Modes of Being and Their Relation to the Liberal Arts and Artist

Abstract

Hardly can we escape saying something about the being whose modes are to be our topic. The task of so doing may be supposed to have been rendered easier by Martin Heidegger who devoted his life to the effort to speak truly about being. But I cannot accept his views without some modification. Though I hesitate to differ with him, Heidegger may not have contended correctly in every respect; in particular, he notes, as I have already remarked (in essay 2) that ‘being,’ a gerund, possesses two quite different senses, the verbal and the nominative. The verbal sense, which seems to him the most difficult to conceive and to express, has, he holds, become over the centuries lost, or at least fugitive. This is the sense referring to motion, change, growth.¹ This sense has largely been replaced by the nominative sense, referring to stability, to the unchanging, to the eternal. The consequence has been, he goes on to reason, disastrous. Being itself, the real being of anything always turns out, under influence by this conviction, to be the permanent. There is, of course, a reason for this choice of meaning. The permanent in any changing situation lends itself to measurement and to mathematical and scientific treatment and finally to technological control.