Ontology

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Ontology Summary

Ontology

ONTOLOGY. The word ontology, meaning "discourse about, or study of, being," was introduced into the philosophical vocabulary in the early seventeenth century. The term was originally used as an equivalent for "metaphysics," which Aristotle, in Metaphysics 4.1, had defined precisely as the science that treats "being insofar as it is being." Thus the enterprise of ontology had a long prehistory.

Plato had considered the question of "being" (to on, ousia), which for him meant the "what" of things as a stable object of certain knowledge. Hence he thought that the term being was properly employed only of the self-identical, changeless, and hence eternal, realm of Forms—that reality, grasped by intellect alone, which is imaged in, but at the same time contrasted with, the mutable realm of "becoming." It was Aristotle, critical of this outright identification of being with the immutable and transcendent Forms, who insisted that the verb "to be" is universally applicable and then proceeded to ask what it means to be (anything). Because, as he frequently observes, "'being' is said in many senses," he denies in effect that the term is used univocally or that it defines an all-inclusive genus. He nevertheless thinks that its primary or focal use is to denote the subject, whether of discourse or of change and action: To be is to be some concrete "thing" (ousia)—a changing, individual composite of two correlative principles, form and matter or (in more general terms) actuality and potentiality. The former of these is the active principle of the thing's growth and development (phusis, "nature"), the intelligible identity of it which the mind grasps in knowledge and expresses in judgment, while the latter is the substratum of possibility that allows for change.

This analysis of what "being" means was substantively taken over in the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Thomas, however, broadened the application of Aristotle's distinction between actuality and potentiality. It included not merely the distinction between the form and the matter that determines the "what" (id quod, "essence") of a thing, but also, and more fundamentally, that between what a thing is and the fact that it is (id quo, "existence"). Essence for Thomas is a potentiality that is brought into "act" only through existing; hence the study of being, in considering the question what it means to be this or that (thing), must focus not merely on what gives a thing ("substance") its identity but also on what accounts for its "being there," its actual existence.

In his treatise First Philosophy or Ontology (1729), however, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), whose work established the normal modern use of the term, understood ontology as a subdivision of metaphysics: the study of being as a genus ("general metaphysics"), to be distinguished from the subjects of "special metaphysics," that is, theology, psychology, and cosmology. Being, then, was for Wolff a univocal term denoting "what is" in its most universal characteristics. Aristotle's (and Thomas's) insistence on the "many senses" in which "to be" is said recedes into the background: For Wolff, the fundamental principles of being are the laws of noncontradiction and of sufficient reason. Reality is composed of imperceptible simple substances each of whose essences is exhausted by a single clear and distinct idea, and whose existence is accounted for by appeal to the principle of sufficient reason.

This science of generic being, abstract and deductive in form, was rejected by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), for whom ontology—a term he used very infrequently—came in effect to be identified with his own transcendental philosophy. This enterprise was concerned not with "things in themselves" but with the subjective preconditions of human knowledge—the forms of sense-perception and the categories of the understanding—through which the "objects" of the empirical world are constituted as such. The propaedeutic study of being thus became, for Kant, an investigation of the ways in which the subject of knowing "objectifies" the content of experience and so constitutes the "beings" of the phenomenal world. Like Kant, G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) rejected Wolff's "dogmatic" ontology. For him, the study of being took the form of a logic, which explicated the movement—from simplicity to organic complexity, from "being" to "concept"—by which Mind (Geist) appropriates itself through self-objectification.

In more recent philosophy, the project of ontology, long neglected save in theological circles where traditional scholastic philosophy prevailed, reappeared in the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl's search for a sure basis of human knowledge led him to elaborate a phenomenological method that sought to identify and describe "what is" as the world of the "transcendental ego" or "pure consciousness" (as distinct from the empirical self, which is a member of the object-world of scientific inquiry). It was Husserl's student and critic Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), however, who through his Being and Time most explicitly and influentially revived the project of ontology. For Heidegger, "being" ("to be") is radically distinguished from "beings" ("what there is"). The former is the subject of ontological, the latter of merely "ontic," discourse. The clue to the question of being is, for him, the existent human subject (Dasein), which is precisely in the act of asking what it means "to be." To grasp what it is "to be" is thus to grasp what is presupposed in the human existent's asking about its being. Ontology is thus again, as for Kant, a transcendental analysis—but not, in this case, of the preconditions of human knowing so much as of the preconditions of human "being-in-the-world."