What is Being?
Posted: December 26th, 2017, 12:50 pm
Naturalism says that there is no transcendent reality, only nature and its laws, and science explains everything by those laws. But in fact nature is transcendent, as opposed to immanence, and science describes the way it appears to us. And it does an excellent job. But science makes a fatal mistake if it tries to explain immanence, for instance consciousness, by transcendence, by the laws of nature, and even reduce everything to physics. This is a Münchhausen's trick and only leads to paradoxes and futile efforts.
Philosophy cannot start with nature, because that would mean a metaphysical commitment before starting. Philosophy starts with our immediate reality, seeking its ontological preconditions.
The terms 'transcendental' and 'transcendent' both express transcending our immediate experiences, 'transcendental' towards their subjective precondition and 'transcendent' towards objects “out there”. So ontologically they are opposites, and we should not confuse them.
The being of the transcendent world, or nature, and the transcendental Subject are the ontological preconditions of our immediate reality, our existence.
Being is. Non-being is not. These are tautologies.
So there is being.
The Subject is the Absolute. It is being itself. And non-being is not. So the Subject is causa sui, its being does not need an explanation. The Subject is very concrete: it is me, and it is each of us, at the moment of experiencing. It is what connects our individual beings so as to make one eternal stream of being. It is the point of reference to everything there is. It is transcendental, with no physical or psychological properties.
The Subject has an inner structure, and that structure can be known a priori. It is not easy, though. It is the task of philosophy. Science can help in the task, but does not lead us very far. That is because science is only interested in objects of the material world or objects of consciousness. The analysis of the Subject demands reflection, a phenomenological study of our being in the universe.
The basic components in the structure of the Subject are (1) time and (2) the Others.
Being is temporal.
Being is being of something.
The Subject is temporal. This means that I have now this experience and then another experience. There must have been the first experience, because if there were an experience before each experience, I could not be here now, in fact there could be no “now”. There cannot be the last experience, because that would mean that there would be non-being, which is absurd. So the Subject, or being, has had a beginning but will not have an end. This is the temporal structure of the Subject.
Time is not a continuum with sparkles of being here and there, so that now I exist and then I do not exist. There is no time outside of being, outside of the Subject. No being without time, no time without being.
That there cannot be an end of my existence, can be proved as follows:
1. If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
2. There is something, also after my death.
3. Therefore my nonexistence is impossible, also after my death.
As to the first premise: the existence of the world is put into "brackets", which is a common method in phenomenology. Then a question is asked: "What would be the state of the world if I did not exist?" And the answer is: "It would not exist, either." This is the key point. So in the first premise we ignore the obvious fact that the world will exist also after my death, which is expressed in the second premise. We are in front of a paradox, and the solution of the paradox is the conclusion attained in sentence 3 of the syllogism. Therefore we must make a distinction between the empirical subject and the transcendental Subject. The empirical, individual subject will vanish away, but the transcendental, metaphysical, absolute Subject is eternal. And all individual subjects are manifestations of this absolute Subject. It migrates through all of us.
The reader who does not see the truth of premise 1 may stop here, because in that case the rest of the story makes no sense. Premise 1 is an a priori truth, like the Cartesian cogito. Premise 2 is an empirical truth. The conclusion is pure logic.
But what is this “something” of being? In fact it seems that there cannot be anything, because there seems to be no reason for the being of anything.
Nevertheless, there is something, as we see.
Every experience has a content. A content can point at two directions: to a noumenon, a “thing-in-itself”, and to an earlier experience. The totality of noumena is the universe. A reference to an earlier experience is memory. Memory defines an individual subject. The Subject manifests itself as individual subjects. Death is forgetting: when the content of my present experience does not have any reference to any earlier experience, I am dead as one individual, being now another individual.
