Aristotle himself described his subject matter in a variety of ways: as the ‘first philosophy,’ or ‘the study of being qua being,’ but what he actually meant by 'being' has remained a hotly disputed question from that day to this.

Yes, 'substance' is another slippery customer, yet our police forces seem to have no difficulties in establishing that if you are caught with marijuana or heroin on your person that you are guilty of carrying a weighable substance - and yet... do my words have any substance, or what is the substance of what I am trying to say?

Significantly the modern Greeks employ the word 'ousiodis' for ‘material,’ as they also use 'periousia' for property and wealth, 'ousia' for substance and savour and essence, and 'anoisia' for ‘stuff.” 

Ousia" is the present continuous participle of "einai, to be, " i. e. "being." Ignoring Plato's corruption of the term for his spurious ontological agenda it was used then as it is used now in modern Greek and meant in the sense of wealth, property or substance in the way that is meant in English when we say:

                                                   "He is a man of substance"

meaning he has accumulated many worldly possessions or property.

Patristic theologians, most notably at Nicea, seized upon it (homoousios, una substantia - one substance), and made it become an important property of the scholastics from which thence the corruption became embedded in modern philosophical discourse.

I am tempted to conclude that there is far too much coincidence in the original meaning and the obvious current ontological equivalency to propose anything other than a clear concordance between the ancient and modern Greek renderings in the sense of  the extrinsic or external properties in the sense of worldly goods,  material property, worldly appurtenances and fortune.

As I said – I am ‘tempted,’ but I will resist the temptation until I have accomplished a more rigorous and comprehensive survey and comparison of all of the instances of 'ousia' in every Greek text that I can get my hands on in order to see how it stacks up semantically.

My present thinking is that Plato's  meaning when he appropriated and  used the word ousia  in its neologic philosophical role was to represent  all that belongs or is a feature  of a human, intrinsically both as a physical and as a metaphysical feature of his corporeal and mental characteristics  

What I believe it DOESN’T represent to Aristotle, or even Plato, is some nebulous, cosmic universal  ontologically different inexpressable notion in the sense of existence,  or for that matter a spirituous Daseinic Man Friday, which keeps company with a bloke as he circumambulates around the experiential island of existence between life and death.

I propose that it was not Aristotle's intention that 'Being' should be construed as denoting the essential equality and interchangeability of 'Being'  as corresponding to the soul or the ego – or the anima – or one’s consciousness of one’s own physical identity, or the personality or nature of somebody else.  We must lay the responsibility for this deliberate  semantic mutation at the door of the theologians who re-engined the word as they cross-fertilised the Arabic grammaticalised rendition  of the verb einai, in its continuous present version, dyadically with an aeonian soul, which after death, is capable of taking flight on butterfly wings to a place elsewhere in an upwards or downwards direction depending upon the biographical behaviour  of its one-time bodily host. We shall explore the influence of the Arab translators of Aristotle in later chapters

Whilst these Modern Greek examples are not a definite proof that the word "ousia" included this (hard) concept of materiality in Ancient Greek, and accepting that diachronic distortion may have occurred, and taking all these caveats into consideration, the modern use of 'ousiodis' for material and 'periousia' for property and wealth, 'ousia' for substance and savour and essence, and 'anoisia' for ‘stuff ! does seem to provide further evidence that 'ousia' may have been even less concerned with the concept of insubstantiality than is presently believed?

If  only Grice could have had his way, and a univocal understanding of BE were to be established amongst the thinking classes of the world!



                                     THE WORD ‘BE’ AND ITS HIDDEN SIGNIFICATIONS

The study of the *IS-word* and the *Being-word* as lexical elements in a statement can act as an introduction to a neglected and usually unidentified hidden portal which can lead to an arena of ontological discovery. *BE* in all of its Indo-European conjugative temporal guises is an unrecognised and unacknowledged ancient cognitive doorway overgrown with mutually mediated cognitive cobwebs psychologically incorporated within oneself, and made subjective or personal as unconscious semantic 'givens' absorbed by humans in infancy and re-enforced by internalisation during youth. Take the statement: "Socrates is dead." Here, almost unnoticed and unregarded, the word *IS* can be seen not only as a copula or equating verb that links the subject with the complement of the sentence, but also as having three additional available veiled ontological latencies:

