In modern Continental ontology there as been a major change in the way we understand Being and pursue Ontology. This change might be called The Fragmentation of Being. In the course of this century the unified concept of Being that had remained untouched for centuries, since the Greeks, came under scrutiny though the advent of Phenomenology. When this concept of Being was finally scrutinized with rigor it was found that it actually had internal structure. There was not just one kind of Being but many and as Heidegger showed by his exegesis of Greek texts Being had always had several meanings.
The beginning of the scrutiny of Being began with Brentano. He wrote his dissertation on the different meanings of the word Being in Aristotle. He went on to found scientific psychology and became the teacher of Husserl. Husserl went on after him to apply his ideas to the foundation of Transcendental Phenomenology which was a philosophy that attempted to extract itself from scientific psychology. In the course of developing his Transcendental Phenomenology Husserl made an important discovery. That is the discovery of "essence perception." He discovered that there was an aspect of cognition that no one had ever noticed and isolated before. This is because no one before him rigorously studied his own consciousness as a basis for philosophizing. Prior to Husserl each philosopher would construct a system of abstract concepts which were strung together as they saw fit as a means of describing the nature of the world and our palace within it. But with the advent of scietific psychology and also phenomenology rigorous studies of the working of consciousness were undertaken. When these studies were done by Husserl and elements of our thought such as logic, number and geometrical entities were studied it was found that the logical concepts of induction and deduction did not adequately describe what actually went on in conscousness. Essence perception was a great discovery by Husserl and he expected that phenomenology would be founded as a rigorous philosophical discipline in order to explore all of the features of consciousness. He was disappointed.
Essence Perception is the direct intuition of the 'kinds' of things. It does not depend on induction or deduction and is in fact prior to each of these forms of controlling cognitions. Husserl gives the example of the lion that jumps out of the jungle at you when you have never seen or heard of a lion before. He says it is not necessary to have seen any other examples of lions nor to have the abstract notion of a lion to understand the essence of the lion. The lion has a kind of structure that is directly aprehended out of our perception of it and all induction and deduction is after the fact analysis of 'what' is primordially given in the essence perception first.
The fact that there was a cognitive faculty that discerned kinds or essences prior to the creation of inductions or the production of deductions was a momentus discovery for Husserl because he had found an aspect of the human cognition that no one had ever noticed before because they were satisfied with abstract descriptions of human functioning and had never compared their conceptual apparatus with what actually happens in cognition.
To this insight Husserl's student Aaron Gurvitch added the insights of Gestalt psychology in order to formulate a phenomenology that recognized the relation of the dynamic field that encompasses both foreground and background perceptual moments to more rigorously define the nature of essence perception.
Another student Martin Heidegger took this fundamental insight of Husserl's and constructed a new kind of Philosophy which appeared with his first book BEING & TIME. In that book the role of Being as the avatar of manifestation was first formulated. Being was no longer just an empty abstract concept, but it refered to manifestation as seen through the eyes of esssence perception. An entirely new vocabulary was developed by Heidegger to express his new philosophy which traditional philosophers are still struggling to understand.
In BEING & TIME Heidegger distinguished between two kinds of Being.
These two kinds of Being translated into two different modalities by which human beings related to their world
Through these two different modalities human beings related to the world in completely different ways. They made up two of perhaps several ways we can relate to things in our world. Once two ways of relating to the world discovered then the race was on to discover other modalities and thus kinds of Being.
The most famous post war philosopher was the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre who founded existentialism along with Albert Camus. Sartre wrote the book BEING AND NOTHINGNESS and attempted to synthesize Husserl's Phenomenology with Hegel's dialectics. The result was a very controversial book which gradually has become understood to have been a dead end because of Sartre's limited understanding of Husserl. But later Sartre wrote CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON which is one of the great books of Philosophy and Sociology that has been mostly ignored and forgotten. Sartre was also famous for his plays and novels which dramatized his philosophy and made it accessible to the general public.
Merleau-Ponty was a contemporary of Sartre who engaged him in many philosophcial and political debates. He wrote two great works PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION and THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE. In these works Merleau-ponty outlined the rest of contemporary contential ontology. The first book was a reworking the basic ontolgical findings of BEING & TIME in a psychologically comprehensible form. In it he related the present-at-hand to pointing and the ready-to-hand to grasping which were psychological behaviors that everyone could understand. Merleau-Ponty tried to ground these distinctions in current brain research and show that thy were well founded modalities by which human beings relate to things in the world. At the end of that study Merleau-Ponty discovered the third kind of Being. That kind of Being he later called Hyper Being. In THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION he called it the 'expansion' of being-in-the-world. He noted that with technology we learn to use it and encompass it in our way of relating to the world. This expansion of our being- in-the-world was not covered by Heideggers concept of ready-to-hand nor the traditional kind of Being which we relate to through the present-at-hand. I will name this the 'in-hand' modality because it occurs when things are taken 'in-hand' and dealt with such that they become an acustomed part of ones world. With this discovery of a third modality by which humans relate to the world things generally started to heat up in the refined world of continental philosophy becaue philosophers were wondering how many kinds of Being might exist.