The being of the universe does not depend on the being of any particular individual subject. However, the being of the universe depends on the being of the Subject, and the being of the Subject depends on the being of the universe. There can be no universe without a point of view, the temporal present, the “here and now”. So the universe belongs to the inner structure of the Subject. The Subject is the reason for the being of the universe. And it is possible that all the details of the universe are predetermined by the inner logic of the Subject, although we will probably never fully understand that logic, in spite of the fact that everything in the universe happens for us. For we are the Subject. But is the Subject transparent to itself? Can it be? Perhaps transparency is the telos of the universe, never attained, the origin of the eternity of our being.
The universe is inhabited. It is the universe of Others. Others are individual subjects, like me. My being is being in relation to Others. There is a symmetric relation between me and the Others: I am also an Other and every Other is also I. My relation to Others is the universe. And because of the symmetric relation between me and the Others the universe is in fact my concrete relation to myself. This relation is material, because Others, having a spatial relation to me, must necessarily have the concreteness that shows itself as matter. In fact matter can be defined as the medium of my relation to Others. Matter is not the ontological basis for our existence, but is necessary for its concrete realization. Therefore Others, like me, must have bodies and minds. My mind is the subjective side of my relation to Others, and my body is its objective side, being on the same ontological level as the bodies of Others and the rest of the material universe. So mental and bodily events run parallel, being two conceptually incompatible levels of description of one and the same relation. Therefore trying to solve the so called mind-body problem by finding a conceptual bridge between matter and consciousness will never succeed, because there is no such bridge. There are only correlations between mind and body, and it is the task of science, not philosophy, to find them. There is no philosophical mind-body problem.
So I am the Others and the Others are I. But because I am now I and not an Other, the Others must be in my past or in my future. This means that we must understand in a new way the relation between subjective time and physical time, because my present, past and future can be simultaneous in physical time. This is a difficult problem, but there is no logical contradiction in it. It only means that everything must be strictly predetermined if I can meet my past and future in the world. But who is in my past and who is in my future? Or what? Probably we will never fully understand the logic of the Absolute, even in principle, because we are inevitably inside the universe, and we cannot jump outside of it to see what it looks like.
Because the being of the universe of Others is necessary for the being of the Subject, my death is inevitable for my transition to another individual subject.
All this means that the ontology of the Subject is a combination of solipsism and a modified theory of transmigration of the Self or I, a combination that removes the logical inconsistencies of both theories. All experiences are my experiences. There are no foreign experiences. The present, the “here and now”, wanders through reality adopting all the manifestations of the Subject in the form of individual subjects, successively, each at its proper time, being born, living and dying, eternally.
Now we see the rationality of the “something”. Being explains itself from within. Being is really nothing but my relation to myself and the “something” is the tautological “being is” or “I am”. The Subject has to understand itself, find itself, be transparent to itself, in order to be in balance with itself, because there is nothing else, and there must be something to guarantee its being. And it must be, because non-being is not. Therefore it has to be in relation to itself, being its own object, as mind and body, seeking the balance of being. But the realization of this requires the whole universe with all its structures and evolutionary processes. This is the essence of the idea that the universe is inhabited, the universe of Others. And this is also the spatial structure of the Subject, seen as I and the Others in the universe.
So the Subject is temporal and spatial: eternal as subjective time, and migrating through all individual subjects in the space-time of the universe.
Now we can define being as the Subject's relation to itself, realized by nature. And nature is nothing more than the universe that modern physics so brilliantly describes. So there is nothing mystical in all this: only an ontological interpretation of known facts.
The idea behind the metaphysical hypothesis that I am also the Others is very clear but so embarrassing that I have hesitated to present it to anybody. However, if the hypothesis is true, it resolves many existential paradoxes, including the paradox of death and the paradox of foreign minds, as shown above. It is also a solid basis for ethics. Unfortunately the only way to verify or falsify the hypothesis is to think clearly.
Whether being ever becomes transparent to itself, gaining balance and peace in understanding itself, remains an open question. We have always dreamed of an everlasting heaven, paradise or nirvana, but maybe the logic of being does not fulfill our dreams, especially as death is unavoidable. Perhaps the myth of Sisyphus gives us a more realistic picture of our existential situation. Climbing up and falling down, never reaching the top. Or reaching it, understanding everything, and then forgetting all, having to start from zero. Or perhaps the balance is in the seeking, and we are like birds sleeping in the wind. Who knows.
