Introduction
1What does it mean to study being “as being”? Anyone at all familiar with Aristotelian discussion of metaphysics has heard the expression: “the science (or study) of being as being.”2 Sometimes, in the mouths
of oldsters recalling their student days, it symbolizes a certain gobbledy- gook or double talk. Sometimes, in the mouths of neophytes, it seems to encapsulate a mysterious enterprise whose promise is extraordinary.
The mere form of expression should not cause diffi culty. To consider a doctor precisely as a doctor is obviously different from the infi nity of possible incidental considerations of a doctor. Sentences expressing per
accidens considerations are familiar, and their denial provides comedy.
If I say “doctors do not make money,” I am greeted (I hope) with laugh- ter. Yet precisely qua doctor, the doctor does not make money; the doc- tor heals. It is as a human being with material needs that the doctor asks for recompense. Studying the medical art is one thing. Studying business practice is something else.
No, in the expression “studying being as being,” the source of puzzle- ment, the source of obscurity, is the repeated word: “being.” How much does it really say? “Dog” says something, and “cat” says something; but “being”? Since it is said of everything whatsoever, it has seemed to many not to say anything at all, a pseudo-word. Being, it might be thought, is like “the night in which all cows are black.”
Of course, it can be insisted that to say something “is” signifi es that one is not merely dealing with fantasies or dreams. Beings are what is
1. This paper was originally read at the philosophy conference “Thomas Aquinas and the Subject of Metaphysics--Findings and Issues,” held at the Pontifi cia Università della Santa Croce, Rome, Feb. 27–28, 2003. I have not removed occasional references to that context.
2. Aristotle, Metaph. 4.1 (1003a21).
real. Still, that seems to be a rather homogeneous check mark to place after a thing’s name. It hardly expresses anything intelligible about the thing.
In short, it is easy to convince oneself that “being” either means ex- actly the same thing, even when said of the most radically diverse items, or else that “being,” since it is said of the most radically diverse items, has no one meaning at all.
Fortunately we are not alone. We have predecessors with whom we can still communicate. We have such people as Plato of Athens, Aristotle of Sta- gira, and Thomas Aquinas the Neapolitan. In fact, our conference is enti- tled “Thomas Aquinas and the Subject of Metaphysics—Findings and Issues.” In a sense, then, it is a historical investigation. What did this thirteenth- century thinker understand concerning the subject of metaphysics? On the other hand, if we take to heart Thomas’s own view of philosophy, we will not see ourselves as engaged in “mere history.” With Thomas, we will insist that “...the study of philosophy is not in order to know what it is people have thought, but what is the truth about reality.”3 If we go
back to Thomas in our study of philosophy, it is because, in the words of Étienne Gilson: “Great philosophers are very scarce.”4
It is not necessary, then, to discover, as though for the fi rst time, an an- swer to the question: What does it mean to study being “as being”? Ar- istotle, the originator of the formula, already provided an answer, and Thomas Aquinas took it upon himself to explain that answer. I propose to review their presentations, and, above all, to recall the way they under- took the study itself. Without some exploration of their practice, the an- swer might remain incomprehensible.
Aristotle’s own presentation offers considerable diffi culty, owing in part to the exploratory procedure in his Metaphysics, in part to the na- ture of those writings of Aristotle which have come down to us.5 That is a
reason to appreciate the commentary6 provided by Thomas. We are bet-
ter off the more penetrating the philosophical mind of the commenta- tor.7 Accordingly, I will generally rely on Thomas for the presentation of
3. Thomas Aquinas, In Aristotelis libros De caelo et mundo expositio, 1.22 (ed. R. Spiazzi, Rome/Turin, 1952: Marietti, 228 [8]):
......studium philosophiae non est ad hoc quod sciatur quid homines senserint sed qualiter se habeat veritas rerum.
4. Étienne Gilson, History of Philosophy and Philosophical Education, Milwaukee, 1948: Marquette University Press, p. 21.
5. Cf. Joseph Owens, History of Ancient Western Philosophy, New York, 1959: Appleton- Century-Crofts, pp. 285–294.
6. By “the commentary” here, I do not mean simply the work of St. Thomas which un- dertakes the line-by-line commentary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; I mean the metaphysical doctrine expressed in all the works of Thomas.
7. Gilson held constantly to the view that one must be a philosopher to be adequate as a historian of philosophy, and one must be a historian of philosophy to be a philosopher.
Aristotle, though I am well aware of the distance which often separates Thomas from our contemporaries as regards Aristotle’s meaning.
