By: Nick Santangelo

Georgetown University Associate Professor Katherine Withy had a question for College of Liberal Arts Philosophy students and faculty last Friday: "Do we really have good reason to draw a distinction between being and entities?"

Dr. Withy was presenting the findings on the motivations of philosopher Martin Heidegger's ontological difference in Anderson Hall's Women's Studies Lounge. The professor had considered nine strategies for motivating this basic principle of Heidegger's philosophy, and she argued why each and every one of them was, according to her research, a failure. She told the audience that she couldn't find a single person who noted why a distinction between being and entities should be drawn. Still, she believes there's much to be learned from each of the nine proposed motivations.

But before she could dive into that argument, Dr. Withy first explained for the uninitiated how Heidegger defined "beings" and "entities."

"Anything that is is an entity," she said. "So puppies are. Pineapples are. Possibilities are. And the past is."

According to Heidegger, there are many different ways to "be," but all of them are distinct from being an entity. What is an entity, then? Dr. Withy explained it best with an example anyone could understand without the need to be a Heidegger scholar, which several of the CLA Philosophy undergraduates in attendance admitted they were not despite their intellectual curiosity about the subject matter.

"If there is climbing going on, we have a climber. What makes someone a climber? It's that they're climbing," Dr. Withy said in her explanation of what a being is. 

In Heidegger's view, humans are "Dasein," which meant that we were sense-makers or understanders of being. As mentioned, however, Dr. Withy questioned what motivated Heidegger's sharp distinction that Heidegger made between entities and the state of being. The professor provided a series of proposed motivations for the ontological difference followed by insights for each.

For instance, if the ontological difference is best understood as the "difference" between an entity and its meaning, then the insight is that the ontological difference must be the difference between entities and being.

Anything that is is an entity

Another strategy consists of four points: 1.) If being were not different from entities, then being would be an entity. 2.) Being is that by virtue of which entities are. 3.) Since being is an entity, there must be something further by virtue of which it is. 4.) If "that" is an entity, then by virtue of what is it? This equals a "third man regress."

According to that strategy, the ontological difference must be the difference between entities and being (not between an entity and being). The ontological difference, then, is not established by argument. It belongs to our being, and we have an inchoate sense of it already.

Yet another strategy holds that being is distinct from entities in that it is transcendent "woraufhin" (whereupon) the basis of which entities are understood. Such entities are the "foreground" to the "background" of being, and that background can never be foregrounded as such. The insight into this strategy is that the ontological difference must be between unified beings as such and entities as such and as a whole.

This strategy, a student believed, seemed like a move Heidegger would have been willing to take. The student argued that the regress could be escaped by embracing the first strategy and putting the second aside.

"I agree with you that Heidegger does think of being as transcendent and unified in this way," responded Dr. Withy. 

Further, the professor thanked the student for bringing something to her attention that she'd previously missed: every strategy fails in a very different way. One fails because it doesn't guarantee the ontological difference, for instance. While another fails as a result of establishing the difference in the "wrong sort of way." A grateful Dr. Withy committed to addressing this point when she rewrites the paper. 

Heidegger does think of being as transcendent and unified in this way

Another student was particularly interested in Strategy 9, which holds that we experience being as transcending entities in angst. Why is there all of this "stuff," instead of nothing? To this, Dr. Withy pointed out that the first step of angst is to encounter entities as a whole and that we encounter said stuff as strange. She held that Heidegger would have rejected this sense of nothingness, defined as a sort of capacious indeterminacy. Instead, argued the professor, Heidegger saw nothing as being a pure cosmic emptiness—not furniture in the universe.

In closing, Dr. Withy had one final insight: "The [ontological difference] stands and falls with the unity of being." And in questioning the nature of the ontological difference as a topic toward the end of his career, Heidegger, concluded the professor, left the ontological difference in a "tormented" state.