ENTE, ESSERE. — In ordinary language they may be synonyms. In philosophical reflection they are usually taken as concrete and abstract: “being” is said of that which has being, of everything that is in any way. For all speculative systems, the concept of being is the simplest and most original: controversies begin when it is a question of determining the way in which it presents itself to consciousness, according to which each system takes a position in attributing to it that content and that structure which correspond to its own interpretation of reality. For empiricist philosophies, the presentation of being and its content coincide entirely with the presentation and content of experience. For rationalist philosophies, being is given without residue and adequately expressed through concepts (dogmatic rationalism), or resolved into the activity of thought (idealism). In the first form of rationalism, being is known and determined according to a real “a priori” (innatism, ontologism); in the second, according to a logical-functional “a priori.” Thus, reference to the problem of being gives the exact orientation for every system, which recognizes and qualifies itself, in its character and method, by the “beginning” it adopts concerning the concept of being. For example, Hegel’s position that being, pure being, is identical with nothingness, and therefore merely a dialectical moment (Encicl., § 86 agg.), on the one hand strains the Scotist-Suarezian-Wolffian concept of being (as genus generalissimum), and on the other gives the principle of the “a priori synthesis” the full expansion that Kant kept restrained by the noumenon, which was still real being opposed to thought.
Aristotle always begins from the observation that being is said in many ways (τολικαγία). The principal ones are: real being and logical being (Met., V, 7, 1017 a 31); the former constitutes the structure of material and spiritual beings; the latter is being “as truth and falsity” of the copula of judgment. Real being, in turn, is divided into being per se and per accidens (Met., V, 7, 1017 a 8); by this division one wishes to distinguish in predication what belongs to a being according to its essence from what is in some way associated with II. Real being per se, considered in its fundamental determinations, is divided according to the “figures of the categories” (Met., X, 10, 1051 a 35; Top., I, 9, 103 b 27 agg.); considered in its fundamental modes, into “act and potency,” the pair that ultimately sums up the Aristotelian conception of the structure of being and the nature of becoming (Met., IX and X).
Being in act is substance or accident, finite or infinite, that is, creature or Creator (s. Tommaso, De ente et essentia, especially II, 4-5). In this classification, as is easy to see, the multiplicity of meanings reveals an order of intrinsic subordination, which is twofold: first, insofar as each succeeding pair deepens and articulates the content of the principal element of the preceding pair; and then insofar as, in each pair, one of the elements dominates the other, which is dependent, within its own order, upon it (Met., IV, 2, 1003 a 33).
Consequently, although the concept of being has the poorest and most indeterminate content (“something that is”), it signifies it while holding together the various modes of which it is predicated, and is therefore virtually the richest concept. Understanding this metaphysics (v.) whose object is “being as being” (Met., IV, 1003 a 27), and the various types of realist metaphysics indicate the various methods of developing an understanding of being. The absence in Aristotle’s classification of existential being (the act of existential being), which appears explicitly instead in s. Tommaso (In I Sent., dist. 33, I, 1 ad 1), has been noted (W. D. Ross). In pagan philosophy, which does not know creation, the act of being coincides concretely with being substance, quantity, quality, etc.; in Christian philosophy, the act of being is the proper effect of God, communicated to creatures according to a participation (Quodlib., XII, q. 5, a. 5) measured by the degree of perfection of each essence. Being therefore divides (in the concept) and is composed (in reality) of essence and of the act of being: the first Cause, which is Pure Act, does not have an essence and therefore is not a being—but is Being subsisting through itself. Thus, the notion of being applies also to accident, potency, and creature: but first and above all being belongs to substance, form, and Divinity, from which these respectively have their being what they are.
