in Kantian philosophy - carry within themselves the beginning of being. Like the rationalists of the 17th century, Kant thinks of being in itself as independent of the spontaneity of human thinking and not generated by it. Kant retains a connection with the Aristotelian tradition: being, according to Kant, cannot be a predicate and cannot be “extracted” from a concept. The self-activity of the transcendental Self gives rise to the world of experience, the world of phenomena, but does not give rise to being. Kant unambiguously solves the problem of extended bodies, accepting the phenomenalist version of Leibniz’s explanation of them: everything extended is only a phenomenon and has only empirical reality. Being, therefore, is closed to the theoretical faculty, which comprehends only what it itself creates. Only a practical attitude takes us from the world of nature, phenomena, to the world of freedom, the self-existent, things in themselves. But the world of freedom is not what is, but what should be; it is the ideal of practical reason, not being, but a postulate of good will. In this form, Kant’s philosophy reflected the idea of ​​nominalism and the Protestantism that grew on its soil (as is known, Luther was a follower of Occam) about the superiority of will over reason, practical action over theoretical knowledge. Categorical imperative Kant, like Luther’s principle of sola fide, is an appeal to the will, which comes into contact with intelligible reality, inaccessible to reason, but does not comprehend, but realizes it. For Kant, good is not being, but ought.

Kant's interpretation of being receives a new interpretation from thinkers who take the position of mystical pantheism (the roots of which go back to Eckhart and Boehme ) – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Convinced that the human Self in its deepest dimension is identical with the divine Self, Fichte considers it possible to derive from the unity of self-consciousness not only the form, but also the entire content of knowledge, and thereby eliminate the concept of a thing in itself. Not with Descartes, but only in German idealism, we for the first time deal with an absolutely self-determining subject - the principle of knowledge, which takes the place of being. Philosophy, Schelling writes, is possible “only as a science of knowledge, having as its object not being, but knowledge... Its principle may not be the principle of being, but only the principle of knowledge” (System of Transcendental Idealism. Leningrad, 1936, p. 37). Being, as ancient and medieval philosophy understood it, here opposes activity as an inert and dead principle, as a motionless inert substance, a material that the human will must overcome in its activity to realize the ideal. The attribute of the highest principle moves from the actual to the potential, from being to becoming. True, in Fichte the activity of the I is not entirely determined by the I itself; it needs some “first impulse,” which Hegel considered to be a remnant of Fichte’s “dogmatic understanding of being,” characteristic of medieval scholasticism and rationalistic metaphysics of the 17th century. Hegel strives to completely eliminate this “dogmatism” and achieve the identity of being and thinking, the divine and human “I”: “...being is the pure determination of thought... We usually believe that the absolute must be far beyond, but it is like since it is completely present, which we, as thinking beings, always carry with us and use, although we are clearly not aware of it” (Works, vol. 1. M. - L., 1929, p. 56). In his concept of substance-subject, Hegel combined the naturalistic pantheism of Spinoza and the mystical pantheism of Fichte, freeing the latter from the remnants of “transcendental being” in the form of a “first impulse.” Hegel’s panlogism realizes itself at the cost of transforming being into a simple abstraction, into “the general after things”: “Pure being is pure abstraction and, therefore, absolutely negative, which, taken just as directly, is nothing” (ibid., p. 148) . Hegel considers becoming to be the truth of such being; Hegel also defines the highest concept of his system - spirit - as becoming, “but more intense, richer than bare logical becoming” (ibid., p. 155). The advantage of becoming over being, change over immutability, movement over immobility was reflected in the priority of relationship over being, characteristic of transcendental idealism.

