The *BEING-Word*

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 osmotically 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 mutually assented 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. It 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 its attributive function as a proposer and conferrer of existential state or modality [death] upon the subject [Socrates,] and it is NOT A STATE IN ITSELF.

Seekers after 'Being' are therefore the perennially unsuccessful Quixotic questers after the state or modality of some object rather than the object itself. They are handicapped and encumbered and condemned to deeply embedded ancient naivety which condemns them to search for some mysterious 'ontological difference' between an object and its existential activity as the embodiment of the actuality of it being the object we encounter. It is as if [like some pompous Dickensian beagle] they are ordered by the burgomaster Heidegger to imprison prostitution, but only succeed in locking up the prostitute.

3. A serious consideration of *BE* provides a threshold of 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,' where [like Heidegger] he instantiated a 'question' where  no question existed or exists.  Arguably the greatest disservice that any philosopher has rendered mankind was Plato's mischief-making 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 [useless]  attempts at humble human pie-making should be judged.

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 non-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 entitative 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 incognizant 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 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?