Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion

A Note on “Being” and “being”

xxi A Note on “Being” and “being” German and Latin each have two substantives for which English has only one: for both the German Sein and the Latin esse, and for the German Seiendes and the Latin ens, English has only the gerund “being.” Because the distinction between Sein/esse and Seiendes/ens is of absolutely central importance to this book, it uses “Being” to translate Sein/esse (and “Beyng” for Seyn, which Heidegger sometimes uses in place of Sein). This capitalization is merely a typographical device; it is utterly irrelevant to the book’s consideration of philosophical issues concerning Being and God. Problems arise with verbal forms including “to be,” “is,” “are,” etc. A first problem is that just as running is what runners do (as runners), but running is not a runner and does not run, Being is what beings do (as beings ), but Being is not a being and does not be. Hence, just as “Running runs” is incorrect, so too is “Being is,” if the latter is interpreted as indicating either that Being is a being, or that Being is what Being does (see 2.1[1][i], below). Further clarification of this state of affairs requires closer consideration of “is.” As is widely known, “is” is used (as is “are”) in the following three ways in ordinary English: (1) to articulate identity, as in Frege’s famous sentence, “A fact is [=] a thought that is true” and in the colloquial “Two plus two is four”; (2) as copula, connecting predicate to subject, as in “Socrates is a philosopher ” (although following Frege, this “is” is generally assimilated into the predicate—for example, is-a-philosopher—and so ceases to be a self-standing component of the sentence); (3) as indicating ontological status (presence or absence), as in “God is” or—in its most common colloquial appearances—following “there,” as in “There is nothing to eat in this house, but there is a lot to drink.” Because of its flexibility in ordinary English, “is” can be used in formulations about being, but also in ones about Being. An example sufficiently intelligible at this point for the purposes of this note—but xxii A N O T E O N " B E I N G " one that is clarified below, particularly by chapter 3—is the following: the sentence “Aristotle is human” can be interpreted as indicating what kind of being Aristotle is—he is a human being and not (say) a rock or a tiger—or as articulating Aristotle’s mode of Being—his mode of Being is Being-human. Because there are such formulations, in this book “is,” “are,” etc., are generally not capitalized even in formulations that concern Being rather than being. The reason is that if they were, this would suggest that formulations wherein they were not capitalized would concern being rather than Being—and, as the just-introduced example shows, that is not always the case. Whether specific instances of “is,” “are,” etc., concern being or Being usually must be determined by consideration of their contexts. Particular problems arise in chapter 4, with the treatments of works of Levinas and Marion, because in many of those works, it is at best difficult to determine whether “Being” or “being” would be the appropriate translation. To make the difficulty of these cases apparent, the unusual term “B/being” is used. B E I N G A N D G O D ...