The dilemma of modern metaphysical philosophy, and that which bedevils and undermines the smooth flow of interpretive exchange between thinkers in this field is the word “being.” When the word “being” is used in philosophical or ontological discourse in its role as a verb of the continuous present, its copulative use and grammatical and semantic role is very clear, and there is no error, but when employed corruptly as a verbal noun (gerund) “being” is irredeemably and incorrigibly polysemous, and is mainly responsible for the constant befuddlement and bickering over its meaning which accounts for the often bitter exchanges between metaphysicians.

The prime objective of philosophical textual criticism and hermeneutical comment is to ascertain as nearly as possible the words written by the author of the original text.

Whenever a reading of a Greek text has become corrupt or tentative the reason is usually one that concerns the various interpretations and translations of the verb einai and its conjugates.

No specious Heideggerian "rectification" can be accepted unless it has:

(a) Intrinsic probability - i. e. is likely to have been written by the author and is exactly suited to the context

(b) Transcriptional probability - so that it is such as to account for the corrupt reading in the transmitted text. This is usually accomplished by a meticulous comparison of the various forms of einai as they appear in a wide variety of contemporary texts including Greek dialects of the period, as well as a diachronic study of the verb from its early uses in the pre-Socratics onwards, together with a comparison with the uses of its equivalent forms in other Indo-European languages in their contemporaneous examples and in its earliest extant forms which can be studied in Sanskrit.

This sort of rigorous scholarly and professional  method seems to have been completely  ignored by Heidegger and as a result his translations have become something of a joke among Hellenists and many philosophers.

As is well known, Heidegger's biggest mistake was his unquestioning of the validity of the questioning of the so-called Question of Being as a valid question. Unless there is some document by Heidegger that I have never come across there is no evidence that there was any attempt by him in any of his writings to seriously address the critical importance of the semantic import of einai either to his own ontological improvisations and wish-fulfillments in particular, or to the metaphysical and religious tradition in general.

One would have expected that a vital preliminary to any consideration of the concepts of Being and Time would be a thorough-going analysis (at least of chapter length) and a review of the semantic value of 'being' as employed in the canon of western philosophy, as a legacy of the Greek einai would have been a critical and indispensable requirement for any investigation, but we search the pages in vain for such an endeavour. A few lines - and no more.

There is for him a general blanket acceptance of the putative  physical provenance of such critical words as: being, existence, and essence etc., without any in depth analysis of their historical linguistic use and their development, or any comparison with the equivalent uses of these concepts by the other great philosophical traditions such as that of the Arab world, to which we owe so much, and who can be credited with the discovery of the so-called ontological difference between essence and existence - it is impossible for an Arab to confuse them, or (apart from a passing reference to Buddhism) to the thinkers of China whose semantic understanding of existence and being is entirely different or the Western tradition.

The first language of Western philosophy may well have been Greek, but its prevailing current of thought passed through the Semitic languages (Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew) before being restored to Indo-European languages (scholastic Latin, French, English, and German). We have Arabic to thank, which unwaveringly discriminates the existential and copulative correspondences, for the distinction from which the concept of a divergence between existence and essence debouchedIf textual work is to be genuinely effective, it necessitates not only technical knowledge and sound method, but also a power of entering into an ancient author's mind, a feeling for the shades of his expression, a capacity for weighing nicely balanced possibilities, and a tact that can guard rules of general validity from hardening into rigid or self-serving formulas.

Heidegger not only lacked this emphatic tact but also the technical skills that the task called for. How can we expect him to grapple with the most difficult verb in any language - the Greek einai - when he had already admitted that he couldn't understand the meaning of “ist” [is] in his OWN language? As one of my favourite poets the great English critic A. E. Housman, said, 'the subject matter of textual criticism is the play of human thought and emotion in creating literature, and the subsequent play of human agency, or of chance, in defacing it'.

Having myself suffered from people deliberately changing my words, I can sympathise all the more with certain long-dead Greeks who suffered the same fate at the hands of Martin Heidegger. An independent observer noting this confusion may well be prompted to suggest that the simple expedient to eliminate the confusion in this particular area of physics would be to borrow the signs of symbolic logic, where the sign for the quantifier of existence is a simple backwards facing E together with its separate copulae the signs of class membership, class inclusion etc. It is doubtful whether the physical community would countenance such a measure, which would be no doubt seen as a concession to “science” and the first crack in the entablature which might end in the collapse of the whole complex of confusion called metaphysics.

So what is to be done? Does our modern physician adhere courageously to an undivided concept of Being behind the different functions of the Greek einai which is divined differently by each individual, and which is said to be hidden (or to play Hide and Seek) to all except the Hellenophilic cognoscenti, or he must discard the verbal noun 'Being' altogether, or attempt to re- delimitate the word in order to put an end to the discord which appears so risible to the other “outside” sciences?

Before we take a closer look at the nature of the Ancient Greek use of einai, I would like to pause for a moment and consider how we think about an entity in relation to its essence. If we have a red apple and a blue cube do you think that the roundness [the round form or shape] of the apple or the square form or shape of the cube “belong” to it? Whether you do or you don't the question hinges on our interpretation of the abstraction “belong.” Does the cube “possess” its squareness? Does it have the ownership or “possession” of its own shape? You may answer that its square shape and blue colour are itshumaly ascribed  attributes. If they are its attributes, and clearly a cube cannot attribute something to itself, then its square shape must have been attributed to it by us humans. “Well of course it is a humanly endowed attribute," you reply, "otherwise the attribute wouldn't be labelled with the English adjective meaning other-dimensional and six-sided.

So this means that the cube is encumbered with a human attribute whether it likes it or not? What if (in the absence of humanity) the cube was stripped of its attributes of three-dimensionality of shape with its six rectangular sides and blueness? Would it still be cube-shaped and blue with no humans to observe it and to add supplemental layers of essivity to it as indications of its “essence?

”If, as Plato maintained, the auxiliary entitiative templates of physical objects are to be found floating around unobserved somewhere in the aether, how can they retain their humanly endowed propertied attributes with no humans to monitor them? Do they retain these properties by proxy? Is the human sentient ground-control of these airborne supernatural sputniks sufficient to fasten and secure their modalic payload in their physical orbits? If then the so-called is-ness (essence) or quiddity (what-ness) is adscititious rather than intrinsic, how are we to take the idea that entities have an essence seriously? How can an entity be thought to “own” the way that it exists?

A woman may well be said to “own” a pimple she has on the end of her nose, but does an apple having a stalk “possess ” or “own” its stalk? Can the concept of “possession” be invested in an inanimate object for “possession” is to ACTIVELY possess? If an entity can be thought to “own” a “property” can it subsequently be said to “disown” or “relinquish” or “surrender” or “foreswear” a certain “property” if like an apple someone bites it to the core?

The whole concept is so anthropocentric and philosophically primitive it takes one's breath away to read philosophical old-timers and modern metaphysicians unthinkingly employing terms like these, just as if time had frozen, framed in some lang syne dusty Athenic agora, and all human thinking had ground to a halt and stayed that way in some physical Madam Tussaud's Waxworks for the last two thousand years.

It is certainly the case that these abstract concepts of essence and quiddity are part and parcel of traditional physics and are taken as expressions of the “presuppositions ” of physical discourse - but does that make them unquestionable and unchallengeable?