I guess I don't see the difference between "beings" and "things”. — T Clark

Beings have the capacity for experience - often the adjective 'sentient' is also added. Inanimate objects do not. In fact it suggests what I think is a pretty succinct definition for consciousness, i.e. 'the capacity for experience'.

I think making the distinction between beings and things is part of a different discussion — T Clark

Customarily, the subject matter of ontology, which is suggested by the thread title.

A non-conscious being is not actually 'a being' but an object or a thing. — Wayfarer

As I’ve stated many times before, I’m not using “being” in the sense of sentient beings. Beings, in my usage, means “things,” or “entities.” It’s anything whatsoever.

To provide a bit more context, here is the sentence you quote with the preceding sentence:

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. — Jung

(Emphasis in original). I don't know if he's expressing a 'standard metaphysical view'.

I think making the distinction between beings and things is part of a different discussion
— T Clark

Customarily, the subject matter of ontology, which is suggested by the thread title. — Wayfarer

I think the being/thing equivalence I am discussing is ontological while the being/thing distinction you are discussing is ethical.

The OP plainly doesn't want to go down this road so I'll leave it at that.

Ever wonder about why humans are, in fact, designated as 'beings'? What significance does that term have? And to what category does the word 'being' apply? I would think, apart from human beings, that there would be agreement that some of the higher animals - apes, elephants, whales, dogs - might be considered 'beings'. Obviously the religious believe in spiritual beings - whether deities or celestial bodhisattvas in Buddhism, for example - but it's not essential to the point.

So - is not consciousness invariably associated with beings? Isn't consciousness a fundamental attribute of beings, generally? (as jgill suggests) A non-conscious being is not actually 'a being' but an object or a thing. So consciousness is intrinsic to being, isn't it? I'm tempted to say that to be, is to be conscious. — Wayfarer

I guess you probably find it annoying or condescending when people challenge you on this, and I don’t want to be annoying or condescending, but it is rather rude (not very rude, just slightly rude) of you to ignore people’s helpful corrections for literally years (granted, not everyone’s comments about it have been made in a good-natured spirit of mutual philosophical exploration, but that’s another matter).

The term “being”, referring to an individual, has a standard philosophical sense, meaning something which is.

(I avoided reference to existence and objects in that definition but I can’t very easily avoid the “thing”, just because of the way language works—I suppose you could take “something” here to mean an individual or particular)

Your refusal to use the term in that way, if it has substance to it, must be something like the following: if the term etymologically derives from a first-person utterance, like “I am”, we model our notion of being on what it is to be conscious, without even knowing it. Therefore, we should say that only conscious beings are beings at all, to reveal and emphasize the centrality of consciousness to being.

That’s the strongest I can make your position on this. But I think it still fails to justify the way you’re using the term, because you rarely make it clear that you are using it in your own technical way. You will just say, for example, that inanimate things are not beings, to people who are using “being” to mean anything, animate and inanimate, which is. And they are in line with standard philosophical usage, not you.

Or are you saying that only consciousnesses are, whereas inanimate objects merely exist? I doubt you want to go down that route. I think you probably agree that inanimate things are, even though this is plainly, linguistically, in contradiction to your wish to restrict being to animate individuals.

The thing is, you don’t even have to stick to your non-standard terminology to carry the same point. I mean, you can say that consciousness is essential to being in some way without misusing the term. Your position on ontology doesn’t depend on your eccentric use of “being”.

I’ve said the following before and I think you might have taken it as insulting or dismissive, but I still suspect there is something in it. “Being” colloquially is in fact used in the way you want to use it in philosophy: “the being from another world”, for example. I haven’t looked into the history of this usage, but I suspect it comes from our use of “human being”, which allowed people to imagine non-human consciousnesses, which thereby became non-human beings. That’s fair enough, but it just isn’t the way that it’s used in philosophy.

If you’re saying it should be, that’s also fair enough, but it doesn’t entitle you to contradict others who are using it in the traditional philosophical sense.

And that is my final statement on the matter! :grin:

Or are you saying that only consciousnesses are, whereas inanimate objects merely exist? I doubt you want to go down that route. I think you probably agree that inanimate things are, even though this is plainly, linguistically, in contradiction to your wish to restrict being to animate individuals. — Jamal

I think it's a fair analysis. It's not that I find it annoying, but I'm at a loss that the distinction accorded to beings as distinct from things seems to me Ontology 101, and conversely, the denial of that distinction seems Materialism 101, as to me, treating humans (and sentient beings generally) as objects is one of the symptoms of the dehumanising effects of materialism (as Jung might also say).

'To be' has various meanings - it can mean 'anything that is' or 'anything that has existence'. But in this case, and considering the context of the quote, I was referring to what is designated as 'a being'. That is a different case of the use of the word 'being' to the general sense of 'anything that exists'. When we talk of 'a being' as a noun then we're designating the subject of that sentence as 'a being'. And of course, beings and things both exist, but that is not the point at issue.

And no, I don't think that inanimate objects are individuals - unless you're including artefacts, which are, of course, manufactured by individuals. I suppose you could refer to an individual tree, or mountain, or river, but I don't know what special significance that has. I don't think you would refer to trees, mountains or rivers as beings, would you? Perhaps if you held to some form of folk religion you might.

But then, also consider the origin of the original post. The preceding sentence is

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. — Carl Jung

So in this sense 'being' does have a meaning which is not conveyed by 'the sum of everything that exists', as Jung is more or less arguing for an idealist philosophy. (Furthermore, I think this is deeply connected to why humans are called 'beings'.) I've read quite a bit of that text in the intervening hours, and he has a bit more to say on it, but overall it's about the dangers to individuation posed by mass culture and mass political and religious movements - rather similar in tone to Erich Fromm's 'Escape from Freedom' which must have been published around the same time.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I’ll just pick out this at the moment:

I don't think you would refer to trees, mountains or rivers as beings, would you? — Wayfarer

That’s the point: yes, I would, and that’s how it’s always been used in philosophy. It doesn’t commit one to materialism.

that’s how it’s always been used in philosophy. — Jamal

Can you point to a specific example?

Not easy at the moment because I’m on mobile, but I’ll try later. Heidegger, Aristotle, and the scholastics spring to mind.

There’s this from Britannica:

For Aristotle, “being” is whatever is anything whatever. Whenever Aristotle explains the meaning of being, he does so by explaining the sense of the Greek verb to be. Being contains whatever items can be the subjects of true propositions containing the word is, whether or not the is is followed by a predicate. Thus, both Socrates is and Socrates is wise say something about being. Every being in any category other than substance is a property or a modification of substance. For this reason, Aristotle says that the study of substance is the way to understand the nature of being. The books of the Metaphysics in which he undertakes this investigation, VII through IX, are among the most difficult of his writings.

Well, sure, but it's well known that one of the bases of Aristotle's metaphysics was precisely the elaboration of the different meanings of the verb 'to be'. And that Franz Brentano's doctoral thesis was on the different meanings of 'to be' in Aristotle, which was a seminal influence on Heidegger who devoted his philosophical career to 'the meaning of being' and 'forgetfulness of being'.

I'm only claiming that beings are subjects of experience, whereas things are not. I don't even know how this is contestable or why there's an argument about it. Even the chatbots get it.

Q: What is the difference between things and beings?

A: Things refer to inanimate objects, physical entities, or concepts that lack life or consciousness. They can include tangible objects such as rocks, buildings, and machines, as well as intangible concepts such as ideas, theories, and laws.

On the other hand, beings refer to living entities, whether they are animals, humans, or other organisms, that possess consciousness and the ability to think, feel, and act. Beings can experience emotions, make choices, and interact with the world around them.

In summary, the main difference between things and beings is that things are inanimate and lack life and consciousness, while beings are living entities that possess consciousness and the ability to think, feel, and act. — ChatGPT

Even the chatbots get it. — Wayfarer

As I say, that’s because it’s the everyday, likely modern, usage. In philosophy, anything which can be said to be is a being.

You mean, ‘on thephilosophyforum’. :wink:

Well it does seem like you're associating what I've said on the use of "being" with secular materialism, physicalism, etc, the kind of views that are prevalent here. But it's really not a related issue. I can say that rocks are beings and also say they're conscious, or I could say that while rocks, pangolins and humans are beings, only humans are animated by a soul, or that humans are nothing but material just like the other beings, and so on.

How to understand the being of beings is maybe a different matter again.

You might also recall the many heated arguments I got into with a former mod over this topic. He sent me a copy of an apparently classic academic paper on it, The Greek Verb to Be and the Problem of Being, Charles Kahn. He never acknowledged it, but this paper supports my argument that the Greek verb 'to be' has a far greater range of meanings than our verb 'to exist', for example:

These remarks are intended to render plausible my claim that, for the philosophical usage of the verb, the most fundamental value of 'einai' when used alone
(without predicates) is not 'to exist' but 'to be so' or 'to be the case'....

.... This intrinsically stable and lasting character of Being in Greek - which makes it so appropriate as the object of knowing and the correlative of truth - distinguishes it in a radical way from our modern notion of existence...The connotations of enduring stability which are inseparable from the meaning of 'einai' thus serve to distinguish the Greek concept of being from certain features of our modern notion of existence. — Charles Kahn

I agree with you on that, and I agree with Kahn. There certainly are differences in philosophy between being and existence, although I think they've been collapsed in most modern philosophy.

That's why I avoided anything to do with existence in my analysis above.

But you can go against modern philosophy on this and yet use "being" to refer to anything. It still means anything which can be said to be.

In other words, Kahn is not supporting you on the specific issue of the use of "being".

In other words, Kahn is not supporting you on the specific issue of the use of "being". — Jamal

How so? I had argued that the meaning of being as understood in ontology (derived from the Greek 'to be') is different to our usage of the verb 'to exist', and that is what Kahn says. (Although if rocks could talk, maybe they'd say something different.)

And again, anything that exists can be said to be, but that does not exhaust the meaning of being.

