There would be being even if we found ourselves in a Berke-leyan situation, if we were nothing other than a screen upon which God projects a world that does not exist in reality. Even in that case there would be our act, even if it were fallacious, of perceiving that which is not (or which is only insofar as it is perceived by us), and there would be we as perceiving subjects (and, according to Berkeley’s hypothesis, there would be a God that tells us what is not). There would therefore be enough being to satisfy even the most anxious of ontologists. There is always something, since there is someone capable of wondering why there is something instead of nothing.
All this should immediately make clear that the problem of being cannot be reduced to the problem of the reality of the world. Whether what we call the outside World, or the Universe, is or is not, or whether it is the effect of a malign spirit, does not in any way affect the primary evidence that there is «something» somewhere (even if it were no more than a res cogitans that realized it was cogitating).
But there’s no need to wait for Descartes. There is a fine page in Avicenna who—after having said on many occasions that an entity is that which is conceived first of all, and that it may not be commented upon except through its name, because it is the first principle of every other comment, and that reason recognizes it without having to fall back on a definition, because entity has no definition, genus, or differentia, and that nothing is more known than it is—invites us to make an experiment that suggests he was not unfamiliar with certain Oriental drugs:
Let us suppose that one of us has suddenly been created, and is perfect. But he is blindfolded and cannot see external things. He has been created gliding through the air, or, better, in the void, so that he might not suffer the shock of air resistance. His limbs are separated, they neither meet nor touch. He meditates and wonders if his existence is proved. Without any doubt, he would state that he existed: despite the fact that this does not prove the existence of either his hands or his feet, or his insides, or his heart, or brain, or any other external thing, he would say he existed, without establishing whether he had a length, a breadth, or a depth…(Philippe 1975: 1–9)
Therefore there is being because we can pose the question of being, and this being comes before every question, and therefore before every answer and every definition. It is known that the modern objection that Western metaphysics—with its obsession about being—springs only from within a discourse based on the syntactic structures of Indo-European, and that is to say on a language that requires the subject-copula-predicate structure for all judgments (insofar as, as the eighteenth-century constructors of perfect languages did their utmost to propose, even sentences like God is or The horse gallops can always be resolved as God is existent and The horse is galloping). But the experience of being is implicit in the first cry emitted by a baby that has just emerged from its mother’s womb, to greet or take account of the something that manifests itself to it as the horizon, and in the baby’s seeking the breast with its lips. The phenomenon of primary indexicality shows us reaching out toward something (and it is irrelevant whether this something is really there or whether we posit that it is through our reaching out; it is even irrelevant whether it is we who are reaching out—there would be a reaching out in any case).
Being is id quodprimum intellectus concipit quasi notissimum, as if we had always been on that horizon, and perhaps the fetus is aware of being while it still floats in the uterus. Obscurely, it senses being as quasi notissimum (or, better, as the only known thing).
There is no need to wonder why there is being; it is a luminous evidence. Which does not mean that it cannot seem dazzling, terrible, unbearable, lethal—and as a matter of fact it seems that way to many people. Asking questions about its foundations is illusion or weakness and reminds one of the person who, asked if she believed in God, replied, «No, I believe in something much greater.» Being is its own fundamental principle, and we run into this inescapable fact every time we ask ourselves questions about it. Asking questions about the foundations of being is like asking questions about the foundations of the foundations, and then about the foundations of the foundations of the foundations, in an infinite regression: when, exhausted, we stop, we are once more and already at the very foundations of our question. 9
If anything, the question why is there being rather than nothing conceals another source of disquiet, which regards the existence of God. But first comes the proof of being, then the question of God. The question «Who has made all this, who keeps it in being?» follows the act of recognizing the evidence that there is something, an evidence so well known that it strikes us as being already organized within the cohort of the entities. It seems undeniable that even animals possess evidence of being despite the fact they are incapable of asking themselves the question that follows from it, an Deus sit. Aquinas was to reply to this in a summa appropriately called «Theologica.» But first comes the discussion on the De ente et essentia.
1.4 How We Talk About Being
Being is even before it is talked about. But we can take it from irrepressible evidence and transform it into a problem (which awaits an answer) only insofar as we talk about it. The first opening to being is a sort of ecstatic experience, albeit in the most materialistic sense of the term, but as long as we remain in this initial, mute evidence, being is not a philosophical problem, any more than water is a philosophical problem for fish. The moment we talk about being, we are still not talking about it in its all-embracing form, because, as we have said, the problem of being (the most immediate and natural of experiences) is the least natural of all problems, the one that common sense never poses: we begin to grope our way through being by carving entities out of it and gradually constructing ourselves a World.
Therefore, since common sense is incapable of thinking of being before having organized it within the system, or the uncoordinated series, of entities, entities are the way in which being makes its rendezvous with us, and it is from there that we must begin.
And so we come to the central question of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. This question is posed in the form of an observation from which Aristotle does not begin but very nearly arrives at after a succession of steps—stumbling over it, so to speak, as he gradually moves from the first book to the fourth, where, after having said that there is a science that studies being as such, at the point where one would expect the first tentative definition of the object of this science, Aristotle repeats as the sole possible definition what in the first book (992b 19) had appeared only as a parenthetical observation: being can be said in many ways (leghetai men pollachos) and in several senses (1001a 33).
What Aquinas thought the intellect percipit quasi notissimum, the horizon of our thinking and talking, Aristotle thought (but Aquinas agreed) was by nature (if it had a nature, but we know that it is neither genus nor species) ambiguous and polysemic.
For some authors this statement consigns the problem of being to a fundamental aporia, which the post-Aristotelian tradition has only attempted to reduce, without destroying its dramatic potential. Indeed, Aristode was the first to try to reduce it to acceptable dimensions, and he did so by playing on the adverb «in many ways.»
The many ways might be reduced to four. Being can be said (i) as accidental being (it is the being predicated of the copula, and so we say The man is white or is standing); (ii) as true, and so it may be true or false that a certain man is white, or that man is an animal; (iii) as potentiality and actuality, and so if it is not true that this healthy man is ill at present, he could fall ill, and today we might say that we could think of