It was soon realized that what Sartre had produced in his BEING AND NOTHINGNESS was a parody of BEING & TIME in which he had turned the entire argument upside down. It was apparent that the 'Nothingness' that Sartre had posited at the center of consciousness was not 'Process Being' but its inversion. This became clear after Heidegger in LETTER ON HUMANISM had renounced Sartre's brand of existentialism. Heiegger's existentialism was based on the connection between the word 'exist' and the word 'ecstasy' and concerend the 'ex-stasis' of dasein (there-being) who was thrown outside itself in the process of projecting the world. Sartre on the other hand was attempting to turn the old dichotomy between essence and existence upside down. Sartre's philosophy remained completely trapped in the present- at-hand by merely inverting traditional philosophical concepts whereas Heidegger was attempting to move off into a fundamentally new dimensionm, following Husserl. But further critique made it apparent that despite the wide differences between their philosophies and the sources of those philosopies all the attempts to reconcile to two kinds of existentialism came up with the fact that they were conceptual antimonies.
Heidegger finally recognized this impasse and called the cancellation of these antinomies of Being (crossed out). This was the third kind of Being and the one that Derrida took up and decided to articulate under the different name DifferAnce. Others also latched on to this Being of the third kind as the solution to the millenia old problems of philosophy. Levinas attempted to combine metaphysics and ethics at this level and introduced the concept that the third psychological concomitant to the in-hand was 'bearing' as when the child bears up under the attention of the mother who bears the child. Michael Henry showed that Heidegger's fundamenal assumption was Ontological Monism and created an alternative view based on the writings of Meister Eckhart that made the opposite assumption of ontological dualism. In that work Henry uncovered The Essence of Manifestation which is like the unconscious within manifestation beyond all the showing and hiding relations described by Process Being. The essence of manifestation is the equivalent of a black hole for ontology and like the unconscious it distorts manifestation without showing itself except by its traces. This is why Derrida began his deconstructionist journey by inagurating the discipline of grammatology. Grammatology looks at the traces that exist beneath the signs that exist beneath the symbols that are presented as frozen representations. There are many other examples of philosophies that have attempted to appropriate Hyper Being or Being (crossed out) as the realm in which to pursue their philosophies.
Merleau-Ponty, however, did not stop at this third kind of Being but went on to think about what happens after the cancellation occurs. He called what was left over after the dust settled Wild Being in THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. Unfortunately he did not get to finish that project as his life was cut short in an auto accident. But THE VISIBLE AND THE VISIBLE stands as one of the deepest books in our modern philosophical tradition. This book outlines several principles of philosophy that several have attempted to elaborate after him but no-one has succeeded in fully explicating. Among these are the flesh and the chiasma. The 'flesh' is what is left after the antinomic cancellation of process being and nothingness. The chiasma is the reversiblity inherent in the relation between dualistic opposites despite all claims of the excluded middle.
There are many philosophers that have achieved pominance after Merleau-Ponty's death which have carried on the pursuit of a philosophy of the fourth type of Being, Wild Being. Most of these philosophies have failed for one reason or another. One of the most brilliant of these attempts was the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in ANTI-OEDIPUS and A THOUSAND PLATEAUS. But many others like Baudrillard have worked toward this end as well. The work of John S. Hans called THE PLAY OF THE WORLD offers a more balanced view of what a philosophy of Wild Being might be like. But most post-modernists who are not caught up in some form of extreme sophism or nihilism still have not found a good way of building a philosophy beyond the cancellation of the antinomies of Process Being and Nothingness. Deleuze and Guattari made the brilliant move of allowing two other disciplines, marxist economics and analytical psychiatry, to cancel each other out instead of the images of dynamic Being so that they were left with philosophy as that which was beyond the cancellation of these disciplines. Speaking beyond cancellation is very difficult because in cancellation the very foundation of your speech and thought are undercut.
What has been lacking is an ontological synthesis which comprehends the interrelation of the different kinds of Being as discovered by the modern continental philosohical tradition. It is that kind of synthesis that the Kent Palmer, the author of these HTML pages, has been working on for over twenty years and which finds expression in his dissertation and several unpublished manuscripts mentioned on the homepage. The ontological synthesis that attempts to comprehend the fragmentation of Being in modern continental philosophy has several points of entry.
Brentano, ON THE KIND OF BEING IN ARISTOTLE's METAPHYSICS
Deleuze, Guattari, ANTI-OEDIPUS
Deleuze, Guattari, A THOUSAND PLATEAUS
Derrida, SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, OF GRAMMATOLOGY
Gurvitch, THE FIELD OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Hans, THE PLAY OF THE WORLD
Heidegger, BEING AND TIME
Heidegger, LETTER ON HUMANISM
Husserl, LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
Husserl, CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS
Merleau-Ponty, THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE
Merleau-Ponty, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION
Sartre, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
Sartre, CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON