“The Problem of Being and Existence” from The Beginning and the End by Nikolai Berdyaev
From ancient times philosophers have sought for the knowledge of being (ousia, essentia). The construction of an ontology has been philosophy’s highest claim. And at the same time the possibility of achieving this has raised doubts among the philosophers. At times it has appeared as though human thought was in this respect pursuing a phantom.
The transition from the many to the One, and from the One to the many was a fundamental theme in Greek philosophy. In a different way the same topic has been fundamental in Indian philosophy also. Indian thought has been disquieted by the question: how does being arise out of non-being? It has to a large extent been focused upon the problem of nothingness, non-being and illusion. It has been occupied with the discovery of the Absolute and deliverance from the relative, which meant salvation. Indian thought has tried to place itself on the other side of being and non-being, and has revealed a dialectic of being and non-being. It is this that has made it important.
The Greeks sought for the primordial. They meditated upon the unchangeable; they were disquieted by the problem of the relation of the unchangeable to the changing; they desired to explain how becoming arises out of being. Philosophy has sought to rise above the deceptive world of the senses and to penetrate behind this world of plurality and change to the One. Doubts were felt even about the reality of movement. If man breaks through to the knowledge of being he will reach the summit of knowledge, and, it was sometimes thought, he will attain salvation through having achieved union with the primary source. Yet at the same time Hegel says that the concept of being is quite futile, while Lotze says that being is indefinable and can only be experienced.
Heidegger, in claiming to construct a new ontology, says that the concept of being is very obscure. Pure being is an abstraction and it is in an abstraction that men seek to lay hold upon primary reality, primary life. Human thought is engaged in the pursuit of its own product. It is in this that the tragedy of philosophical learning lies, the tragedy, that is, of all abstract philosophy. The problem which faces us is this: is not being a product of objectification? Does it not turn the subject matter of philosophical knowledge into objects in which the noumenal world disappears? Is not the concept of being concerned with being qua concept, does being possess existence?
Parmenides is the founder of the ontological tradition in philosophy, a highly significant and important tradition in connection with which the efforts of reason have reached the level of genius. To Parmenides being is one and unchanging. There is no non-being, there is only being. To Plato, who carried on this ontological tradition, true being is the realm of ideas which he sees behind the moving and multiple world of the senses. But at the same time Plato maintains the supremacy of the good and beneficent over being, and from that it is possible to go on to another tradition in philosophy. In Plato the unity of perfection is the highest idea, and the idea of being is being itself. Eckhart held that Esse is Deus. Husserl, after passing through a phase of idealism and asserting the primacy of the mind, came to carry on the tradition of Platonism in the contemplation of ideal being, Wesenheiten.
In the processes of thought the human mind sought to rise above this world of sense which presents itself to us, and in which everything is unstable, above a world which is a world of becoming, rather than of being. But by that very fact the search for being was made to depend upon thinking, and the impress of thought lay upon it. Being became an object of thought and thereby came to denote objectification. What reason finds is its own product. Reality is made to depend upon the fact that it becomes the subject matter of knowledge, in other words an object. But in actual fact the reverse is true, reality is not in front of the knowing subject but ‘behind’ him, in his existentiality.
The erroneous character of the old realism is particularly clear in the case of Thomism, the philosophy of the common or of sound common sense. It regards the products of thinking, the hypostatization of thought, as objective realities. And so St Thomas Aquinas supposes that the intellect, and the intellect alone, comes into touch with being. Being is received from without. This is to make the average normal consciousness, which is also regarded as unchangeable human nature, absolute. That kind of ontology is a clear example of naturalistic metaphysics, and it does not recognize the antinomies to which the reason gives birth. The nature of the intellectual apprehension of being is settled by the fact that being was already beforehand the product of intellectualization. In the Thomist view being comes before thought; but this being was already fabricated by thought. Being is secondary not primary.
In medieval philosophy the question of the relation between essentia and existentia played a great part. Being is essentia. But the question remains: does essentia possess an existentia of its own? In present day philosophy, for example in Heidegger and Jaspers, this question assumes a new form, that of the relation between Sein and Dasein. Aristotle and the scholastics admitted a classification in logic of the same sort as in zoology and in this classification the concept of being took its place as the broadest and highest. Brunschvicg points out with truth that it was Descartes who broke with this naturalism in logic and metaphysics. But ontology has never been able to cut itself off entirely from the naturalistic spirit.
Hegel introduced a new element into the concept of being. He introduced the idea of non-being, nothingness, without which there is no becoming, no emergence of what is new. Being itself is empty and the equivalent of non-being. The initial fact is being-non-being, unity, being and nothingness. Being is nothingness, indeterminate and unqualified being. Dasein in Hegel is the union of being and nothingness, becoming, determinate being. Truth is in the transition from being to nothingness, and from nothingness to being. Hegel wants to put life into numbed and ossified being. He seeks to pass from the concept to concrete being. This is attained by way of recognizing the ontological nature of the concept itself, it is being which is filled with interior life. “Identity”, says Hegel, “is a definition of only simple, immediate, dead being, whereas contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality. It is only in so far as nothingness has within itself its contradiction that it has movement and attains a state of wakefulness and activity.” Dialectic is real life.
But Hegel does not attain to real concreteness. He remains under the sway of object-ness. Vladimir Soloviev, who was much under the influence of Hegel, makes a very valuable and important distinction between being and the existent. Being is the predicate of the existent, which is the subject. We say: “this creature is” and “that sensation is”. A hypostatization of the predicate takes place. Various kinds of being are formed through the abstraction and hypostatization of attributes and qualities. In this way ontologies have been built up which have constituted a doctrine of abstract being, rather than of the concrete existent. But the real subject-matter of philosophy ought to be, not being in general, but that to which and to whom being belongs, that is, the existent, that which exists. A concrete philosophy is an existential philosophy, and that Soloviev did not arrive at, he remained an abstract metaphysician. The doctrine of the all-in-one is ontological monism.
It is not true to say that being is: only the existent is, only that which exists. What being tells of a thing is that something is, it does not speak about what is. The subject of existence confers being. The concept of being is logically and grammatically ambiguous, two meanings are confused in it. Being means that something is, and it also means that which is. This second meaning of “being” ought to have been discarded. Being appears as both a subject and a predicate, in the grammatical sense of those words. In point of fact, being is a predicate only. Being is the common, the universal. But the common has no existence and the universal is only within that which exists, in the subject of existence, not in the object. The world is multiple, everything in it is individual and single. The universally-common is nothing but the attainment of the quality of unity and commonness in this plurality of individualities. There is some degree of truth in what Rickert says, that being is a judgment of value, that the real is the subject-matter of judgment. From this the mistaken conclusion is drawn that truth is obligation, rather than being; the transcendent is only Geltung. Geltung refers to value not to reality.
When the primacy of obligation over being is asserted, this may seem like the Platonic primacy of the good over being. But Soloviev says that that which obliges to be in this world is the eternally existent in another sphere. A fundamental question arises: does meaning, the ideal value, exist and if so in what sense does it exist? Does a subject of meaning, value, and idea exist? My answer to this question is that it does, it exists as spirit. Spirit moreover is not abstract being, it is that which concretely exists. Spirit is a reality of another order than the reality of “objective” nature or the “objectivity” which is born of reason. Ontology should be replaced by pneumatology. Existential philosophy departs from the “ontological” tradition, in which it sees unconscious objectification. When Leibniz sees in the monad a simple substance which enters into a complex organization, his teaching is about the world harmony of monads, and what he is most interested in is the question of simplicity and complexity, he is still in the power of naturalistic metaphysics and an objectified ontology.
