In this paper, I will argue that Peter van Inwagen’s advocacy for a univocal sense of Being established on the basis of formal-logical quantification not only misunderstands Heidegger’s ontology but, as a result, limits the productive scope of metaphysical questioning.[1] Because van Inwagen collapses the distinction between beings and their activity, misunderstands the meaning of Dasein, and reduces the ontological to language, he fails to see how a recognition of different ways of being can help clarify traditional metaphysical disputes and create further discussion between diverse thinkers.
According to Heidegger, all beings are; but in addition to this, beings exhibit distinctive ways in which they are for us. This is why he believes that Being is analogical: There is a central meaning which, as it were, branches off into more specific ones. In contrast, van Inwagen holds that Being only has one meaning and that, as such, all beings are the same ontologically: “[T]o say that things of a certain sort exist and to say that there are things of that sort is to say the same thing” (480). A clear, more comprehensive summary of Heidegger’s position is as follows:
All of this [i.e., what is] is not merely uniformly presented to us on the world-stage as a confused manifold of juxtaposed items. On the contrary, within beings [Seiendes] there are certain fundamentally diverse ‘kinds’ of beings, which prescribe certain contexts in respect of which we take up a fundamentally different position…. And yet [for the most part] the beings that surround us are uniformly manifest as simply something present at hand in the broadest sense…. (FCM 275)
From this excerpt, a number of points can be gleaned:
- He begins with “All of this,” which simply indicates anything that is a being, that simply is.
- Beings do not manifest themselves “uniformly,” in an undifferentiated manner.
- The various ways in which beings manifest themselves are not arbitrary but can be grouped “fundamentally… [into] ‘kinds.’” That is, these kinds are natural: they are not made but found.
- Point (3) is obscured primarily because point (2) is not explicitly realized. It seems contradictory that, in the first sentence, he should deny that beings are uniform, only to say in the final sentence that they are. This must be understood phenomenologically: Descriptively, we do in fact find that beings often appear much in the same way, say, as things that are “just there,” but this is derivative; it is actually the case that, through our engaged dealings in the world, beings are qualitatively distinct. What is decisive is how beings are encountered, which elicits “fundamentally different position[s]” toward them. Heidegger explains that our ontology is biased toward presence-at-hand for existential reasons, insofar as it allows for a more secure existence.
It is worth dwelling a bit more on this last point, because it may be interpreted as a circular argument. Van Inwagen might object that Heidegger is begging the question in this way: Being is analogical rather than univocal, but on the basis of one of its modes, namely, presence-at-hand, we conclude that this is the one (uni) way in which it is properly said (vocal). Or to put simply, Heidegger can only refute van Inwagen’s univocity by assuming in the first place that being is not univocal, which is not the same as proving that such is the case. However, this concern is avoided because, as McDaniel explains, “Since Heidegger recognizes th[e] general concept of existence, he is willing to say (and capable of saying) of two things that enjoy different kinds of being that they are two” (300-301).
I believe Schaffer is on the mark when he declares that existence questions, which Heidegger would designate as ontic, are trivial within metaphysics, considering the very things under question can only be intelligently disputed if they first of all are (357). At this point, both van Inwagen and Heidegger are in agreement that Being is the most general phenomenon. The subsequent difference is that, for van Inwagen, this is both the point of departure and the point of arrival. His inquiry starts and stops at the same instant, because his is a “flat ontology” (Schaffer 355). Everything that is, is on the same plane. According to such an ontic egalitarianism, there are no qualitative distinctions between beings because, after all, being is nothing but an empty universal, as it were, reducible to an existential quantification of the form ∃ (“There is….”)!
To my mind, van Inwagen’s Quinean view is not a satisfactory account of either the reality we experience or Heidegger’s philosophizing about it.[2] Specifically, he misunderstands at least two points in Heidegger’s ontology.
First, he fails to properly appreciate the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. This Heidegger calls the “ontological difference,” i.e., the difference between beings and their respective Being (Sein), or beingness (Seiendheit), or way-of-being. Simply put, it is not the same thing to describe the fact that something is and to describe how that something is. Thus, it is true that Dasein and tables are, but they are in different ways—Dasein in virtue of its openness to Being, the table its presence-to-hand. Van Inwagen is quite correct, then, when he says that it is an “obvious truth… that one can’t engage in any activity unless one is” (477). Heidegger would not contest this. But van Inwagen stops being correct because he does not acknowledge the analogical sense of Being to which Heidegger is committed. Being is analogous insofar as there is a general activity of Being that derives from more specific—one can say “specialized”—activities.