Whatever our fate will be, all we have is the future. Here and now.
Philosophy cannot start with nature, because that would mean a metaphysical commitment before starting. Philosophy starts with our immediate reality, seeking its ontological preconditions.
The terms 'transcendental' and 'transcendent' both express transcending our immediate experiences, 'transcendental' towards their subjective precondition and 'transcendent' towards objects “out there”. So ontologically they are opposites, and we should not confuse them.
The being of the transcendent world, or nature, and the transcendental Subject are the ontological preconditions of our immediate reality, our existence.
Being is. Non-being is not. These are tautologies.
So there is being.
The Subject is the Absolute. It is being itself. And non-being is not. So the Subject is causa sui, its being does not need an explanation. The Subject is very concrete: it is me, and it is each of us, at the moment of experiencing. It is what connects our individual beings so as to make one eternal stream of being. It is the point of reference to everything there is. It is transcendental, with no physical or psychological properties.
The Subject has an inner structure, and that structure can be known a priori. It is not easy, though. It is the task of philosophy. Science can help in the task, but does not lead us very far. That is because science is only interested in objects of the material world or objects of consciousness. The analysis of the Subject demands reflection, a phenomenological study of our being in the universe.
The basic components in the structure of the Subject are (1) time and (2) the Others.
Being is temporal.
Being is being of something.
The Subject is temporal. This means that I have now this experience and then another experience. There must have been the first experience, because if there were an experience before each experience, I could not be here now, in fact there could be no “now”. There cannot be the last experience, because that would mean that there would be non-being, which is absurd. So the Subject, or being, has had a beginning but will not have an end. This is the temporal structure of the Subject.
Time is not a continuum with sparkles of being here and there, so that now I exist and then I do not exist. There is no time outside of being, outside of the Subject. No being without time, no time without being.
That there cannot be an end of my existence, can be proved as follows:
1. If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
2. There is something, also after my death.
3. Therefore my nonexistence is impossible, also after my death.
As to the first premise: the existence of the world is put into "brackets", which is a common method in phenomenology. Then a question is asked: "What would be the state of the world if I did not exist?" And the answer is: "It would not exist, either." This is the key point. So in the first premise we ignore the obvious fact that the world will exist also after my death, which is expressed in the second premise. We are in front of a paradox, and the solution of the paradox is the conclusion attained in sentence 3 of the syllogism. Therefore we must make a distinction between the empirical subject and the transcendental Subject. The empirical, individual subject will vanish away, but the transcendental, metaphysical, absolute Subject is eternal. And all individual subjects are manifestations of this absolute Subject. It migrates through all of us.
The reader who does not see the truth of premise 1 may stop here, because in that case the rest of the story makes no sense. Premise 1 is an a priori truth, like the Cartesian cogito. Premise 2 is an empirical truth. The conclusion is pure logic.
But what is this “something” of being? In fact it seems that there cannot be anything, because there seems to be no reason for the being of anything.
Nevertheless, there is something, as we see.
Every experience has a content. A content can point at two directions: to a noumenon, a “thing-in-itself”, and to an earlier experience. The totality of noumena is the universe. A reference to an earlier experience is memory. Memory defines an individual subject. The Subject manifests itself as individual subjects. Death is forgetting: when the content of my present experience does not have any reference to any earlier experience, I am dead as one individual, being now another individual.
The being of the universe does not depend on the being of any particular individual subject. However, the being of the universe depends on the being of the Subject, and the being of the Subject depends on the being of the universe. There can be no universe without a point of view, the temporal present, the “here and now”. So the universe belongs to the inner structure of the Subject. The Subject is the reason for the being of the universe. And it is possible that all the details of the universe are predetermined by the inner logic of the Subject, although we will probably never fully understand that logic, in spite of the fact that everything in the universe happens for us. For we are the Subject. But is the Subject transparent to itself? Can it be? Perhaps transparency is the telos of the universe, never attained, the origin of the eternity of our being.