GENESIS IN PHILOSOPHY 19th century. The principle of the identity of thinking and being, Hegel’s panlogism, caused a wide reaction in 19th-century philosophy. The late Schelling and Schopenhauer contrasted Hegel with a voluntaristic concept of being. From the standpoint of realism, criticism of German idealism was led by F. Trendelenburg, I. F. Herbart, B. Bolzano. Feuerbach defended the naturalistic interpretation of being as a single natural individual. The existence of an individual personality, which is not reducible either to thinking or to the world of the universal, was opposed to Hegel by Kierkegaard. Schelling declared his early philosophy of identity and Hegel's panlogism that grew out of it unsatisfactory precisely because in them the problem of being disappeared. In “The Essence of Human Freedom” Schelling sees the existential basis of existence - both the world and God himself - in the so-called. the “divine basis” of God, which is “groundlessness” or “abyss” and represents the unconscious will, the dark, unreasonable attraction. Being in Schelling's irrationalistic pantheism is not a product of a conscious act of good divine will, but the result of the bifurcation and self-disintegration of the absolute. Being here is not identical with good, but rather is the beginning of evil. This tendency deepens in the interpretation of being as an unreasonable will, a blind natural attraction in the voluntaristic pantheism of Schopenhauer, characterized by O. Liebman as “pansatanism.” Schopenhauer contrasts will with spirit as a powerless representation devoid of ontological status. Schopenhauer’s being is not simply indifferent to good, as with Hobbes or the French materialists, but rather it is evil: the formula ens et malum convertuntur, “being and evil are reversible,” is applicable to Schopenhauer’s philosophy - from his point of view, good would not be being, but nothing, the destruction of the eternally thirsty and eternally unsatisfied will, which is therefore doomed to inescapable suffering.

Philosophical teachings 2nd half. 19th century, based on Schopenhauer’s voluntarism - “philosophy of the unconscious” Ed.Hartmann , Nietzsche’s “philosophy of life” also considers being as opposed to spirit and reason. Ed. Hartmann comments on Leibniz's theodicy: although this world is the best possible, it is still so bad that it would be better if it did not exist at all. Nietzsche, under the influence of Darwinism and positivism, inverted the “value scale” of the pessimists Schopenhauer and Hartmann: he proposes not to renounce will, but to joyfully accept it, for will to power and self-affirmation constitutes the essence of being, which Nietzsche calls “life.” Life is power, strength, active self-affirmation of a natural individual who does not bind himself to any moral requirements external to his vitality. A student of the sophists, Nietzsche hates Socrates and Plato, convinced that from them, who opposed justice and goodness to force, came that “corruption of being”, which ends in the “nihilistic” decline of the will to power. Nietzsche contrasts being and good, life and morality: being, or life, lies on the other side of good and evil, “morality is an aversion from will to being” (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 9, 1910, p. 12) . Reality, according to Nietzsche, is possessed only by the changeable and transient. The modern spiritual state is a state of depravity, generated by faith in an unchangeable and eternal existence, “as if in addition to the real world, the world of becoming, there is also a world of existence” (ibid., pp. 34–35). In the world of the will to power, everything exists only in relation to the subject striving for self-affirmation - or self-destruction in a paroxysm of passion.

In pluralistic realism I.F. Herbart the Aristotelian-Leibnizian understanding of being as a single entity is being revived. In his polemic with German idealism, Herbart restores the main logical-ontological principle of Aristotle - the law of contradiction: being is that which is identical to itself; that which contradicts itself cannot exist. Contradiction, according to Herbart, takes place in the world of phenomena, and not in things in themselves - “reals”. In the world of phenomena we deal with the properties of reals as a result of their relationship to other reals. Essence, therefore, turns out to be ontologically prior to the relations of being, but for our knowledge, in Herbart, as in Aristotle, the relation comes first: without relation to others, realities are unknowable. Unlike Leibniz, who thought of monads by analogy with the soul and considered them changing, developing, Herbart, who saw in this understanding of monads the source of German idealism, which removed the difference between being and becoming, returns to the Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of substances as unchanging units of being and thereby revives the doctrine of the soul as a simple substance (rational psychology) rejected by Kant.