1. It is a pointer to an archive of  memorabilia of general principals, which can be utilised in order to avoid tedious and repetitive description. For example, if the historical philosopher Socrates and his doings and sayings are known to the speaker of a statement about the man, and the facts are also known to his or her listeners, and the fact of his death, and the nature of death itself is mutually agreed upon, then a discursive specification as to the personal history of Socrates and the meaning of death is not necessary, and the truth of the utterance: 'Socrates is dead,' is accepted

2. The word "is" can act as shortcut or prompter to a hidden more comprehensive arcanum of meaning and information embedded in the referential indices, that is available for introspection inside our own head or somebody else's head by way of additional interrogation. In this way if one of the listeners, (or even possibly the speaker,) was unsure as to the identity of Socrates or unsure as to the validity of his death, then the *IS-word* door would swing ajar inviting entry and clarification. The meaning of 'Be, is and being' lies in their indicative function as an introductant and or pointer to the existential state or modality of the subject as expressed in the predicate.

Seekers after some spiritual or theological dimension to 'Being' are therefore the perennially unsuccessful Quixotic questers after the state or modality of some object rather than the object itself. They are captives of a deeply embedded ancient naivety which condemns them to search for some mysterious 'ontological difference'  between an object and its existential activity or states  as the embodiment of the actuality of it being the object they encounter. For them it is as if they are ordered to imprison theft, but complain that they can only succeed in locking up the theif.

3. A serious consideration of *BE* provides an opportunity which allows us to investigate the original specious Greek cognitive meaninglessness of 'Being' together with the instigator Plato's explanation of the spurious 'question,'  of which we are expected to believe ity forms a part.

Heidegger, parroting Plato, instantiated a 'Question of Being' where no question existed or exists. Arguably the greatest disservice that any philosopher has rendered mankind was Plato's metaphysical mischief-making by  regarding the meaning or interpretation of the Greek word 'ousia' [property - in the sense of what belonged to a man] as meaning a: 'state or fact of existing,' and his even more childlike model of a 'perfect being' as that which 'grants' the 'Being' of beings, and that there is literally a perfect pie [a template of last resort] hovering in the sky that acts as a form of perfection against which all  earthbound human attempts at perfect pie-making should be judged futile.

The inauthentic twentieth century revival of 'Being' as 'existence' in the Heideggerian extrapolation of the ancient concept and the concomitant re-introduction of obfuscational medieval thinking, did tremendous damage to western thought and set back philosophy by at least fifty years.

To think about 'be, is and being' allows us to enter into a domain of ontological enquiry into the existing existents and reject the reificative  nonsense  of the existence of existence and the non-transcendence of an imagined transcendentality. We can contemplate the denotative indicant, *The being Socrates* as he was as a living entiative man, how the world impinged upon him, and how he impacted upon the world, and what were the existential modalities of the world he inhabited and the nature of the reciprocal relation that motivated, allowed and facilitated Socrates to have such a significant admittance to the company of philosophers.

The third option is always ready to hand and available to us, but not many seek to take advantage and push open the door to further knowledge,  preferring rather to defer to wishful thinking, and a risible imagined 'epagogic vision,' and like the stubborn religious critics of Galileo refuse to look through the telescope at a discomforting reality which clashes with their deeply instilled and internalised traditional prejudices.

But is that true? People may be normally unreflective and therefore incognisant of the technical meaning of 'is,' but at a deeper semantic level they are very touchy concerning any ontological infringements that are uttered in natural language that appear to be at odds with their perception of their own actuality and the reality of the world in which they find themselves.

Perhaps it is not only the more venturesome seekers after verity that prowl the lonely slopes of onto-aletheiological insight? Could it be that John and Mary Doe too are secret if somewhat infrequent wondering and wandering interlopers and brief visitants to the 'inner world' of *IS,* who slip unsuspected and undetected through the tempting third portal of Ereignis, but are never subjected to a detailed debriefing upon their return?