# An analysis of the concept of being

This article by Dan Polansky looks at the concept of being. An inspiration is the concept of being by Aristotle. However, what we get here may turn out to be something different.
In this conception, "being" is a countable noun. Example beings are the following:
* Being a cat.
* Being white.
* Being a brother (of at least one person).
* Being the brother of Martin.
* Being in the process of swimming.
* Being an entity that has two eyes.
* Being an entity that has at least two eyes.
* Being a cat that has broken a vase.
* Being Albert Einstein (the special relativity guy).
* Being a human called Albert Einstein.
Analogically, we may concieve of the concept of having. This gives us the following example havings:
* Having a body.
* Having a house.
* Having a guitar.
* Having a brother.
Interestingly, purely syntactically, we may proclaim all havings to be beings. Since the following are apparently beings:
* Being an entity that has a body.
* Being an entity that has a house.
The scheme is "Being an entity that has X".
We may also do it the other way around, proclaiming all beings to be havings:
These beings are (putative?) entities, often taking the place of the subject in a sentence:
* Being happy is a tough assignment. (Dyer?)
* Being an entity that has a car is advantageous.
* Being in possession of an illegal drug can lead to trouble.
Unsurprisingly, they also take place of a predicate:
If we want to keep the noun form of the being, one option is to use the verb to have:
The space of all beings is very hard to overview. Beings seem to result from taking sentences and drilling a single hole (but not any drilling at any place will do).
These beings seem to be the same thing as monadic predicates. However, we may note that the beings are there regardless whether there is someone predicating, a mind. Thus, the particular individual animal's being a cat is there even if no one is looking, thinking and predicating.
It appears obvious that there are many more beings than the language can readily capture. A much more powerful mind than the human one could easily register more beings.
Some beings can be classified using Aristotelian categories, e.g. being a cat and being white. Other beings less so, e.g. being a white cat or even being a cat that has broken a vase.
The use of language brings beings forward to the mind. Let us consider:
* Being a human with XX chromosomes.
* Being a child bearer.
* Being a human with a womb.
* Being a human that wears lipstick.
The words characteristic, property, sign and pattern come to mind. Their relationship to this concept of being is yet to be investigated.
Some beings are indirect and vague:
* Being something like human but not exactly human.
* Being something that has some characteristics (beings?) of a human.
We see that some beings correspond to single words. This makes it possible to classify these beings in some ways similar to classification of words. Thus:
* Some beings correspond to nouns (e.g. cat, where the being is being a cat, or it is being an entity that has cathood).
* Some beings correspond to adjectives and certain nouns derived from them (e.g. to white and whiteness).
* Some beings correspond to verbs and certain nouns derived from them (e.g. to swim and swimming).
* Some beings pertain to the domain of biology.
* Some beings pertain to the domain of geography.
* Some beings pertain to the domain of mathematics.
But we have seen that beings can be complex and then, the above classification is impossible. Consider:
This being is multi-domain, in part biological, in part cultural.
Beings appear to be not specific to a particular language, but this is probably a matter for a debate. Thus, the following beings are the same:
* Being a cat.
* Eine Katze sein.
Since we specify beings by means of sequences of words, the question whether the beings exist independent of words and culture is at least debatable. I think they do exist independently in principle, but the matter is perhaps not entirely simple.
The concept of being is implied in certain conventional definitions in dictionaries. Thus, whiteness is:
This definition explicitly classifies the being under investigation as a quality or a state. But we can omit this classification and we get:
Above, we mentioned the concept of having (countable). To be and to have seem somewhat central, but we can add more, e.g. feeling:
* Feeling bad.
* Feeling that this is going to be a good day.
These can again be turned into beings:
* Being in a state of feeling bad.
* Being in a state of feeling that this is going to be a good day.
And we can find some strange creatures:
Above, we have used ambiguous specifications. Do ambiguous specifications really correspond to a single being? Thus, is being white really a being (since, in what sense of white?) It seems more plausible that a single sense in a dictionary corresponds to a single being. For a multi-word specification, we would need to disambiguate all words to get a single being. Thus, being a white cat is not a single being since in which sense of cat? On the other hand, the noun cat seems to disambiguate the adjective white.
Does every entity correspond to a being? It seems to. Since, e.g. London corresponds to this:
In general:
But the entity is not identical to the being; London is not the same thing as being London.
We see that entities have multiple beings. Since, as for London, the following examples apply:
* Being a city.
* Being the capital of the U.K.
* Being on Thames.
* Being in England.
* Being a city that has major so-and-so.
A being can contain a large amount of information. For instance, being a person who sees photograph so-and-so. This can be further extended: being a person who has seen photograph so-and-so, photograph so-and-so, and photograph so-and-so. Here, the actual photographs are only represented via "so-and-so".
Beings can be in relation of more specific or generic or neither. The following increases in specificity:
* Being an animal.
* Being a mammal.
* Being a feline.
* Being a domestic cat.
* Being a white domestic cat.
* Being a white domestic cat that has broken a vase.
Some beings have single-word names, some ending in -hood, some in -ness, some in something else. Thus:
* Being a person → personhood.
* Being white → whiteness.
Some beings can be explicitly language-specific:
We can translate the specification of the being into, say, German, but the quoted part cannot be translated. One might think that the above would be equivalent to being a white cat, but I am not so sure.
Some beings can be thought of as residing in the subject, but others much less so. The following seem to reside in the subject:
* Being a cat.
* Being white.
Since, inspecting the object under investigation without inspecting its environment or other objects would in principle yeild the presence of the being.
The following not so much:
* Being an entity called "cat".
* Being an entity that subject so-and-so calls "bavagai".
* Being an entity that is owned by person so-and-so.
Logical connectives such as and, or and not seem to be able to construct beings. Example beings depending on logical connectives:
* Being an entity that is not a cat.
* Being an entity that is a male cat, an abode or a waterfall.
There is something peculiar about the above beings; they lack something like compactness, let's say. There seems to be something absurd about it; then, any human has the being of a human or X, for any noun-specified X.
One could further consider multi-parameter beings (recalling that predicates are in general multi-parameter or perhaps "polyadic"):
The above being is not something that an entity has but rather a pair of entities has. But then, a pair is also an entity, so we may turn multi-parameter beings into the single-parameter being:
Things can get worse, for some value of worse:
And furthermore:
The art of definition and specification involves consideration of candidate beings to be incorporated into a sentence. Perhaps something like a relatively general inquiry into beings would contribute to these arts. One such inquiry or undertaking seems to be the first-order logic, but this would need to be properly articulated.
One being could be called existence, based on the usage of the verb to be in "To be or not to be? That is the question." (Shakespeare, quoted from memory) or "This parrot is no more!" (Monty Python) But that seems to be something else. On the other hand, being in the state of existence seems to be a being. It implies a possible going over into the state of nonexistence. That interprets existence as a state in which an entity is. It implies the entity is in fact indestructible; it merely goes into the state of nonexistence. A certain analogy could be deleting a row from a database table vs. marking it via the field "deleted".
The words essence and entity would be from the verb to be as well (to be verified). It would be worthwhile to clarify their relationship to beings.
Let me return to Aristotle's concept of being. I think it is Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) that indicates that in Aristotle, some beings are said of and some are not. The former kind could be the concept of being I presented above. But the latter kind has to be something else: all the beings above are able to be said of. To be done: find the specific SEP article and statement.