Being in The Medieval and Pre-Modern Period

The medieval period was highlighted by the growth of Christianity in the Western world. Aristotle’s notion of God as the highest being sparked the studies of Christian theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, mystics such as Meister Eckart, and pre-modern philosophers like Leibniz, Spinoza and Hegel.  

While Greek philosophers did not distinguish between the existence and essence of beings, Islamic thought viewed the material world as having a contingent existence, while God’s existence was unconditional. Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) adapted this viewpoint to suggest that for the impermanent beings of the world, existence and essence were different, but not for God. He also said that the relationship between God and beings was analogical. For example, the quality of God’s goodness is similar to but not the same as human goodness. Duns Scotus (1266-1308 AD), however, believed that the relationship between God and beings was univocal, not analogical, as in God’s goodness was exactly the same as human goodness.  

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328 AD) preached a union of the individual soul with God that had four stages, beginning with dissimilarity between the two and ending in a human breakthrough that went beyond God. His views were considered heresy and forgotten for several centuries, but they have been revived and become greatly popular today.  

Pre-Modern Period

With the onset of scientific thinking after the medieval period, the world’s focus changed to the observable world of beings. However, philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel continued the ancient inquiry into Being. In his Ethics, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677 AD) said that everything in Nature is of one universal substance of which all beings are modes or modifications. Moreover, he proposed that God and Nature were the same, a pantheistic view that was radically different from Christian or Jewish theology where God transcended Nature.  

By contrast, Gottfried Liebniz (1646-1716 AD) suggested that God was an absolutely perfect being who created the world in a perfect way, since he was incapable of imperfection. Human happiness came from accepting the will of God and being content with all the good or bad experiences that came our way due to it. Leibniz was also among the first philosophers to pose the fundamental question of metaphysics which continues to be central to modern inquiry into Being: Why is there something rather than nothing?

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1779-1831 AD) put forward the three-stage dialectical process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (coined by Johann Fichte). In this process, each of the opposing concepts, such as Being and Nothing, has three moments of understanding. When combined together, these two opposing concepts and their three moments lead to “synthesis” in our understanding of them in relation to each other. It is important to note that this dialectical process also underlies the continuous flux of the world, where Being and Nothing constantly go through this three-phase dialectic of change.   

In the years following Hegel, philosophers like Nietzsche, Husserl and Brentano made significant contributions to our understanding of Being, which led to radically new re-examinations by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and the equally revolutionary French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze.