I am very much aware of the temptation to make the perceived facts of ousia and aspects of the meanings of einai fit in with my feelings and preconceptions about the matter as I encounter them through the study of the actual Greek language.

I wrote about this temptation (a seduction I believe Heidegger succumbed to) way back in the early days of AIT, concerning the mis-classification of parts of speech, and matters concerning the Greek word ousia, which at that time was based upon my knowledge of my own language and the Germanic languages, [primarily Swedish.] Because of that I am being extra scrupulous in my analytical review of the data, and not “Doing a Heidegger” and changing the Greek words and their meanings in order that they fit in with the result that I desire.

The 'slippery' nature of comparison, and the danger of putting words in the place of expressions that do not conform to my analysis is very real to me.

I will probably find what I am about to write very difficult, for it is quite complex, but I've got to make a start some time so here goes...

In the early chapters of The Dilemma of Modern Metaphysics I mentioned that the philosophers of Ancient Greece had problems because of the lack of a word - not the actual concept - but the word or signification to describe what we now refer to as “existence,” when they meant the simple existence of an entity sententially unencumbered by the predicational modalities which, if desired, can be attributed to it later with the help of the BE-mechanism in the normal way - the EINAI-word in its various conjugations.

I have already provided an example of the mind-boggling circumlocution required for Aristotle to describe and establish the difference between simple existence and existential modality or essence (another word they lacked) in the absence of those words. The fact that Socrates and Plato were able to make sense of the stream of petitios that they inherited from the immaturity of mental science and the decay of the pre-Socratic philosophies was one of the greatest contributions that any man has made to the problems of understanding our world.

In those days ousia without any doubt incorporated a reference to the extrinsic properties of substance in the sense of property or wealth, or was employed metaphorically, in such a way that the idea of substantiality  of both the  personally intrinsic and personally extrinsic properties of a human was conveyed, but before going any further, it's worth making clear that 'substance' for Aristotle never  means strictly 'stuff', alone and is certainly not equivalent (as is our own modern use of the word) to 'matter,' for which the Greeks had the perfectly adequate term 'hyle.' Substance is certainly characterised by 'thisness.'

My judgements on this subject are based upon what I have ascertained from my own feeble [yet slowly strengthening] efforts at the translation of the original texts, but more illuminatingly from the translations of others far more competent than I in translating the germinal materials of Aristotle  and others.

At this stage of my investigations there is not one shred of textual evidence that the concept  of 'ousia' was ever used in such a way to communicate the idea of “Being” in the sense of the indescribable, spirituous, universalistic concept used by the Christian Church, or by the metaphysical tradition.

1. I believe that even Plato, considered perhaps to have the reputation as the most transcendentalist of all the Greek philosophers, has been misrepresented and therefore maligned in the eyes of the more cynical reader by the translation of his employment of ousia as “Being” rather than substance or substantiality and properties of an existent. If as those of a transcendentalist persuasion would have us believe “Being” is in some way and in some intangible manner to be thought of as the inexpressible insubstantiality of the soul of man, then why is the word “soul” (psuche) so freely and liberally used in the Sophist?

As for to be, to happen, to be present to begin below, to make a beginning, they had huparcho. Ginomai, provided them with 'to become,'  i.e. to come into existence, to begin to be, receive being. The roll call of existential words available unfolds, and even includes a word koili to cover the innermost being the innermost part of a man, the soul, heart as the seat of thought, feeling, a choice which precisely caters for the sort of intangible immateriality that the metaphysical word-swappers claimed was meant by the substance-word ousia.

Now why in the world would an intelligent people like the Greeks employ a word which meant exactly the OPPOSITE to denote this human ethereality when they had a surfeit of perfectly sensible and mutually understood words in their lexicon already?

It proves that the semantic signifier/signifiers for this intension was already available in the Greek vocabulary.