B. Bolzano also turned to realism and objectivism in the interpretation of existence. His “Teaching of Science” (1837) is the opposite of Fichte’s teaching of science: if Fichte proceeded from the Self as an absolute subject, then the subject of Bolzano’s study is existence in itself, timeless and unchangeable, similar to the ideas of Plato. The world of being, according to Bolzano, does not depend on the knowing subject; like Herbart, Bolzano opposes transcendental idealism and revives Leibniz's pluralistic metaphysics. Bolzano's ideas influenced the understanding of existence of A. Meinong and E. Husserl (globally early), who spoke at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. against subjectivism and skepticism from the standpoint of an objective ontology of the Platonist type. A student of A. Trendelenburg also spoke out in defense of Aristotelian realism F. Brentano , who criticized German idealism as a mystical-romantic movement and prepared the phenomenological movement (A. Meinong, K. Stumpf and E. Husserl - students of Brentano). According to Brentano, Fichte and especially Hegel, having eliminated the real being of substances, reducing it to the level of a simple phenomenon, undermined the basis of Christian personalism and put in its place the reality of the universal - a state that does not possess ontological reality. Brentano's dissertation “The Variety of Meanings of Being in Aristotle” (1869) is devoted to the problem of being and its types. Real being, according to Brentano, is not possessed by universals, but only by individual things (cf. “reals” of Herbart). However, unlike Herbart, Brentano does not limit knowledge only to the sphere of relationships, i.e. phenomena: essences themselves are directly accessible to knowledge, but not just any, but essences of a special kind, constituting the givens of mental life, phenomena of internal perception. As for the perception of the external, here we are dealing with phenomena in the Kantian sense of the word - they do not reveal themselves, but something else that is not directly accessible to us. Brentano's realism, therefore, extends only to the sphere of mental (but not physical) reality - this principle is also found in Husserl's phenomenology.

Attempts to revive realistic ontology were opposed by Ser. 19th century positivism, which continued the nominalistic tradition and the criticism of substance that English empiricism began and completed by D. Hume. According to O. Comte, knowledge has as its subject the connection of phenomena, i.e. exclusively the sphere of relations (relative): the self-existent is not only unknowable, but it does not exist at all.

Deontologization of knowledge was carried out in the last quarter of the 19th century. and neo-Kantianism. If the positivists tried to put concrete sciences in the place of metaphysics (ontology), then among the neo-Kantians this place is occupied by either epistemology (theory of science - the Marburg School) or axiology (the theory of values ​​- the Baden School). In the Marburg school, the principle of relationship was declared absolute; in place of the unity of being, the unity of knowledge was put, which G.Kogen justifies based on the unity of function (as such is Kant’s transcendental apperception), and not the unity of substance. The deontologization of scientific and philosophical knowledge presupposes the elimination of the Kantian “thing in itself” as something given, not generated by a transcendental subject: substance, according to Cohen and P. Natorp, is only a necessary prerequisite for thinking about relationships that only really exist: something moving is just a logical postulate introduced in order to think about movement. Philosophy does not deal with being, but only with method; the essence of all knowledge is mediation, i.e. establishing a system of relations between conventional units, the meaning of which is determined by their place in the overall connection of the method; the activity of mediation is the only reality recognized by the Marburgers: “movement is everything, the final goal is nothing.” The tendency towards the deontologization of philosophy is also characteristic of the Baden school: creating - in contrast to utilitarianism and eudaimonism in ethics and naturalism in the philosophy of history - a theory of values ​​as eternal and unchanging reference points in the world of changeable and transitory existence, V. Windelband And G.Rikkert in this case they identify being with empirical existence (i.e. with becoming) and therefore declare values ​​to be a non-existent principle. Values ​​do not have existence, they only mean, have force in relation to the subject of activity; non-existence turns out to be so. higher than being and at the same time more powerless and groundless than being. The world of values ​​(like Kant’s categorical imperative) is an ideal, not a reality; it is addressed to our good will and only by it can it be translated into reality. Being and goodness, being and ought are opposed to each other.

GENESIS IN PHILOSOPHY 20th century. The revival of interest in the problem of being in the 20th century, as a rule, is accompanied by criticism of neo-Kantianism and positivism. Wherein philosophy of life (Bergson, Dilthey, Spengler, etc.), considering the principle of mediation to be specific to the natural sciences and scientism oriented towards them (mediated knowledge deals only with relationships, but never with being itself), appeals to direct knowledge, intuition - but not intellectual intuition rationalism of the 17th century, and irrational intuition, akin to artistic intuition. Reason is identified in the philosophy of life with scientific reason, i.e. with a functional principle - this is the commonality of its premises with the theory of knowledge of neo-Kantianism and positivism: both directions identified being with changeable and fluid formation, and according to Bergson, being is a stream of creative changes, indivisible continuity, or duration (la durée), which is given to us in introspection; similarly, Dilthey sees the essence of being in historicity, and Spengler - in historical time, which constitutes the nature of the soul.

