Episode 326 - Thursday, May 10, 1979

1. "Being" is the most "universal" concept: to on esti katholou malista panton. Illud quod primo cadit sub apprehensione est ens, cuius intellectus includitur in omnibus, quaecumque quis apprehendit. "An understanding of being is always already contained in everything we apprehend in beings." But the "universality" of "being" is not that of genus. "Being" does not delimit the highest region of beings so far as they are conceptually articulated according to genus and species: oute to on genos ["Being is not a genus"]. The "universality" of being "surpasses" the universality of genus. According to the designation of medieval ontology, "being" is a trancendens. Aristotle himself understood the unity of this transcendental "universal," as opposed to the manifold of the highest generic concepts with material content, as the unity of analogy. Despite his dependence upon Plato's ontological position, Aristotle placed the problem of being on a fundamentally new basis with this discovery. To be sure, he too did not clarify the obscurity of these categorical connections. Medieval ontology discussed this problem in many ways, above all in the Thomist and Scotist school, without gaining fundamental clarity. And when Hegel finally defines "being" as the "indeterminate immediate," and makes this definition the foundation of all the further categorial explications of his Logic, he remains within the perspective of ancient ontology--except that he does give up the problem, raised early on by Aristotle, of the unity of being in contrast to the manifold of "categories" with material content. If one says accordingly that "Being" is the most universal concept, that cannot mean that it is the clearest and that it needs to further discussion. The concept of "being" is rather the most obscure of all.

Martin Heidegger, "The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being," from Being and Time, 1927. Trans. Joan Stambaugh.

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