There is a world of difference in substituting the gerundial word “Being” in place of the word “existence” [that which subsists - or “substantiation,”) for the word “Being” has implications of the dimension of immateriality, or the vagueness of an actuating cause or ongoing accompaniment of an individual, representing his impalpable and intangible ethereality, whilst the word substance or existence has connotations of simple instantiated worldly material presence, or the immutable reality and genesis of substance, without any overtones of spirituality.

I defy anybody to produce a single piece of Greek text which proves the semantics of 'ousia' as meaning 'Being' in the Heideggerian sense either written at a time before the great productive periods of Greek philosophy, of which Socrates, Plato and Aristotle represent the finest example, or at a time contemporaneous with them, or at any time before the later influence and corruptions and distortions introduced by the later Greek speaking advocates of Christianity, or the subsequent Neo-Platonists perverted their writings.

It is a challenge that I hope will be taken up by the Heideggerians, (though I doubt that I will have any takers in this of this area of ontology.)

For the most part the corpus of the metaphysical tradition is sympathetic to the idealism of transcendentalism, and is almost wholly dependant on the use of “Being” [count the number of “Beings” in any metaphysical text] and the reinforcement of idealism that the corrupted version of the Greek ousia in its “clerical” role as “Being” renders to their particular view of the world.

If what I claim is true and it can be proved,  then the ramifications for philosophy would be quite dramatic and would entail a complete re-reading of the Ancient texts.  Fortunately there is a fairly well documented forensic record of this process of corruption of the meaning of ousia - a trail that takes us from the writings of Aristotle through his Arab translators, who had, due to the structure of Arabic, a very clear understanding of the simple (or pure) existence as opposed to  the existential modalic dichotomy, (the way objects are - rather than the fact that they are the objects they are, which they then translated and later passed over to the Latin of the Roman Empire.

Subsequently and gradually in the dark recesses of monkish cells, the meaning of  ousia was changed to fit in with the theological agenda of the medieval church, until finally the meaning of ousia emerges into the modern world as…”Being” in the Heideggerian sense.

What in fact Heidegger has done when he claims to have restored the question of “Being” to its rightful place, is not to have re-opened a neglected domain of human enquiry, but to have re-introduced and reinforced the corrupt understanding of ousia as misrepresented by the scholastics, who, whilst they gave us the precious Latin  gift of the EXIST-word with one hand, passed on to us the base coinage of the ousia-degradation  in its new clerkishly semantic role of “Being” with all the indefinable quasi-religious nuances that the word now implies.

The next step?

Two pieces of important evidence need to be produced:

(a) The Greek texts need to be subjected to and tested against the new paradigm in order that a re-evaluation with ousia translated as substance rather than “Being” makes good linguistic and philosophical sense. Obviously the works of Plato will be the main focus of analysis here, because he is the one who is credited with, if not the introduction of the concept of “Being,” then certainly with its popularisation. It would seem to me that it might be productive if the original Greek texts of Plato were to be studied carefully and instances of  the word ousia compared with any other contemporary or near-contemporary sentential examples of ousia rendered by translaters as  “Being” from other writers.

Another  trick that could be used with Plato's texts is the device that works with most of Heidegger's textual output.  That is,  to make a copy of the text of (say) Being and Time and then (with the help of *search and replace)  replace all of the gerundial versions of the word  *Being*  (not the verb of the continuous present) with the word *God.* Many people are then surprised to discover that the whole book makes perfect sense as the crudely disguised religious tract that many claim it actually is.  It is fascinating to re-read Plato with the word substance substituted  for the word *Being*  - it still makes sense and ( in the same way as it does with Heidegger) does not conflict with the general or overall flow of the philosophical content. Where [upon substitution] a obvious conflict appears, then that section of the text and the semantics of the piece can be studied in closer detail to see if any possible semantic contention can be resolved.

(b) A cogent and detailed account of the circumstances of the gradual change and slow corruption of the meaning of ousia as it passed back and forth between Greek, Arabic and Latin, with all the stages clearly detailed with textual evidence.