The desire for being is realized differently in the phenomenological school. Husserl's elder contemporary A. Meinong The neo-Kantian principle of “significance”, attributed to the subject, is opposed by the concept of “evidence”, emanating from the object and therefore built not on normative principles (ought), but on the basis of being. Meinong bases his theory of knowledge on the theory of the subject, the starting point of which is the distinction between object and being, essence (Sosein) and existence (Dasein). The requirement of evidence as a criterion of truth also underlies the phenomenological “consideration of essence”; however the actual orientation Husserl to psychology (like Brentano, he considers only the phenomena of the mental world to be directly comprehended) led to his gradual transition to the position of transcendentalism, so that his true existence in the second period was not the world of “truths in themselves,” but the immanent life of transcendental consciousness: “ Transcendental consciousness is absolute being” (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, 1912, S. 141); it is an immanent being that does not need any “thing” for its existence (this is how Spinoza defined substance). Pure consciousness, according to Husserl, is the original category in which all other regions of existence are rooted.

M. Sheler sees in neo-Kantianism and positivism an apology for those tendencies of industrial civilization that have turned man into homo faber, opposed not only to nature, but also to being, to any immediate givenness in general. Carrying out in ethics the same turn to ontologism that the early Husserl made in logic, Scheler relates moral values ​​not to the world of obligation, but to the ideal world of being. Thus, they cease to be something related to the subject, i.e. relationships, and act as an “in-itself being” independent of the subject, as a special region of being – ordo amoris (the order of love), Pascal’s “law of the heart”, revealed in phenomenological contemplation. If for Husserl being is absolute, or pure consciousness, then in Scheler’s personalistic ontology being is a personality, understood as a “substance-act” that is not objectified in its deep essence, related in its being to the supreme personality - God. Reviving the tradition of Augustinianism, Scheler, however, unlike Augustine, considers the higher being as powerless in relation to the lower, and the reason for this is that, according to Scheler, spiritual being is no more original than the existence of the blind vital force that determines real reality. Scheler's neo-Augustinianism turned out to be grafted onto the trunk of the philosophy of life in its Nietzschean version: the beginning of life and strength - at best indifferent to good and evil, and rather, perhaps, evil - confronts him with the powerless ideal world of the spirit, and for Scheler himself of the two poles - powerless spirit and spiritless force - rather, the latter should be identified with being. Starting, like Scheler, from neo-Kantianism, N. Hartman declared being the central concept of philosophy, and ontology the main philosophical science, the basis of both the theory of knowledge and ethics. Being, according to Hartmann, goes beyond the limits of all existing things and therefore cannot be directly defined; the subject of ontology is the existence of beings; By exploring - in contrast to the concrete sciences - existence as such (Aristotle's ens qua ens), ontology thereby also concerns being. Being taken in its ontological dimension, according to Hartmann, differs from objective being, or “being-in-itself”, as epistemology usually considers it, i.e. as an object opposite to the subject; existence as such is not the opposite of anything; it is also neutral in relation to any categorical definitions. The existential moments of existence are existence (Dasein) and qualitative certainty associated with essence (Sosein); modes of being of beings - possibility and reality, ways of being - real and ideal being. Hartmann considers categories as principles of being (and hence as principles of knowledge), and not as forms of thinking. The ontological structure of the real world, according to Hartmann, is hierarchical: inanimate, living, mental and spiritual - these are the “layers” or “levels” of being, with each higher layer based on the lower.

