“…the question that has always been asked and is still being asked today, the ever-puzzling question ‘What is being’ amounts to this: ‘What is primary being?’...”
By formulating the question “What is being” in terms of “What is primary being” Aristotle takes a significant turn in bringing the “this” or the concrete (for e.g. a particular man) to the centre — because, for him, “primary being” cannot be abstract; but must in fact be the more particular and the concrete. In contrast, the movement towards secondary being would be towards the more general or the universal. For e.g., we include a particular man in the species called ‘man’ and the species itself in its turn is included in the genus called ‘animal’. These (man, animal), then, are secondary substances. The particular man, however, is Aristotle’s ground, the object of his investigation of ousia or primary being.
Aristotle’s first step towards the understanding of the meaning of being is via the ten categories which he considers as all-exhaustive in understanding the nature of things. These categories are: [1] What (Substance) – ‘Man, a horse’, [2] How large (Quantity) – ‘Two cubits long’, [3] What sort of thing (Quality) – ‘White, grammatical’, [4] Related to what (Relation) – ‘Double, greater’, [5] Where (Place) – ‘In the market place, In the Lyceum’, [6] When (Time) – ‘Yesterday, last year’, [7] What attitude (Posture/Position) – ‘Is lying, sitting’, [8] How circumstanced (State or Condition) – ‘Is shod, is armed’, [9] How active, what doing (Action) – ‘Cuts, burns’, [10] How passive, what suffering (Affection) – ‘Is cut, is burnt’ (Aristotle: Categories).
An overview of the categorial formulation illustrates that in understanding the meaning of being, Aristotle poses virtually all possible interrogatives – ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘where’, ‘when’ – and yet, it is remarkable that, he conspicuously abandons the ‘who’.
Even though Aristotle is driven towards concretion in both (a) asking the question “What is being” in terms of “What is primary being”, and (b) in offering an exhaustive categorial determination of all things in the world, he seems to fall short of the step that would yield fuller concretion. In fact, it is implausible to hold that any claims to the concretion of being can bypass or underestimate the ‘who’ of the question of being.
The question of meaning of Being cannot be isolated from the one who interrogates. In the act of asking the question: ‘What is being?’ Aristotle seems to gloss over the fact that Being is an issue for the one who asks that question. To lay it out in another way, in merely keeping to the ontical-categorial framework, Aristotle devalues the ontological priority of the question.
It is to address this skew that Heidegger’s Dasein steps into the picture. In asking the question of meaning of Being, rather than simply ‘What is Being’, Heidegger creates the need for Dasein itself and retrieves the quest for being. Dasein is that ‘being which is concerned in its being about its being’ (Heidegger: Being and Time). Da is a German word referring to place, though it also has a temporal aspect to it – ‘there/here, at this time’. Sein, on the other hand means ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’. This renders Dasein a meaning of ‘existing-there-or-here-then’. The essence of Dasein lies in its existence and not in its substance.
In his ontological framework laid out in Categories, with great emphasis, Aristotle attempts to distinguish substance from subject and yet his subject appears most substance-like, without any subjectivity. Aristotle’s main complaint against his predecessors is the absence of logical clarity of terms in their systems, but he himself doesn’t clarify what he means by a ‘subject’ and how it is to be properly distinguished from a substance, even in situations which appear to demand an explicit articulation. It is interesting that Aristotle uses multiple instances of ‘a man’ to illustrate his discussion of being in Categories, Physics and Metaphysics. But he uses it as a mere substantive ‘man’ and not as a subjective ‘man’. A particular entity like a man, the locus of primary being for Aristotle could satisfactorily be replaced by a particular table or a clay pot and is therefore dramatically different from the Dasein of Heidegger. This is because even though Dasein can be conceived of as merely ontical like a clay pot, the fact that it has the possibility to be concerned with whether its being is merely ontical (or not) is an issue for it, is certainly ontological in character.
For Aristotle what is most characteristic of substance is the fact that although it remains, notwithstanding, numerically one and the same, it is capable of being the recipient of contrary qualifications. He claims:
There is a sense in which material passes away and comes into being, and there is a sense in which it does not. As that in which a thing is, the material does in its own right suffer destruction (for that which is destroyed is in it, namely the deprivation), but as what is by way of potency, it does not in its own right suffer destruction, but is necessarily indestructible and ungeneratable (Aristotle: Physics).
In the Physics he says, further:
Necessarily everything concordant comes into being from what is discordant, and the discordant from what is concordant, and the concordant is transformed by destruction into the discordant and this is not any random one but one that is opposite (Aristotle: Physics).
Therefore the movement between actuality and potentiality, in other words— change — is seen by Aristotle as that which is the most distinctive trait of a primary being (Aristotle: Categories). In spite of the fact that even by the end of Physics Aristotle continues to grapple with whether ‘the thinghood of the thing is the form or what underlies it’ (Aristotle. Physics), there is a seeming emphasis on the possibility of ‘what a thing can become’, namely, its form. That the substance of a thing is its form is a claim that is both accepted and rejected in Metaphysics. In Chapter 17 of Metaphysics one encounters “a new beginning” where form and matter, which were so far elements, are radically transformed into principles. The primary being of a thing then becomes for Aristotle its nature – the inherent impulse or power to develop and change into ‘what is’.
Although some features of objects are not their primary being, those that are primary being are natural and are established by nature; hence the nature of a thing is clearly its primary being, and it is, not an element, but a principle (Aristotle: Metaphysics).
The question of ‘what is primary being’ then shifts from what its substance is to what its function or final cause is. Natural phenomena, for Aristotle, are characterized by their purposeful movement toward becoming themselves, and that is the ‘form’. Form is thus not a pre-existing static ‘idea’ into which the world shapes itself. Rather, form is motion, the motion of natural phenomena from potentiality to actuality.
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