This is for Tom Carroll and anyone else interested in the topic.
At 998b22 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that Being cannot be a highest genus. (If it were a genus, it would have to be the highest genus since Being is maximally inclusive in that absolutely everything is; but Being cannot be the highest or any subordinate genus because it is not a genus at all.) I will formulate Aristotle’s thesis in my own way, and then give some reasons for accepting it. I won’t examine his reasoning in this installment. But first some terminological regimentation.
I will use ‘Being’ and ‘Existence’ interchangeably. To be = to exist. Being = Existence. Being/Existence is crucially different from beings/existents. (The forward slash in my writing indicates inclusive as opposed to exclusive disjunction. This is a Logic 101 distinction that I will happily explain if necessary.)
What is important here is the ontological difference between Being/Existence and beings/existents. I say that with Heidegger in mind, but without endorsing all or even most of what Heidegger means by the phrase, especially not what he says in his later phase, post-Kehre (after the famous ‘Turn.’) As I use ‘ontological difference,’ said difference is already in Aquinas as the distinction between esse and ens, the distinction between the To Be (esse) of beings and the beings (entia) that participate in To Be/Being. My ontological use of ‘participate,’ despite its Platonic provenance, is eminently apropos inasmuch as ens is the present participle of the infinitive esse. (Exactly how much philosophical juice can be squeezed out of this grammatical fact is a matter of controversy.)
The majuscule-miniscule distinction must be constantly observed. I mean the distinction between big ‘B’ being and little ‘b’ being. This typographical distinction records the ontological difference of Being and beings; in Latin that between esse and ens; in German, that between das Sein and das Seiende. Both of the latter terms are nominalizations or, if you prefer, substantivizations, the first of the infinitive sein, the second of the present participle seiend. ‘Das Sein’ is a proper noun that refers to Being in its difference from beings, while ‘das Seiende’ is a common noun that refers to beings either collectively or distributively depending on whether it is taken to refer to beings as a whole or to beings taken one-by-one.
So we need to distinguish collective from distributive uses of ‘being.’ And we must never use ‘being’ to refer to the Being of beings, that in virtue of which beings are. Some will dismiss ‘in virtue of which’ as a weasel phrase, a phrase with no definite meaning. We can discuss this if Tom wants to, but for now I dismiss the dismissal. Others will be inclined to say that there is no Being different from beings: there are beings, all right, but no Being. They might go on to say that talk of Being in its difference from beings involves illicit hypostatization.
This all needs careful discussion, but for now I will simply point out that the many numerically different beings have something in common, namely, that they are, and are not nothing. Each of the many beings is, and each is not nothing, and so each has in common with every other one the fact of its not being nothing. So the Being of beings is not the same as the beings that are. Being is one to their many. Being is what makes them be. The many beings form a totality of some sort since they all have in common that they are. But we may not assume that totality of beings is a mathematical set, a mereological sum, or any other familiar sort of totality. I am inclined to say that it is sui generis. It would also be hasty to assume that we know what the commonality of Being amounts to. Is it the commonality of a multiply instantiable concept? The commonality of a common cause? Both suggestions lead to trouble.
Another question concerns the ‘of’ in ‘Being of beings.’ Is this a subjective genitive, an objective genitive, both, or neither? In ‘city of Boston,’ the ‘of’ is neither. What I call the ‘of’ of apposition is not a genitive. So this is another topic that Tom might want to discuss. Timor domini initium sapientiae. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The fear of the Lord is not the Lord’s fear, but ours. The genitive is objective. The beginning of wisdom, however, is wisdom’s beginning. Subjective genitive. So both types of genitive are operative in one and the same Latin sentence and its English translation. The revelation of God, however, is both God’s revelation of himself and a revelation about God to us. So in this example the genitive has both functions. What about the Being of beings? Is Being merely that which makes possible the manifestation of beings to us, or is it that which makes beings be whether or not they are manifest to us? Or both?
Now what struck Parmenides at the beginning of our tradition and filled him with wonder was that beings are, that things exist, that they are (non-locatively) there, that they are not nothing. This was a concrete metaphysical experience he had, an intuition or direct (conceptually unmediated) awareness of the Being of beings. The first ‘of’ in the preceding sentence I take to express the objective genitive and the second the subjective genitive.
This leads naturally to the question, What is Being? Aristotle concludes at 998b22 of his Metaphysics that Being cannot be a genus. And he is right if he means that what makes beings be cannot be their falling under a genus. To put his conclusion in my own way, existing things are not a kind of thing. Particular trees, cats, moons, and so on are instances of natural kinds. So we can say that feline things are a kind of thing. But no particular feline, Max, for example, can instantiate the kind unless it, Max in this case, exists. No individual x can instantiate any kind K unless x exists. From this I conclude that existing things are not a kind of thing. Being is not a genus.
From this we can conclude that Being and a being is trans-generic: it transcends and cuts across all the various genera. A being qua being (ens qua ens) is not confined to any genus, and the Being (esse) of this being (ens) is not the being’s instantiation of any genus. Accordingly, being (ens) is a trans-generic and thus transcendental determination in the pre-modern sense.
More later. We are just scratching the surface.