In the Republic of Plato, the task of philosophical education is precisely to turn the soul toward the consideration of being. “Being” in Plato obvi- ously names a fi eld of investigation which incorporates a variety of inten- sities: some things “are” more, some things “are” less.8
It is Aristotle who, in undertaking the most ambitious of human stud- ies, the only study which can satisfy the radical human natural desire, the desire to know,9 eventually presents it as “a science of being as being.” He
had already said he was seeking the highest causes. Pursuing this point, he noted that a cause must be the cause of some nature. Of what na- ture could the highest cause be cause, if not of the nature of being? In confi rmation of this, he pointed to the ancient Greek cosmologists. They sought the highest causes, and, clearly, they were seeking the causes of being as being.10
Cf. “Wisdom and Time,” published in French in Lumière et Vie 1 (1951), pp. 77–92, and in English translation by Anton C. Pegis in A Gilson Reader, ed. Anton C. Pegis, Garden City, N.Y., 1957: Doubleday Image Books, pp. 328–341:
......one can be a scientist without knowing the history of the sciences, whereas one cannot be a philosopher without knowing the history of philosophy. [337]
And E. Gilson, “Doctrinal History and its Interpretation,” Speculum 24 (1949), pp. 483– 492, at pp. 488–489:
......no man can write a single line of history of philosophy without handling his subject as a philosopher. Such is the main reason why doctrinal history is full of philosophical controversies about historical facts, which we mistake for historical controversies. 8. On degree or measure or mode of being, see especially Plato, Republic 9 (585b– 586b). The project, viz. treating being as being, is a distinctive one. One thinks immedi- ately of the project envisaged in Plato’s Republic 7.4 (518c–d):
......[T]he present argument.......indicates that this power is in the soul of each, and that the instrument with which each learns--just as an eye is not able to turn toward the light from the dark without the whole body--must be turned around from that which is
coming into being [ek tou gignomenou] together with the whole soul until it is able to en-
dure looking at that which is [to on] and the brightest part of that which is [tou ontos]. And we affi rm that this is the good, do we not? [Plato, Republic 7.4 (518c–d), tr. Allan Bloom, New York, 1968: Basic Books (italics Bloom’s).]
In the Theaetetus (184b–186e), Plato, distinguishing knowledge [episteme] from sense per- ception, presents the soul as comparing things from the viewpoint of being. He speaks [185c] of “what is common to all things”; being [ousia], more than anything else, belongs to all things [186a]. In the Timaeus (52d): “......einai tria triche......”: he presents the three ways
of being of the Ideas, the Receptacle, and the Phenomena. And let us recall the demand in
the account of the perpetual war about being in the Sophist (249d), that being must some- how include both the changeless and the changing.
9. Aristotle, Metaph. 1.1 (980a21).
10. Aristotle, Metaph. 4.1 (1003a21–32); St. Thomas, CM 4.1 (ed. Cathala, 529–533): [533]Then, when [Aristotle] says “But because.......,” here he shows that this science which we have in our hands has that-which-is for its subject, with this sort of argument. Every principle is the essential principle and cause of some nature. But we are seeking the first principles of things and the highest causes, as was said in the fi rst book: there- fore, they are the essential cause of some nature. But of no other [nature] than that of
Aristotle’s presentation of being as being as the fi eld of the metaphysi- cian is thus a doctrine of “being” as the name of a nature, a nature seen in its community as coinciding with the fi eld of infl uence of the highest of all causes. This picture is several times presented by St. Thomas when considering God as creator. To take a well-known text, consider his ex- planation of God as cause of primary matter. Thomas reviews the history of philosophy of causal infl uence. The early philosophers thought that the substance of things was uncaused, and conceived of causes merely as sources of accidental form. Later, having analyzed generable and cor- ruptible substance itself into form and matter, they understood such sub- stance as caused, but conceived of matter as uncaused: thus, the causes they conceived were limited to originating particular kinds of things. Ul- timately, such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle achieved an unquali- fi edly universal outlook, considering being as being, and so they came to affi rm the existence of unqualifi edly universal causality, causality of total substance, and so even of matter.11
To study being as being, then, means that one catch sight of being as a nature, i.e. something somehow common to things, in function of which they fall within the proper fi eld of infl uence of the highest of all causes.12
Thomas had already indicated this in the prologue he wrote for his Com-
mentary on the Metaphysics:
The aforementioned separate substances are the universal and fi rst causes of being [universales et primae causae essendi]. Now, it pertains to the same science to consid- er the proper causes of some genus and the genus itself: for example, the natural [scientist] considers the principles of natural body [corporis naturalis]. Hence, it is necessary that it pertain to the same science to consider the separate substances and common being [ens commune], which is the genus of which the aforementioned substances are the common and universal causes.
being [entis]. Which is clear from this fact, that all the philosophers seeking the elements [of beings] inasmuch as they are beings sought these sorts of principle, viz. the fi rst and high-
est; therefore, in this science we are seeking the principles of that-which-is inasmuch as it is that-which-is; therefore, that-which-is is the subject of this science, because every science is seeking the proper causes of its subject.
In the above I have inserted the words “of beings” [entium] which appears to have been omitted by scribal error, since it is in Thomas’s Aristotle text, and is needed for Thomas’s argument. Socrates also, as presented by Plato in Phaedo 96a–b and 97b, 97e, saw the early physicists as seeking the causes of being.
11. Thomas, ST 1.44.2 (and 1); and cf. CP 8.2 (975 [5]).
12. Cf. ST 1.4.3, where Thomas, seeking to explain how all creatures are like God, speaks of the analogical community constituted by being:
......according to some sort of analogy, the way being itself [ipsum esse] is common to all. And in this way those things which are from God are assimilated to him inasmuch as they are beings [entia], as to the fi rst and universal principle of all being [totius esse].
What I wish to underline is the treatment of being as a single unifi ed
fi eld, called here a “genus.” We know that Thomas must be using the
word “genus” in a wide sense, since he always maintains that being is not a genus, properly speaking.13 Still, it must name a per se unifi ed fi eld.14