It is essential to grasp the inter-relations of such concepts as truth, being, and reality. Of these terms, reality is the least open to doubt and the most independent of schools of philosophical terminology, in the meaning which it has acquired. But originally it was connected with res, a thing, and the impress of an objectified world has been stamped upon it. Truth again is not simply that which exists, it is an attained quality and value, truth is spiritual. That which is, is not to be venerated simply because it is. The error of ontologism leads to an idolatrous attitude towards being. It is Truth that must be venerated, not being. Truth moreover exists concretely not in the world but in Spirit. The miracle of Christianity consists in the fact that in it the incarnation of Truth, of the Logos, of Meaning, appeared, the incarnation of that which is unique, singular and unrepeatable; and that incarnation was not objectification, but an abrupt break with objectification. It must be constantly reiterated that spirit is never an object and that there is no such thing as objective spirit. Being is only one among the offspring of the spirit. But only the trans-subjective is that which exists, the existent. Whereas being is merely a product of hypostatized existence.
Pure ontologism subordinates value to being. To put it in another way, it is compelled to regard being as a unique scale and criterion of value and of truth, of the good and the beautiful. Being, the nature of being, indeed is goodness, truth and beauty. The one and only meaning of goodness, truth and beauty is in this, that they are – being. And the reverse side of the matter is similar, the sole evil, falsehood and ugliness, is non-being, the denial of being. Ontologism has to recognize being as God, to deify being and to define God as being. And this is characteristic of the kataphatic doctrine of God, and distinguishes it in principle from the apophatic which regards God not as being, but as supra-being.
Schelling says that God is not being, but life. “Life” – it is a better word than “being”. But ontological philosophy has a formal likeness to the philosophy of life, to which “life” is the sole standard of truth, goodness and beauty; life at its maximum is to it the supreme value. The highest good, the highest value is defined as the maximum of being or the maximum of life. And there is no disputing the fact that one must be, one must live, before the question of value and good can be raised at all.
Life is more concrete and nearer to us than being. But the inadequacy of the philosophy of life consists in this, that it always has a biological flavor: Nietzsche, Bergson and Klages illustrate the point. Being indeed is abstract and has no interior life. Being can possess the highest qualities, but it may also not possess them, it can be also the very lowest. And therefore being cannot be a standard of quality and value. The situation is always saved when the phrase “real and true” is added. But then “reality and truth” become the highest standard and appraisal. It is the attainment of “real and true” being which is the aim, not the affirmation of being at its maximum. This only underlines the truth that ontologism is a hypostatization of predicates and qualities. Being acquires an axiological sense. Value, goodness, truth and beauty are a vision of quality in existence and rise above being.
But there is something else still more important in characterizing ontologism in philosophy. The recognition of being as the supreme good and value means the primacy of the common over what is individual and this is the philosophy of universals. Being is the world of ideas which crushes the world of the individual, the unique, the unrepeatable. The same thing happens when matter is regarded as the essence of being. Universalist ontologism cannot recognize the supreme value of personality: personality is a means, a tool of the universally common.
In the most living reality essentia is individual in its existentiality, while the universal is a creation of reason (Duns Scotus). The philosophy of ideal values is characterized by the same crushing of personality, nor has it any need to oppose the philosophy of abstract being. Real philosophy is the philosophy of the concrete living entity and entities and it is that which corresponds most closely to Christianity. It is also the philosophy of concrete spirit, for it is in spirit that value and idea are to be found. Meaning also is something which exists and by its existence of communicated to those that exist. Being and becoming must have a living carrier, a subject, a concrete living entity. That which concretely exists is more profound than value and comes before it, and existence goes deeper than being.
Ontologism has been the metaphysics of intellectualism. But the words “ontology” and “ontologism” are used in a broad sense and not rarely are identified with metaphysical realism as a whole. Hartmann says that the irrational in ontology lies deeper than the irrational in mysticism, for it is beyond the bounds not only of what can be known, but also of what can be experienced. But in this way ontological depth is assigned a higher (or deeper) level than the possibility of experience, that is, than existence. This ontological depth is very like the Unknowable of Spencer. In Fichte being exists for the sake of reason and not the other way about. But being is the offspring of reason and reason moreover is a function of primary life or existence. Pascal goes deeper when he says that man is placed between nothingness and infinity. This is the existential position of man, and not an abstraction of thought.
Attempts have been made to stabilize being and strengthen its position between nothingness and infinity, between the lower abyss and the higher, but this has been merely an adjustment of reason and consciousness to the social conditions of existence in the objectified world. But infinity breaks through from below and from above, acts upon man, and overthrows stabilized being and established consciousness. It gives rise to the tragic feeling of life and to the eschatological outlook.
And this accounts for the fact that what I call eschatological metaphysics (which is also an existential metaphysics) is not ontology. It denies the stabilization of being and foresees the end of being, because it regards it as objectification. In this world indeed being is change, not rest. That is what is true in Bergson. I have already said that the problem of the relation between thinking and being has been put in the wrong way. The actual statement of the problem has rested upon failure to understand the fact that knowledge is the kindling of light within being, not taking up a position in front of being as an object.
Apophatic theology is of immense importance for the understanding of the problem of being. It is to be seen in Indian religious philosophy and, in the West, principally in Plotinus, in the Neo-platonists in pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in Eckhart, in Nicholas of Cusa and in German speculative mysticism. Kataphatic theology rationalized the idea of God. It applied to God the rational categories which were worked out in relation to the object world. And so it has been light-heartedly asserted, as a basic truth, that God is being. The kind of thinking which is adapted to the knowledge of being has been applied to him, the sort of thinking which is stamped with the indelible impress of the phenomenal, natural and historical world. This cosmomorphic and sociomorphic knowledge of God has led to the denial of the fundamental religious truth that God is mystery and that mystery lies at the heart of all things.
The teaching of kataphatic theology to the effect that God is being and that he is knowable in concepts is an expression of theological naturalism. God is interpreted as nature and the attributes of nature are transferred to him (almightiness, for example); just as in the same sociomorphic way the properties of power are communicated to him. But God is not nature, and not being, he is Spirit. Spirit is not being, it stands higher than being and is outside objectification. The God of kataphatic theology is a God who reveals himself in objectification. It is a doctrine about what is secondary not about what is primary. The important religious process in the world is one of spiritualizing the human idea of God. The teaching of Eckhart about Gottheit as of greater depth than Gott is profound. Gottheit is mystery and the concept of creator of the world is not applicable to Gottheit. God, as the first thing and the last, is the non-being which is supra-being.
Negative theology recognizes that there is something higher than being. God is not being. He is greater and higher, more mysterious than our rationalized concept of being. Knowledge of being is not the last thing, nor the first. The One in Plotinus is on the other side of being. The depth of the apophatic theology of Plotinus, however, is distorted by monism according to which the separate entity issues from the addition of non-being. This would be true, if by “non-being” we understood freedom as distinct from nature. Eckhart’s teaching is not pantheism, it cannot be turned into the language of rational theology, and those who propose to call it theo-pantheism have a better case. Otto is right when he speaks of the supra-theism not the anti-theism of Sankhara and Eckhart. One must rise higher than being.
The relation which subsists among God, the world and man is not to be thought of in terms of being and necessity. It must be conceived by thought which is integrated in the experience of spirit and freedom. In other words it must be thought of in a sphere which lies beyond all objectification, all object power, authority, cause, necessity and externality, outside all ejection into the external. The sun outside me denotes my fall, it ought to have been within me and to send out its rays from within me.
This is above all of cosmological significance, and it means that man is a microcosm. But in the problem which concerns the relations which subsist between man and God, it certainly should not be taken to mean pantheistic identity. That is always evidence of rationalistic thinking about being in which everything is either relegated to a place outside, or identified with, something. God and man are not external to each other, nor outside one another; neither are they identified, the one nature does not disappear in the other. But it is impossible to work out adequate concepts about this, it can be expressed only in symbols. Symbolic knowledge which throws a bridge across from one world to the other, is apophatic.