By leaving out this latter half, van Inwagen can assert, “The vast difference between me and a table does not consist in our having vastly different sorts of being (…dass sein); it consists rather in our having vastly different sorts of nature (Wesen…)” (477). Heidegger’s point is that the different nature is the different way of being. As Quine expressed a preference “for desert landscapes” and van Inwagen is a follower of Quine, he can criticize this position for multiplying entities, leading to an “overpopulated universe” (Quine 23), as it seems like Heidegger is saying that there are two “layers”: There is the being, first of all, and then, in addition, there is the being’s Being, or nature, that is tacked on. Yet this would be a misunderstanding, too, because as Heidegger insists, “The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (Being and Time 26). So what is a being’s Being, if not a new being? It is the way in which the being manifests itself—or, in a word, it is the distinctive activity of the respective being, which distinctly runs counter to van Inwagen’s first thesis.
Second, he deflates the ontological question into a linguistic one. Van Inwagen asks us to imagine some Martians whose language lacks any being- or existence-related words, whether nominal or verbal; then, he contends that, in such a scenario, the Martians would be not only perfectly intelligible but also probably better off than we are—we who busy ourselves to no avail with vapid talk of “being”! The (un)surprising thing is that, in each of his proposed “translations” that ostensibly dispenses with being-language—for example, “‘It makes me strangely uneasy to contemplate the fact that it might have been the case that everything was always not I’” (479)—van Inwagen manages to use such words anyway, words such as “been” and “was,” which are conjugations of “to be” and require the concept of existence to have any sense.
To this, he might reply that, despite begrudgingly using these words, he is actually employing them toward a different end, such that “being” is no longer an activity. For example, van Inwagen might say that in the sentence “The dragon is brushing its teeth,” which might appear in a medieval scroll or children’s storybook, there is no ontological commitment in question; one need not actually posit that such a dragon exists and that it is brushing its teeth. Still, this defense does not hold up, for Heidegger is not making a linguistic point about the words we are using; rather, the words refer to an underlying concept, namely, that something is, that we can experience it in some way—in a word, the phenomenon of Being.
Precisely this is what fascinated Heidegger: That anything we can think or talk about, imagine, perceive, etc. presupposes Being, for which we have what Heidegger calls a “vague average understanding of Being” (Being and Time 25). Being must always be presupposed, though this “must” should not be interpreted to suggest contingency: We cannot do otherwise. Even in the case of the fictional dragon brushing its teeth, the dragon is an imaginary being, and imagined beings have their own distinct beingness, even if they only have their Being in the confines of bound pieces of paper.
If we return to the above-quoted Martian translation, which includes the words “It,” “me,” “fact,” “everything,” and “I,” the total absence of any being-word does not refute Heidegger’s position, but actually implies it; that is, even if van Inwagen’s Martians could successfully eliminate any semblance of being-language, the necessary concept of Being would necessarily persist. How so? First of all, because to speak of “It,” “me,” “fact,” “everything,” and “I,” implies that each of these things exists to be spoken about; and second, because even if none of the said things exist, the very sentence, in being spoken, exists, along with the speaker who says it! Indeed, for Heidegger, language has a disclosive function: Through speech, we make beings manifest. Yet this manifestness need not be limited to spatiotemporal objects that can be studied by science, considering a feeling, like the Martian’s being “strangely uneasy” about its contingency, is just as much a being that is communicated through speech.
Van Inwagen, neglecting the ontological difference, uses the example of “an unborn” or “unconceived person” in order to supposedly show how the Heideggerian position falters. The argument goes that the very premise “there are unconceived people” is nonsensical because the mere use of a form of “be” need not refer to anything that really has Being (481). Actually, the so-called problem of an “unborn” or “unconceived Dasein,” to which I will henceforth refer in keeping with Heidegger’s philosophy proper, can be addressed in two ways, depending on how “unborn” is construed.
According to Heidegger, it is true that “Dasein is its possibility” (Being and Time 62); however, to speak of an unborn Dasein, as van Inwagen does, is inappropriate and mistaken, since there is no such thing. At that point, one is speaking of either an unactualized being, to which I shall turn presently, or else a fetus, a present-at-hand collection of cells which, like all other beings, is, and has its own distinctive beingness. The fetus’ mode of being, though, is not Existenz, which belongs properly to Dasein, for whom its Being can be an issue: It is neither open to beings nor in-the-world (which really amounts to the same thing).[3] In fact, even if we granted that a fetus could be an unborn Dasein, and as Dasein is defined by possibility, then we would have to say that it is only a possibility of possibility, a second-order potentiality that thus makes its Being of another kind. There is no “remainder of… life,” as van Inwagen correctly opines, for something that does not have the mode of life to begin with (481). And yet, the fetus has Being all the same.