Hartmann's ontology excludes evolutionism: the layers of being constitute the invariant structure of existence. In this respect, Hartmann’s teaching is similar to the hierarchy of levels of being in Thomism, however, it is distinguished from the Thomistic-Aristotelian approach by the thesis (common between Hartmann and Scheler) about the powerlessness of the upper layer in relation to the lower layer that bears it (organic nature in relation to inorganic, spirit - in relation to attitude towards life) and the associated position about the extra-existent status of values, which echoes the theory of values ​​of the neo-Kantians. M. Heidegger sees the main task of philosophy in revealing the meaning of being. In “Being and Time” (1927), Heidegger, following Scheler, reveals the problem of being through consideration of the existence of man, criticizing Husserl for the fact that he considers man as consciousness (and thereby knowledge), whereas it is necessary to understand him as being - “here -being” (Dasein), which is characterized by “openness” (“being-in-the-world”) and “understanding of being”. Heidegger calls the existential structure of man existence . Not thinking, but existence as an emotional-practical-understanding being is open to the meaning of being. Heidegger considers the source of the openness of “here-being” to be its finitude, mortality, and temporality; proposing to see being in the horizon of time, Heidegger thereby unites with the philosophy of life against traditional ontology, criticizing it for the fact that, starting with Plato and Aristotle, it allegedly identified being with existence (this is partly true only in relation to nominalism and empiricism of the 17th century ., as well as to positivism and philosophy of life); Heidegger characterizes transcendental idealism (including Husserl’s phenomenology of the 1910s–20s) as subjectivism, “oblivion of being.” Like Nietzsche, Heidegger sees the source of the “oblivion of being” in Plato’s theory of ideas and rejects attempts to interpret being as God, as the “highest being.” “Existence is not God and not the basis of the world. Being is further than all existing things, and yet closer to man than any existing thing, be it a stone, an animal, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the closest. However, what is close remains the most distant to a person” (Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Bern, 1947, S. 76).

The turn to being, which found expression in the works of Herbart, Lotze, Brentano, Husserl, Scheler, Hartmann and Heidegter, began in Russian philosophy in the 19th century. V.S. Solovyov. Rejecting idealism and abstract thinking after him, S.N. Trubetskoy, L.M. Lopatin, N.O. Lossky, S.L. Frank and others put the question of being at the center of consideration. This issue was explored most deeply in the ideal-realism of N.O. Lossky and S.L. Frank. The latter showed that the subject can directly contemplate not only the content of consciousness, but also being, which rises above the opposition of subject and object, being absolute being, or All-Unity. Starting from the idea of ​​All-Unity, N.O. Lossky combines it with the doctrine of individual substances, going back to Leibniz, Teichmüller and A. Kozlov. At the same time, he identifies hierarchical levels of existence: the lowest – spatio-temporal events of the empirical world; the second level is the abstract ideal existence of universals - mathematical forms, numbers, ratios of quantities, etc., introducing unity and connection into the diversity of the sensory world; a higher, third level – the concrete ideal existence of substantial figures, super-spatial and super-temporal individual substances, the hierarchy of which, like Leibniz’s, is determined by the degree of clarity of their ideas; at the top of this hierarchy is the Supreme Substance, which, however, like other substances, is created. The Creator - the transcendental God is the source only of the existence of substances, while the function of their unification and thereby the unity of the world belongs to the Supreme intraworldly monad.

Thus, in the 20th century. There has been a tendency to return existence to its central place in philosophy, associated with the desire to free ourselves from the tyranny of subjectivity, which is characteristic of modern European thought and forms the spiritual basis of industrial and technical civilization.

Literature:

1. Lossky N.O. Value and being. Paris, 1931;

2. Man and his existence as a problem of modern philosophy. M., 1978;

4. Gaidenko P.P. Being and mind. – “VF”, 1997, No. 7;

5. Hartmann N. Zur Crundlegung der Ontologie. Meisenheim, 1941;

6. Litt Th. Denken und Sein. V., 1948;

8. Heidegger M. Zur Seinsfrage. Fr./M., 1956;

9. Stein E. Endliches und ewiges Sein. Freiburg, 1962;

10. Lotz J.B. Das Urteil und das Sein. – “Pullacher Philosophische Forschungen”, Bd. II. Münch., 1957;

11. Möller J. Von Bewusstsein zu Sein. Mainz, 1962;

12. Sartre J.-P. L'être et le neant. P., 1965;

13. Lotz J.V. Sein und Existenz. Freiburg, 1965;

14. Beck H. Der Akt-Charakter des Seins. Münch., 1965;

15. Specht E.K. Sprache und Sein. V., 1967;

16. Wahrheit, Wert und Sein. Festgabe für D.v.Hildebrand zum 80. Geburtstag, hrsg. von B.Schwarz. Regensburg, 1970;

17. Schmitt G. The concept of being in Hegel and Heidegger. Bonn, 1977;

18. Gilson E. Constantes philosophiques de l'être. P., 1983.

Being is traditionally one of the basic and most complex philosophical concepts of Existence as such. It is with him that the great sages of the past begin their reflections, and modern philosophers talk about him. Being is life