Over and definitely out :wink:

But you said that only conscious individuals can be said to be, i.e., to be beings. That's what I'm criticizing, not the difference between being and existence.

anything that exists can be said to be — Wayfarer

So anything that exists is (also) a being.

I can't think of another way to put it. Appeals to the obvious or to authority are no good in philosophy, but I'm not making any philosophical point or promoting an ontological view; I'm just talking about what a word means in the philosophical literature.

Assuming 'self-referential phenomenological processes' constitute subjectivity ...

... Subject-things
Object-things

Objects with subjects¹ (e.g. persons)
Objects without subjects² (i.e. things).

The term 'being' (Sein) seems superfluous and anachronistic. Anyway, I agree with @Jamal and – no surprise – disagree with @Wayfarer's usage. Consider Heidegger's anti-cartesian denotations:

Da-sein (existence, in-der-Welt-sein)¹
Seiendes (beings, things)²

Or if one prefers:

subject-beings¹
nonsubject-beings²

can see the argument for consciousness being primary. If you think of it psychologically, consciousness, as sensation, is prior to the abstraction of being and of the recognition of the external world as external.

"Being" presupposes non-being, it's an incoherent concept anyhow, but consciousness as simply sensation precedes any such distinctions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

I think there might be some overthinking in this thread. In English it is common to talk about anything in the external world as "objects," or "systems." Increasingly though, these boundaries are seen as arbitrary. "Entities" is a bit more ambiguous. "Beings," is almost always referring to conscious agents. A being is a system/object but not all objects are beings in everyday English; being is closer to "person."

The headline "scientists discover beings from outside the solar system," implies alien life not meteors passing through our neighborhood. The common usage of the distinction is simply based on "does it have first person subjective experiences."

As for sleeping people, consciousness doesn't disappear with sleep. People have REM and deep sleep dreams, even if they can't remember them later. Someone having night terrors and trying to put out a non-existent fire in their bed is obviously conscious in some sense even though they are asleep in important other ways. Someone with sleep paralysis acts like an unmoving object even though they are awake and panicking.

Because the "Hard Problem," is indeed hard, I don't think there is actually a useful criteria for telling beings and objects apart with this everyday terminology.

I would also argue against the "terminator" hypothesis that persons (or beings) cease to exist at the moment of death. George Washington is still President Washington. We can meaningfully talk about dead Christians or dead Muslims in a terrorist attack. We can talk about the Austrian dead on the Isonzo even though the people are dead and Austrian Empire is no more.

Certain elements of identity survive a person's biological life. This only makes sense from a purely physical view. Most of the matter that encodes information about one's identity exists in the brains of other people, not the self. Identity is created by the interaction of self and environment, and is encoded more in the former than the latter. So death leaves most of the physical elements instantiating identity quite intact, and this is why propositions about the attitudes held by dead people can have truth values.

The Tao, the primal oneness, comes before distinctions are made. — T Clark

Naming, consciousness, brings things into existence. — T Clark

In that case the Tao is being as a whole — existence. The individuated beings (things) that we differentiate in perception have as much existence an anything else, as beings.

If there was no one around to call an apple an apple, it wouldn't exist as a separate object, only as part of the inseparable whole. — T Clark

It wouldn’t exist as a linguistic entity— but animals interact with apples all the time. They seem to differentiate between them and what we call rocks just fine.

I don't know if he's expressing a 'standard metaphysical view — Wayfarer

I think he’s repeating Descartes. Descartes’ dualistic ontology is fairly standard, I’d say. Even on the forum.

You will just say, for example, that inanimate things are not beings, to people who are using “being” to mean anything, animate and inanimate, which is. And they are in line with standard philosophical usage, not you. — Jamal

Thanks for putting the time in to write all this out in detail. I’ve been down this road with Wayfarer too many times already. But you’re quite right: by “being” I mean anything whatsoever; by “a being” I mean any particular entity whatsoever. I don’t know how to be any clearer.

One motivation for suggesting that mind or consciousness precedes being is the view that it seems impossible that consciousness emerges from systems the components of which are severally non-conscious. However it seems to me there is a similar problem with putting consciousness as primary, namely his hard to see how extension, locality, differentiation and so on can emerge from consciousness alone. I think we need more than one property at base. At least two it seems to me, maybe more, I'm not sure. So I'm a substance monist but probably a property dualist, possibly triplist or more, depending on how few we can get away with. Is consciousness plus spatiality enough? I don't know.

The headline "scientists discover beings from outside the solar system," implies alien life not meteors passing through our neighborhood. The common usage of the distinction is simply based on "does it have first person subjective experiences." — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's true, but when Hegel or Heidegger talk about "Being" they're just talking about existence, they aren't talking about consciousness.

We just need to clarify.

Descartes’ dualistic ontology is fairly standard, I’d say. Even on the forum. — Mikie

That's interesting. I'm definitely not a substance dualist. I don't think @Wayfarer is, he's an non-dualist, although he might not identify as a monist exactly. Bartricks definitely did seem like a substance dualist. So is @Hanover I think. I can't think of any others off the top of my head. Maybe a few of the overtly religious members. But I'd say generally substance dualism is very non-standard, even on the forum, for good reason.