The universe is inhabited. It is the universe of Others. Others are individual subjects, like me. My being is being in relation to Others. There is a symmetric relation between me and the Others: I am also an Other and every Other is also I. My relation to Others is the universe. And because of the symmetric relation between me and the Others the universe is in fact my concrete relation to myself. This relation is material, because Others, having a spatial relation to me, must necessarily have the concreteness that shows itself as matter. In fact matter can be defined as the medium of my relation to Others. Matter is not the ontological basis for our existence, but is necessary for its concrete realization. Therefore Others, like me, must have bodies and minds. My mind is the subjective side of my relation to Others, and my body is its objective side, being on the same ontological level as the bodies of Others and the rest of the material universe. So mental and bodily events run parallel, being two conceptually incompatible levels of description of one and the same relation. Therefore trying to solve the so called mind-body problem by finding a conceptual bridge between matter and consciousness will never succeed, because there is no such bridge. There are only correlations between mind and body, and it is the task of science, not philosophy, to find them. There is no philosophical mind-body problem.
So I am the Others and the Others are I. But because I am now I and not an Other, the Others must be in my past or in my future. This means that we must understand in a new way the relation between subjective time and physical time, because my present, past and future can be simultaneous in physical time. This is a difficult problem, but there is no logical contradiction in it. It only means that everything must be strictly predetermined if I can meet my past and future in the world. But who is in my past and who is in my future? Or what? Probably we will never fully understand the logic of the Absolute, even in principle, because we are inevitably inside the universe, and we cannot jump outside of it to see what it looks like.
Because the being of the universe of Others is necessary for the being of the Subject, my death is inevitable for my transition to another individual subject.
All this means that the ontology of the Subject is a combination of solipsism and a modified theory of transmigration of the Self or I, a combination that removes the logical inconsistencies of both theories. All experiences are my experiences. There are no foreign experiences. The present, the “here and now”, wanders through reality adopting all the manifestations of the Subject in the form of individual subjects, successively, each at its proper time, being born, living and dying, eternally.
Now we see the rationality of the “something”. Being explains itself from within. Being is really nothing but my relation to myself and the “something” is the tautological “being is” or “I am”. The Subject has to understand itself, find itself, be transparent to itself, in order to be in balance with itself, because there is nothing else, and there must be something to guarantee its being. And it must be, because non-being is not. Therefore it has to be in relation to itself, being its own object, as mind and body, seeking the balance of being. But the realization of this requires the whole universe with all its structures and evolutionary processes. This is the essence of the idea that the universe is inhabited, the universe of Others. And this is also the spatial structure of the Subject, seen as I and the Others in the universe.
So the Subject is temporal and spatial: eternal as subjective time, and migrating through all individual subjects in the space-time of the universe.
Now we can define being as the Subject's relation to itself, realized by nature. And nature is nothing more than the universe that modern physics so brilliantly describes. So there is nothing mystical in all this: only an ontological interpretation of known facts.
The idea behind the metaphysical hypothesis that I am also the Others is very clear but so embarrassing that I have hesitated to present it to anybody. However, if the hypothesis is true, it resolves many existential paradoxes, including the paradox of death and the paradox of foreign minds, as shown above. It is also a solid basis for ethics. Unfortunately the only way to verify or falsify the hypothesis is to think clearly.
Whether being ever becomes transparent to itself, gaining balance and peace in understanding itself, remains an open question. We have always dreamed of an everlasting heaven, paradise or nirvana, but maybe the logic of being does not fulfill our dreams, especially as death is unavoidable. Perhaps the myth of Sisyphus gives us a more realistic picture of our existential situation. Climbing up and falling down, never reaching the top. Or reaching it, understanding everything, and then forgetting all, having to start from zero. Or perhaps the balance is in the seeking, and we are like birds sleeping in the wind. Who knows.
Whatever our fate will be, all we have is the future. Here and now.