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because it is the limit point of subjectivation, of being in language, that beyond
which one can no longer name, predicate, or signify but only indicate. Thus,
if “every substance seems to signify a certain ‘this’” ( tode ti), this is true in the proper sense only of primary substances, which always manifest “what is individual and one” ( atomon kai hen arithmoi); secondary substances, for example,
“man” or “animal,” “by contrast signify a certain quality: the subject [the lying-
at-the-base] is not in fact one, as in the primary substance, but ‘man’ is predi-
cated of many things and also ‘animal’” (3b 10–16).
1.7. It is because of the priority of this subjective determination of being as
primary hypokeimenon, as the impredicable singularity that stands-under-and-
at-the-base of linguistic predication, that in the tradition of Western philosophy
the term ousia is translated into Latin with substantia. Beginning with Neoplatonism, in fact, the treatise on the Categories acquired a privileged place in the corpus of Aristotle’s works and, in its Latin translation, it exercised a determinative influence on medieval culture. Boethius, in whose version the Middle Ages
knew the Categories, despite perceiving that the more correct translation would
have been essentia ( ousia is a deverbal formed from the participle of the verb einai, and in his theological treatise against Eutyches and Nestorius, Boethius
therefore has the term essentia correspond to ousia and reserves substantia for the Greek hypostasis), instead made use of the term substantia and thus in a decisive way oriented the vocabulary and the understanding of Western ontology. Being
can appear as that which lies-under-and-at-the-base only from the point of view
of linguistic predication, that is, starting from the priority of the subjective de-
termination of ousia as primary hypokeimonon that stands at the center of Aristotle’s Categories. The entire lexicon of Western ontology ( substantia, subiectum, hypostasis, subsistentia) is the result of this priority of the primary substance as hypokeimenon, as lying-at-the-base of every predication.
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1.8. In book VII of the Metaphysics, when he has asked the question “what
is ousia?” and after he has distinguished four senses of the term, Aristotle refers explicitly to the subjective determination of being elaborated in the Categories.
The hypokeimenon, the subject [that which lies-under-and-at-the-base] is that
on the basis of which other things are said, while it is not said of others; for this
reason it must be defined as primary, because the primary subject seems to be
above all [ malista] ousia. (1028b 35–1029a 1)
At this point, however, he seems to call into question the priority of the subject
and in fact to affirm its insufficiency:
We have now said in general [ typoi, “as in a sketch”] what ousia is, namely, what is not (nor is said) on the basis of a subject, but is that on the basis of which all
(is and is said). But one must not define it only in this way, because it is not suf-
ficient [ hikanon]: not only is it obscure [ adelon], but in this way material would be ousia. . . . (1029a 9–12)
From this moment, the priority of the subjective determination of being cedes its
place to the other determination of ousia that Aristotle will call to ti en einai ( quod quid erat esse in the medieval translations). To understand Aristotelian ontology
means to correctly situate the relation between these two determinations of ousia.
1.9. A student of Heidegger, Rudolf Boehm, dedicated a penetrating analy-
sis to the problem of this apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s thought, which
seems at the same time to affirm and to negate the priority of the subject. He cri-
tiques the traditional interpretation that, beginning in the Middle Ages, main-
tains the priority of the “lying-at-the-base” ( das Zugrundeliegende) and shows
that Aristotle introduces the ti en einai precisely to respond to the aporias im-
plicit in that priority. The subjective determination of essence in fact thinks
ousia not in itself but insofar as something else requires and demands it as that
which stands-under-and-at-the-base of itself. That is to say, the priority of the
subject in Aristotle is in agreement with the thesis according to which the ques-
tion of ousia has a sense only if it is articulated as a relation to another, that is, in the form “by means of what is something predicated as something?” This
determination, however, introduces into being a fundamental division, through
which it is divided into an inexistent essence and an existent without essence.
Put differently, if one thinks being from the “lying-at-the-base,” one will have,
on the one hand, an inessential existent (a “that it is” without being, a quod est
without quidditas) and, on the other, an inexistent essence: “Essence [ Wesen] and being [ Sein] fall outside one another and, in this way, break with one another, in
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the twofold sense of the term: they each break with the other and fall to pieces”
(Boehm, R., p. 169).
By means of the concept ti en einai, then, Aristotle seeks to think the unity
and identity of existence and essence, of the existentive being of the primary
substance and the predicative being of the secondary substance, but does it in
such a way that, in the last analysis, the subject lying-at-the-base turns out to be
inaccessible and essence appears as something non-existent. That is to say, the
ti en einai expresses the irreducible reciprocal counterposition ( Widerspiel ) of being and existing, which Boehm, from the perspective of his master Heidegger,
in the last analysis refers back to the “wonder that the existing being is,” whose
sole adequate expression is the question: “why is there being rather than noth-
ing?” (pp. 202–203).