man in the Universe or the entire great Cosmos, from which each of us came and where we will all go in due time? An incredible mystery and an eternal question that haunts people. In attempts to find answers, to create a complete and correct picture of human Existence, an incredible number of interpretations of the concept have come to light. It is not for nothing that the main terms in the current text are written with. They do not represent the usual designation of things, but are intended to emphasize their scale and depth.

Sciences such as metaphysics and ontology, theology, cosmology and each of them consider the types of Being as part of universal space and mind have been trying to most fully consider the main aspects for hundreds of years. Thus, theology is a branch of knowledge devoted to the divine existence. Metaphysics speaks of the principles, the super-subtle, super-sensitive principles of this human phenomenon. It was this that Aristotle called “first philosophy,” and often these two concepts are considered as interrelated, and sometimes even completely identical. Cosmology chose the Essence of the world as the subject of its study. Space, like the whole world, is the realm of knowledge. Ontology considers everything that exists. The dialectics of Being, proposed by Hegel, sees it as a continuous chain of events, thoughts, incessant movement and development. However, this point of view is often criticized.

Of course, such a quantity led to the natural emergence of such concepts as “types of Being.” What forms can it take? Despite the differences in interpretation, Genesis is only the material and spiritual part of our world. It is precisely this belonging to one or another area of ​​Existence that is called objective and subjective reality.

The material part includes everything that exists regardless of the will and desire of Man. It is in itself, self-sufficient and independent. At the same time, not only natural objects are included, but also phenomena of social life. Spiritual existence is a more subtle structure. Thoughts and desires, thoughts, reflections - all this is part of the subjective reality of the Universal Existence.

Just as white cannot exist without black, so Genesis loses its meaning without its opposite. This antipode is called a certain “Nothing”.

Non-existence is what is often called the counterweight to Existence. The most interesting and inexplicable feature of Nothing is that in the absolute understanding of the Universe, it simply cannot exist. Despite some absurdity of such a statement, it has a place in philosophy.

The person himself, after his death, goes into this Nothingness, but his creations, descendants and thoughts remain in this world, and become part of the reality in which subsequent generations continue to live. Such “flowing over” allows us to say that Being is infinite, and Nothing is conditional.

Being is the broadest philosophical category, which is used to designate the substantiality, as well as the integrity of the world. Genesis philosophy originated in Ancient Greece. The emergence of the doctrine of it coincided with the emergence of philosophical knowledge, as well as with the transition to theoretical-logical thinking.

The concept that the world is holistic did not emerge immediately. Intermediate concepts and concepts contributed to its emergence. Those thinkers who lived during the period of antiquity very carefully considered all possible options for philosophical constructions, while relying on the knowledge that was obtained by their predecessors. They also relied on mythology, art, and so on.

Over time, a completely new attitude in understanding the world around us arises in cognition. The point is that Greek natural philosophers viewed reality as a kind of variety of constantly changing objects, processes, phenomena, and their followers asked questions about the very basis of all these changes. This basis is being. Philosophy, even in our time, often refers to this category. Many great philosophers studied it.

Being in philosophy

The word “being” itself is a combination of two other words: the first is “to be”, the second is “is”. Let us note that it denotes not only the very existence of something in this world, but guarantees that this existence is natural and completely real.

Being in philosophy makes it possible to experience the world as something holistic, unified, not consisting of separate parts. The science that studies existence is called ontology - this is one of the most important knowledge.