Or, if by an “unborn Dasein” one means, not a fetus, but merely a possible Dasein that could exist or could have existed at some indeterminate point in the future or past, then the argument is similar. Again, Dasein, as a to-be, is its possibilities; only as actual, as existing, does Dasein have its own potentiality-for-Being (Being and Time 225). On the other hand, to predicate potentiality of a non-existent being is to commit an ontological mistake, as only a being that is, can be; conversely, a being that only could be, like some unspecified unborn Dasein, does not as such have any real possibilities of its own to speak of. A seed is a potential tree, while a potential seed cannot be a potential tree but only an actual seed—if even that, seeing as it does not even satisfy a minimum existence. Analogously, a potential Dasein does not itself have potential, for potential is a modality that belongs to specific kinds of beings, but not all. Therefore, van Inwagen misses the point when he declares that “there are no things that don’t exist” (481), from which it supposedly, albeit incorrectly, follows that existence and being are the same.
For van Inwagen, talking about ways of Being is superfluous, as he believes that all ontic questions can be resolved through the application of unrestricted existential quantification. Not only does formal logic encompass the whole domain of what is, it also avoids making any ontological commitments [4]; all it does is stipulate in an ideal, conditional way what is predicated of what.[5] When, in addition to the unrestricted existential quantifier, ∃, there are added restricted existential quantifiers, that is, symbolic specifications of which beings are being talked about, Heidegger is made obsolete. A statement along the lines of “There is something, such that this something is so-and-so” forgoes any need for “beingness.” And according to McDaniel, van Inwagen is indeed justified herein; so far, existential quantification is compatible with Heideggerian ontology.
Nonetheless, a key difference emerges: “From a Heideggerian perspective,…. [t]he unrestricted quantifier is in some way to be understood in terms of [the] restricted quantifiers…, not the other way around” (McDaniel 303). McDaniels refers briefly to the difficulty of, as he puts it, “‘defining up’ the generic sense of ‘being’” (304), but it seems to me that the difficulty is in the opposite direction: If we start, as van Inwagen does, from the assumption that Being is univocal and that quantification is primarily unrestricted, then how could qualitative distinctions possibly be derived? Starting from a plurality and arriving at a unity strikes me as more plausible than the converse: The former involves a basic operation of determinate abstraction, whereas the latter compels nondeterminate division.
Alternatively, I can point out that the very term “quantification” betrays the difficulty inherent to a flat ontology, given that numerosity, to which van Inwagen wishes to reduce the activity of Being, requires homogeneity. Putting all beings on the same plane, so to speak, deprives them of their intelligible differences. A simple proof of this is that the beingness of numbers—numerosity—is clearly inapplicable to that which is counted thereby. If I count three dogs, the number “3” and the actual dogs themselves are irreducible; dogs cannot be understood on the basis of numbers, nor can numbers be derived, logically speaking, from dogs.[6] Yet from a formal-logical perspective, in which existence is nothing but quantification, this point, which methinks indispensable, cannot legitimately be raised.
Another point Heidegger could make is that, although existential quantification is valid as a system of discourse (McDaniel 302n), it is ultimately derivative. This conclusion comes from his phenomenological understanding of language as a form of understanding, which understanding is always implicitly of Being (Seinsverständnis). Formal logic’s existential quantification is an instance of first-order logic in which statements are analyzed in terms of predicate relations. With regard to the actuality of these predicates and what they ostensibly name, logic is agnostic, so to speak.
However, as Heidegger sees it, these propositions (Aussagen), as forms of signification established upon predication, are actually founded upon, and so presuppose, a more original saying (Sagen). Therefore, a proposition is an abstraction insofar as it is extracted out from a saying (aus-sagen), which initially points out, or indicates, a being. All of this is to say that existential quantification is useful only because, in an idealized and roundabout way, it is an artificial means of re-presenting (vor-stellen) what we experience. In a word, existential quantification is valid because it actually has its own hidden ontological premises, a covered up sense of what is meant by Being.
For this reason, I agree with McDaniel that a Heideggerian ontology that “accept[s] that there are different ways of being… impact[s] ontological disputes” (291)—except, this statement being nearly trivial, I would put it more strongly: Acknowledging Being as analogous is a more productive approach to metaphysics than van Inwagen’s univocal approach, which effectively limits, and so hinders, metaphysical inquiry. Where Schaffer speaks of a permissivism, Heidegger may well be committed to a pluralism which, unlike univocity, renders certain traditional metaphysical disputes more tractable. McDaniels demonstrates this cogently in the case of subsistence. He believes, first, that we have a natural tendency to differentiate between the being of abstract existents and that of concrete/material ones; and second, that this natural tendency of ours is essentially correct. On the other hand, to equate the being of a table with that of a number is both unnatural, i.e., artificial or contrived, and more obscuring than clarifying.