1.10. A preliminary condition of every interpretation of the ti en einai is an
analysis of its grammatical structure, which Boehm curiously leaves aside. This
is so true that the same expression is translated in different ways by Boehm ( das
Sein-was-es-war, “being-what-it-was”), by Natorp ( das was es war sein, “what it was to be”), by Aquinas and the medieval Scholastics ( quod quid erat esse), by
Ross and others (simply as “essence”). As long as the unusual grammatical struc-
ture of the expression—and the still more unusual presence of the past en (“was”)
in place of the present esti—has not been clarified, the passage to its philosophical interpretation is in no way possible.
In 1938, a young philologist who was to die in the war in 1942, Curt Arpe,
devoted an exemplary study to an analysis of the ti en einai that is also grammat-
ical. He shows that, to understand the sense of the ti en einai, it is necessary to mentally complete the formula with two datives, one pure and one predicative.
In fact, Aristotle commonly expresses the essential predication with a predica-
tive dative—thus, precisely in the passage in which one seeks the definition of
the ti en einai (1029b 12–20): toi soi einai, “being yourself” (literally, “being to oneself”), toi mousikoi einai, “being cultured” (lit., “being to the cultured”), toi epiphaneiai einai, “being the surface,” and elsewhere, toi anthropoi einai, “being human”—or “to the human.” However, since Aristotle does not speak here only
of being human in general but of the being human of this certain human being,
; it is necessary to insert into the formula a pure or concrete dative. “With this,”
writes Arpe, “one clarifies the grammatical form of the question ti en einai; to be understood, it requires completion by means of a pure dative and a predicative
dative produced by assimilation. By putting the article to first, the formula takes on the meaning of a response to the question” (Arpe, p. 18).
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That is to say, to ti en einai means (in the case of a human being): “what it
was for X (for Socrates, for Emma) to be (Socrates, Emma).” The formula ex-
presses the ousia of a certain entity by transforming the question “what is it for this certain being to be?” into the response “what it was for that certain being
to be.”
א That Arpe’s suggestion is correct is also proven by the fact that in Categories, 1a 5, Aristotle writes: “if one is to say what it is for each [ ekateroi, pure dative] of them [ scil.
the human being and the ox] to be an animal [ zooi, predicative dative] . . .” Yet note that in the Categories the verb is still in the present ( ti esti).
As we have seen, the formula to ti en einai allows two translations: “what it was to be” and “being what it was.” Both are in a certain way to be maintained, because the
formula expresses precisely the movement from the one to the other, without their ever
being able to coincide. As has been noted, “with the two terms hypokeimenon and ti en einai are named the two meanings in which Aristotle uses the ambivalent term ousia”
(Tugendhat, qtd. in Boehm, R., p. 25). And yet, “what it was to be for X” can never truly
“be” what it was.
1.11. If in this way the grammatical structure and the sense of the formula
are clarified, there remains the problem of the imperfect “was” ( en): why must
Aristotle introduce into the definition of essence a past tense, why “what it was”
instead of “what it is”? This turns out to be the decisive problem that defines
the ontological apparatus that Aristotle has left as an inheritance to Western
philosophy.
Scholars have proposed explanations that, while correct in certain aspects,
do not catch hold of the problem in its complexity. Arpe is thus in a favorable
position when he rejects as Platonic the solution of Trendelenburg, according
to whom the imperfect derives from the priority of the model in the mind of
the artisan with respect to the work (Arpe, p. 15). But even Natorp’s solution,
which Arpe seems to share, however correct it is, does not exhaust the prob-
lem. According to Natorp, the ti en einai means “what from time to time for
a certain subject ‘was’ or signified in every case the same thing, if one brings it
alongside this or that predicate. It is possible that in the past tense ‘was’ there is
hidden something more profound, but in the first place it means nothing more
profound than the fact that the term, of which the definition must be given, is
presupposed as already known through use and that even its denotation is pre-
supposed as factually identical and that now this identity must be particularly
put in relief and brought to one’s awareness” (Arpe, p. 17). As for Boehm, he sees
in the imperfect the expression of the unity and identity of being and essence, in
the sense that the identity of being of an existing being with what it is necessarily
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entails “the identity of its being with what it already was”: that is to say, it is a
matter of securing the continuity of a certain being with itself. “The essential
identity of being and essence is at the same time the ceaselessly reaffirmed iden-
tity of an autonomous being in general” (p. 171).