What is the basis of existence? It is based on the fact that a person perceives the world not only as existing here and now, but also as something that is eternal and remains real even where this person has never been and never will be. The existence here and now is proven by human experience, and the eternity and boundlessness of the world is explained by the intuitive activity of consciousness. The unity of what is described above constitutes the structure of the concept of being.

Philosophers who study questions of existence sincerely believe that the world remains unshakable despite all the upheavals that occur in nature and society. Nothing affects it, it always remains constant, integral, unchanging. Unshakable peace is true existence, the support that gives us guarantees that reality will not disappear.

Reflections on a strong world are the core of human meaning-making activity. We can say that all kinds of concepts are superimposed on intuition, which form the meaning contained in various

Ontology states that the world that exists around us lives and also develops according to its own laws. These laws have never depended and will not depend either on our desire or on our will. They provide harmony and stability to our activities, although at the same time they limit it. The ability to follow the laws of existence greatly simplifies the existence of man and any other creature.

This should include:

• category of things. Here we are talking about the essence of things of nature, as well as things created by man;
• category of spiritual. Here everything is based on a subjective as well as an objective spirit;
• category of person. Here one can observe a division into man as a being of nature, and also into man as a specific being, separated from this nature;
• Consists of the existence of society and the existence of an individual.

Being in philosophy is just one of the points of philosophical reasoning about man and the world around him. Despite this, the importance of ontology is truly great.

« It is impossible to define existence without falling into absurdity(i.e., without trying to explain the meaning of any word with the same word), because the definition of any word begins with the expression “it is...”- it does not matter whether it is expressed explicitly or implied. This means that to define being it is necessary to say: “being is...”, and thereby use the word itself in the definition” (Pascal, “On the Spirit of Geometry”, I). Lalande's Dictionary confirms the same thing, without even quoting Pascal: being is “a simple term, the definition of which is impossible”. And not because we do not know the meaning of this word, but because we cannot define it without assuming that we already have this knowledge, albeit vague. If the word being “is used in many senses,” as Aristotle said (for whom each of these meanings resulted in a category: being appears under the names of substance, quantity, quality, relationship), this does not help us in the least to establish what it is in itself. itself, there is nothing in common in all these senses.

There is no consensus on what being is. Generally speaking, this concept is interpreted as a philosophical category that denotes objective reality: space, man and nature. Existence does not depend on human will, consciousness or emotions. In the broadest sense, this term refers to general ideas about all things; everything that exists: visible and invisible.

The science of being is ontology. Ontos translated from Greek means existence, logos means word, i.e. ontology is the study of existence. Even followers of Taoism and philosophers of antiquity began to study the principles of human existence, society and nature.

The emergence of questions about existence is relevant for a person when natural, ordinary things turn out to be the cause of doubts and reflections. Humanity still has not fully clarified the issues of existence and non-existence. Therefore, again and again a person thinks about the incomprehensible topics of real life. These themes arise especially clearly at the junctions of two different eras, when the connection between times breaks down.

How philosophers discovered the universe

The first to highlight reality as a category called “being” was Parmenides, an ancient Greek philosopher who lived in the 6th-5th centuries. BC. The philosopher used the work of his teacher, Xenophanes and the Eleatic school, to classify the entire world, using mainly such philosophical concepts as being, non-being and movement. According to Parmenides, existence is continuous, heterogeneous and absolutely motionless.

Plato made a great contribution to the development of the problem of existence. The ancient thinker identified being and the world of ideas, and considered ideas to be genuine, unchanging, eternally existing. Plato contrasted ideas with inauthentic being, which consists of things and phenomena accessible to human feelings. According to Plato, things perceived through the senses are shadows that reflect true images.

Aristotle located primary matter at the base of the universe, which defies any classification. Aristotle's merit is that the philosopher was the first to bring up the idea that a person is capable of cognizing real existence through form, an accessible image.

Descartes interpreted this concept as dualism. According to the concept of the French thinker, existence consists of material form and spiritual substance.

The XX philosopher M. Heidegger adhered to the ideas of existentialism and believed that existence and being are not identical concepts. The thinker compared existence with time, concluding that neither the first nor the second can be known by rational methods.

How many types of reality exist in philosophy?