The notion of being is therefore not predicated of beings in one single way, but differently according to the different ways in which they realize the act of being. In Aristotle, the problem of analogy (v. BADIA, TOMMASO) is only sketched, since he organized his metaphysics on this side of a theory of creation. At the beginning, in Cat., 1 (1 a 1-12), he distinguishes between equivocal terms (ἀγώνα) and univocal terms (ἀγώνα), and in Top. (1, 15, 106 a 9) between terms that are said in one sense (ἀγώνα) and those that are said in several senses (ἀγώνα). In the Metaphysics the term ἀγώνα, ἀγώνα occurs explicitly, and especially “ἀγώνα,” to indicate the mode of predication that is not reducible to genus and species (V, 9, 1018 a 13); it is attributed to the one (V, 6, 1016 b 32 agg.) and consequently also to being and its other attributes, to causes (VIII, 2, 1043 a 5; XII, 3, 1071 a 7), and to act (IX, 1048 a, 37-b 16). For Aristotle, predication according to analogy expresses a certain positive relation, unlike pure equivocity; but it is a relation of subordination that could be called “ascending,” and not on the same plane, as univocal predication implies. Aristotle indicates it as a relation of movement of “one thing toward another” (ἀγώνα ἀγώνα δὲ ἕνα ἔχει ὡς ἕλλα πρὸς ἄλλο; Mat. V, 6, 1016 b 34). It seems that Aristotle did not know analogy in the sense in which it would later be understood by the scholastics, namely, analogy of proportionality or attribution, and that he almost confined it to the predicamental sphere. He says in fact: “In every category of being there is an analogous term, as the straight line in length, the plane in surface, perhaps the odd number in the field of numbers, and the color white among the different colors” (Mat., XIV, 6, 1093 b 17-21). This was not a simple relation of any kind, except insofar as it presupposed a deeper relation of strict dependence: a relation that Aristotle had profoundly and for the first time shown between cause and effect and among the various causes, between substance and accident, between whole and potency: hence, throughout the entire sphere of finite being. Aristotle seems to have conceived the relation to Infinite Being only as ascending analogy, insofar as all beings, by tending toward their own perfection, aspire to God as the “object of love” (ὡς ἐγώνα). Mat., XII, 7, 1072 b 3), and God is said to be precisely ἀγώνα τὸ πρῶτον (ibid., 1072 b 1).
The Greek commentators therefore rightly extended these indications into a preliminary outline of a theory. Porphyry, who summarizes a tradition, distinguishes in this class of terms two series or forms: a) those that are predicated with reference to a single origin (ὡς ἑνός), such as “medicinal” of a book, a beverage, and an iron instrument (surgical)...; b) those of things that tend toward the same end (πρὸς ἑν), such as “healthy,” for example, of grain, walking, reading, etc. An analysis still elementary, but one that preserved the solidarity of analogical predication with causal dependence.
In Christian thought, the Fathers who made use of analogy (such as Pseudo-Dionysius) dwelt preferably on the metaphysical aspect of likeness to God. It was scholasticism, engaged with logic, that became interested in the problem of the predication of being. And since, through creation, creatures receive from God their own consistency of being, some maintain that being, being intrinsic to creatures, is said univocally of God and creatures, almost as though it were a supreme genus (Scotus, Arriaga); and at least we can (disregarding the differences among the various beings) have of being a single supreme concept common to both (Suárez). In Thomism,
by contrast, analogy has been firmly maintained, as the expression of modes of being irreducible under the unity of a concept, or at most so only incompletely. But the Thomists themselves then divide: some, following Cajetan, give as the formula of analogy a dissimilarity «simpliciter» and a similarity only «secundum quid»; others instead (Blanche, Balthasar), more faithful to the tradition and to the thought of the Angelic Doctor, use the formula «secundum rationem partim eandem et partim diversam» (In XI Met. lect. 3, n. 2197; cf. ibid., In IX, n. 1768; In VII, nn. 1334-38; Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 13, a. 4; De Pot., q. 7, a. 7).
This formula is expressed in its ultimate metaphysical purity in the following terms: «Non dicitur esse similitudo inter Deum et creaturas in forma, secundum eandem rationem generis aut speciei, sed secundum analogiam tantum; prout scil. Deus est ens per essentium, et alia per participationem» (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 4, a. 3, ad 3). This relation of participation, constitutive of analogy, naturally takes shape according to the ontological degree of the terms in relation: substance and accident, intrinsic and extrinsic causes, act and potency, etc. Thus being subsists in the relations that it grounds and that subsequently move it toward its fulfilment.