Knowledge by concepts which are subject to the restraining laws of logic, is suitable only to being, which is a secondary objectified sphere, and does not meet the needs of the realm of the spirit, which is outside the sphere of being or of supra-being. The concept of being has been a confusion of the phenomenal world with the noumenal, or the secondary with the primary, and of predicate with subject. Indian thought took the right view in asserting that being depends upon act. Fichte also maintains the existence of pure act. Being is postulated as an act of spirit, it is derivative. What is true does not mean what belongs to being, as medieval scholastic philosophy would have it. Existentia is not apprehended by the intellect, whereas essentia is so apprehended, simply because it is a product of the intellect. What is true does not mean what belongs to being, but what belongs to the spirit.
A matter of great importance in the question of the relation between kataphatic and apophatic theology, is the working out of the idea of the Absolute, and this has been in the main the business of philosophy, rather than of religion. The Absolute is the boundary of abstract thought, and what men wish is to impart a positive character to its negative character. The Absolute is that which is separate and self-sufficient, there is in the Absolute no relation to any other. In this sense God is not the Absolute, the Absolute cannot be the Creator, and knows no relation to anything else. The God of the Bible is not the Absolute. It might be put in a paradoxical way by saying that God is the Relative, because God has a relation to his other, that is to say to man and to the world, and he knows the relation of love. The perfection of God is the perfection of his relation; paradoxically speaking, it is the absolute perfection of that relation. Here the state of being absolute is the predicate not the subject. It is doubtful whether the distinction can be allowed which Soloviev draws between the Absolute Existent and the Absolute which is becoming; there is no becoming in the Absolute. The Absolute is the unique, and the thinking mind can assert this of the Gottheit, though it says it very poorly.
A real, not verbal, proof of the being of God is in any case impossible because God is not being, because being is a term which belongs to naturalism, whereas the reality of God is a reality of spirit, of the spiritual sphere which is outside what belongs to being or to supra-being. God cannot in any sense whatever be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects. Ontological proof shares in the weakness of all ontologism. The service which Husserl rendered by his fight against all forms of naturalistic metaphysics must be acknowledged. Naturalism understands the fullness of being in terms of the form of a material thing, the naturalization of the mind regards the mind as a part of nature. But existence bears different meaning in different spheres. Husserl draws a distinction between the being of a thing and the being of the mind. In his view the mind is the source of all being, and in this respect he is an idealist. It is the being of consciousness with which he is concerned.
It is rightly pointed out that there is a difference between Husserl and Descartes, in that the latter was not concerned with an investigation into the various meanings of existence. But Husserl is concerned with that, and seeks to pass on from a theory of knowledge to a theory of being. But he preserves the ontologism which comes down from Plato. It is upon being that he keeps his attention fixed. But there is this further to be said, that not only things but even Wesenheiten also exist for the mind only, and that means that they are exposed to the process of objectification. Behind this lies a different sphere, the sphere of the spirit. Spirit is not being, but the existent, that which exists and possesses true existence, and it is not subject to determination by any being at all. Spirit is not a principle, but personality, in other words the highest form of existence.
Those idealists who have taught that God is not being, but existence and value, have simply been teaching, though in a distorted and diminished form, the eschatological doctrine of God. God reveals himself in this world and he is apprehended eschatologically. I stand by a philosophy of spirit, but it differs from the traditional “spiritualist” metaphysics. Spirit is understood not as substance, nor as another nature comparable with material nature. Spirit is freedom, not nature: spirit is act, creative act; nor is it being which is congealed and determined, albeit after a different fashion. To the existential philosophy of spirit the natural material world is a fall, it is the product of objectification, self-alienation within existence. But the form of the human body and the expression of the eyes belong to spiritual personality and are not opposed to spirit.