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IN FIVE WEB PAGE PARTS - PART FOUR
The Uncovering of Ousia 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. II wrote about this temptation (a seduction
I believe Heidegger succumbed to) way back
in the early days of Analytical Indicant Theory, 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. (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. |
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