If Aristotle had wanted to express only the banal fact that the presupposed
subject is necessarily already known or to affirm the identity with itself of every
essential entity (and both things certainly correspond to his thought), he could
have had recourse to more precise formulas than the simple imperfect en. What
is in question here is, rather, the very structure of the Aristotelian ontological
apparatus, which always divides being into existence and essence, into a presup-
posed subject on the basis of which something is said and a predication that is
said of it. Once this division is posited, the problem becomes: how is it possible
to say the primary substance, the sub-iectum? How can one grasp what has been
presupposed in the form of the hypokeimenon, namely, the being Socrates of
Socrates, the being Emma of Emma? If it is true, as Boehm’s investigations have
shown, that being has been divided into an inessential existent and an inexistent
essence, how will it be possible to overcome this division, to cause the simple
wonder “that something is” to correspond with “what it is to be this”?
The “what it was for this being to be” is the attempt to respond to this ques-
tion. If, insofar as it has been presupposed, the individual can be grasped only as
something past, the only way to catch hold of the singularity in its truth is in time.
The past tense “was” in the formula ti en einai certainly expresses the identity and continuity of being, but its fundamental achievement, whether or not Aristotle
was fully aware of it, is the introduction of time into being. The “something more
profound” that “is hidden” in the past tense “was” is time: the identity of the being that language has divided, if one attempts to think it, necessarily entails time. In the very gesture with which it divides being, language produces time.
1.12. The question to which “what it was to be” must give a response is: given
the scission between a sub-iectum, an inessential existent lying-at-the-base and
an inexistent essence, how is it possible to grasp singular existence? The problem
here is similar to the one Plato had posed in the Theatatus, when he has Socrates
say that the primary, simple elements do not have a definition ( logos) but can
only be named ( onomasai monon, 201a 1ff.). In the Metaphysics (1043b 24), Aristotle attributes this “aporia” to the followers of Antisthenes, who affirmed that
one could only give a definition of composite substances and not of simple ones.
The problem is all the more important, insofar as the logical apparatus that,
according to Aristotle, should orient every study is formulated as follows: “The
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‘why’ is always sought in this form: ‘why something is [or belongs to, hyparchei]
something else” (1041a 11ff.). That is to say, it is a matter of eliminating every
question of the type: “why something is something” by articulating it in the
form “why something is (belongs to) something else” (thus, not “why is an ed-
ucated man an educated man” but “by means of what is a human being a living
being of this or that type”; not “why is a house a house” but “by means of what
are these materials, bricks and roofing-tiles, a house”).
The apparatus runs up against a peculiar difficulty when a thing is not predi-
cated of something else, as when one asks, “what is a human being?” In this case,
in fact, we find ourselves before a simple expression ( haplos legesthai; 1041b 2), which is not analyzable into subject and predicates. The solution that Aristotle
gives to this problem shows that the ti en einai is pre
cisely what serves to grasp the being of a simple or primary substance. In this case as well, he suggests, the
question—for example, “what is a house?”—must be articulated in the form:
“why are these things a house?,” and this is possible “because there is present [or
belongs to them] what was the being of the house” ( hoti hyparchei ho en oikiai einai; 1041b 5–6). In the formula ho en oikiai einai, which explicitly recalls that of the ti en einai, the past tense “was” certainly refers to the existence of the house as something already known and evident (a little before, Aristotle had written: hoti
hyparchei, dei delon einai, “what exists must be evident”; 1041a 22); but one does not understand the functioning of the apparatus if one does not comprehend
that the mode of this existence is essentially temporal and entails a past.
1.13. If we now ask what type of temporality is in question, it is evident that it
cannot be a question of a chronological temporality (as if the preexistence of the
subject could be measured in hours or days) but of something like an operative
time, which refers to the time that the mind takes to realize the articulation be-
tween the presupposed subject and its essence. For this reason, the two possible
translations of the formula to ti en einai are both to be maintained: “what it was for X to be” refers to the presupposed hypokeimenon, and “being what it was” to
the attempt to catch hold of it, to make subject and essence coincide. The move-
ment of this coincidence is time: “being what it was for X to be.” The division
of being worked by this apparatus serves to put being in motion, to give it time.
The ontological apparatus is a temporalizing apparatus.
In the tradition of Western philosophy, this temporality internal to the sub-
ject will be thought, beginning with Kant, in the form of autoaffection. When
Heidegger writes: “time as pure self-affection forms the essential structure of
subjectivity” (Heidegger 7, §34), one must not forget that, through the implied
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dative and the past tense “was” of the ti en einai, Aristotle had already marked
out in the hypokeimenon, in the subiectum, the logical place of what was to become modern subjectivity, indissolubly linked to time.