Again, this illustrates the usefulness and power of the ontological difference, or the distinction between the ontic (what is) and the ontological (what what is is). An example from Heidegger will illuminate this intuition:
In the assertions ‘God is’ and ‘the world is’, we assert Being. This word ‘is’, however, cannot be meant to apply to these entities in the same sense (…univoce), when between them there is an infinite difference of Being; if the signification of ‘is’ were univocal, then what is created would be viewed as if it were uncreated, or the uncreated would be reduced to the status of something created. (Being and Time 126)
In short, the assumption of univocity does a disservice to the phenomena. To adopt van Inwagen’s existential quantification would be an injustice to the way we think about and experience the world [7]:—Yes, each thing that is, is just as much as every other thing, but no, each thing that is, is not in the same manner as every other thing. Even an atheist who disbelieves God’s existence would, I think, honestly admit that, in theory, God’s way of Being is of a fundamentally different kind than humanity’s.[8] Likewise, although both a quark and a chameleon are actually in the world, few would seriously consider their respective modes of Being qualitatively indistinct.
In conclusion, when it comes to the question of what is meant by the word “being,” I think Heidegger’s analogical conception is both truer to experience and more useful than van Inwagen’s univocal conception. Recognizing a general sense of Being is a starting point, not a conclusion; otherwise, one forfeits the ability to express the varied richness of the world. By overlooking or even abolishing the ontological difference, existential quantification flattens ontology, preventing us from making sense of how beings differ from each other, not just numerically but essentially. Different beings differ in their Being; but while this sounds strange, in reality it is anything but strange. What is truly strange is the desire to reduce the wonder of Being in all its manifestness to ∃…
Notes:
[1] To the best of my ability, I shall try to be consistent with my terminology, using “being” and its derivatives for those things that are (Seiendes), “Being” (Sein) or “beingness” (Seiendheit) for modes/ways of Being, and “exist” and its derivatives for Dasein alone. Basically, beings are any- and everything, but a being’s Being(ness) is the manner in which that being is encountered by us. On the other hand, Being itself (Sein selbst) is that which allows all beings to be at all.
[2] This is no surprise, though, because van Inwagen himself admits as much:
[M]y knowledge of Heidegger is superficial… I, nevertheless, make no apology… It is my view that Heidegger’s philosophy of being is so transparently confused that no profound knowledge of his writings is a prerequisite for making judgments [on it].” (475n4)
[3] A non-Heideggerian would balk at this seemingly ridiculous proposition: “Of course a fetus is in the world! That is what an ultrasound reveals. Or are you suggesting a fetus is somehow extraterrestrial?” Here, too, the ontic-ontological distinction is vital. Ontically, a fetus is just as much “in the world” as a table is; it is inner-worldly. But for Heidegger, being in the world is different from being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), which is an ontological description. In other words, both a fetus and a Dasein are in the world, but only the latter is being-in-the-world. A more detailed exposition of what is entailed by having a “world” and how this relates to other beings, like animals, can be found in the latter sections of Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics; however, due to the limitations of this paper, which does not set out to address the ontological status of fetuses—or, for that matter, the contentious ethical question of abortion, which would never cross Heidegger’s mind—I can’t develop this further.
[4] This doesn’t seem entirely true to me. In Time and Being, Heidegger makes use of the fact that the German phrase “Es gibt”—“There is”—literally means “It gives/is given,” which he refers back to Being. Van Inwagen is aware of this linguistic fact but, fairly enough, does not come to the same conclusions (480n15).
[5] One may say that formal logic deals not with what actually exists but only what is real, in Kantian language.
[6] I specify that this is so logically because, empirically, this is the case.
[7] Van Inwagen or another critic could easily dismiss this as a fallacious appeal to nature, for which reason I must forthrightly disclose my predilection toward phenomenology. Heidegger and I take seriously Aristotle’s exhortation to “save the phenomena” (σώζειν τὰ φαινόμενα). This is a fundamental stance that I assume for the sake of the essay.
[8] Cf. Schaffer’s similar argument (359)
Works cited:
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, 1962.
———. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Indiana University Press, 1995.
McDaniel, Kris. “Ways of Being.” Metametaphysics, edited by David J. Chalmers, Clarendon, Press, 2009, pp. 290-319.
Quine, Willard V. “On What There Is.” The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 2, No. 5, 1948, pp. 21-38.
Schaffer, Jonathan. “On What Grounds What.” Metametaphysics, edited by David J. Chalmers, Clarendon, Press, 2009, pp. 347-383.
Van Inwagen, Peter. “Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment.” Metametaphysics, edited by David J. Chalmers, Clarendon, Press, 2009, pp. 472-506.