The philosophy of existence includes everything in human consciousness, nature and society. Therefore, its categories are an abstract concept that unites various phenomena, objects and processes according to a common feature.

1. Objective reality exists regardless of human consciousness.
2. Subjective reality consists of what belongs to a person and does not exist without him. This includes mental states, consciousness and the spiritual world of a person.

There is a different distribution of being as a total reality:

• Natural. It is divided into what existed before the advent of man (the atmosphere) and that part of nature that was transformed by man. This may include selective plant varieties or industrial products.
• Human. Man, as an object and subject, is subject to the laws of nature and at the same time is a social, spiritual and moral being.
• Spiritual. Divided into consciousness, unconsciousness and the sphere of the ideal.
• Social. Man as an individual and as part of society.

The material world as a single system

Since the birth of philosophy, the first thinkers began to think about what the world around us was and how it came into being.

Existence, from the side of human perception, is twofold. It consists of things (the material world) and spiritual values ​​created by people.

Aristotle also called matter the basis of existence. Phenomena and things can be combined into one whole, a single basis, which is matter. The world is formed from matter as a unity that does not depend on the will and consciousness of man. This world influences man and society through the environment, and they, in turn, directly or indirectly influence the world around them.

But no matter what, existence is one, eternal and limitless. Various forms: space, nature, man and society exist equally, although they are presented in different forms. Their presence creates a single, universal, infinite universe.

At every stage of the development of philosophical thought, humanity has strived to understand the unity of the world in all its diversity: the world of things, as well as the spiritual, natural and social worlds that form a single reality.

What makes up a unified universe

Being as a total unity includes many processes, things, natural phenomena and the human personality. These components are interconnected with each other. Dialectics believes that the forms of existence are considered only in indissoluble unity.

The variety of parts of existence is extremely great, but there are signs that generalize what exists and distinguish certain categories from it:

• Universal. The universe as a whole. Includes space, nature, man and the results of his activities
• Single. Every person, plant or animal.
• Special. Comes from a single thing. This category includes various species of plants and animals, social classes and groups of people.

Human existence is also classified. Philosophers highlight:

• The material world of things, phenomena and processes that arose in nature or were created by man
• The material world of man. The personality appears as a bodily being and part of nature, and at the same time as a thinking and social being.
• Spiritual world. Unites the spirituality of each individual and universal spirituality.

Differences are revealed between ideal and real existence.

• Real or existence. This includes material things and processes. It is spatio-temporal in nature, unique and individual. It was considered the basis of being in materialism.
• Ideal or essence. Includes the inner world of a person and mental state. Devoid of the character of time and action. Unchangeable and eternal.

Real and ideal worlds

The two worlds, real and ideal, differ in their mode of existence.

The physical world exists objectively and does not depend on the will and consciousness of people. Ideal is subjective and possible only thanks to man, depends on human will and desires.

Man is simultaneously in both worlds, so man has a special place in philosophy. People are natural beings, endowed with material bodies that are influenced by the world around them. Using consciousness, a person reasons about both the universe and personal existence.

Man is the embodiment of dialectical unity and idealism, body and spirit.

What did philosophers think about the universe?

N. Hartmann, a German philosopher, contrasted the “new ontology” with the theory of knowledge and believed that all philosophical directions study being. Existence has many faces, it includes physical, social, and mental phenomena. The only thing that unites the parts of this diversity is that they exist.

According to M. Heidegger, a German existentialist, there is a connection between nothingness and being. By denying nothingness arises and helps to reveal being. This question is the main question of philosophy.

Heidegger rethought the concepts of God, reality, consciousness and logic from the point of view of bringing philosophy to a scientific basis. The philosopher believed that humanity had lost awareness of the connection between man and existence since the time of Plato, and sought to correct this.

J. Sartre defined being as pure, logical identity with oneself. For a person - being-in-itself: suppressed moderation and complacency. According to Sartre, as humanity develops, the value of existence is gradually lost. This softens the fact that nothingness is part of existence.

All philosophers agree that the universe exists. Some consider it to be based on matter, some on ideas. Interest in this topic is inexhaustible: questions of existence interest people at all stages of human development, because an unambiguous answer has not yet been found, if it can still be found.