The problem of being in philosophy and approaches to its formulation in the era of antiquity

The problems of being in the history of philosophy are the most discussed issues. The ambivalence of this phenomenon can be seen if we compare two points of view. First of all, the view of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who was the first of the Greek thinkers to raise the question of being as a kind of wholeness, came to the conclusion that any of our thoughts are about being, and therefore there is no non-existence. There is another opinion, the so-called "Hamlet's view", which allows both being and non-being (to be or not to be). In this eternal discussion, two aspects can be discerned: 1) the dialectical nature of being and nothing and 2) the ontological and existential dimensions of the concept of "being."

In addition, the problem of being in philosophy opens up a whole series of other debatable questions, such as: is being a reasonable prerequisite for the unity of the world, or is it a certain state from which the "Eternal Present" glimpses? Does it have a beginning and an end? Does it exist outside our consciousness or is it a product? Is being only the world around us and things or something deeper? Is being what we know directly or is there a single unchanging foundation for everything that exists, a certain ordering system of the world? On the one hand, the questions of being are sometimes too simple to talk about, because everyone understands what it means to be, but a clear definition of this term always eludes the researcher.

The problem of being in philosophy has always been put in different ways, depending on a certain era and society. Even during the reign of the mythological consciousness of primitive culture, when, according to Levi-Bruhl, a person felt patricipation (involvement) in the natural world and did not analyze phenomena, but told stories about them (myths), in these very myths a certain subordination of being was established: who created The world, who maintains order in it, what is the place of the person in it. At the decline of the mythological era, people developed two approaches to this problem - relatively speaking, the eastern and the western. The Eastern approach consisted in the transformation of myth into philosophy, and the Western approach consisted in expelling it from philosophy through analysis.

The problem of being in the philosophy of the Ancient East was solved in two ways. It was represented as an absolute, manifested in the world, and the world was seen as its ghostly likeness. Another version of the vision of being described it as a "filled emptiness", which at every moment manifests itself in the world. In the West, Plato found himself closest to the first variant of understanding this question in Eastern philosophy . The East enriched the history of philosophy by raising the problem of the true and untrue, illusory and real being. Western philosophy was more concerned about the characteristics of being-it is the unity of diversity or the diversity of unity, the universe or the multiverse. Greek philosophers (Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander) viewed being as Cosmos and sought its primary (water, air, apeiron ...). They were also interested in whether the being is always the same and whether it is identical to itself (almost the entire Greek tradition was inclined to it) or is "fluid" and "becoming" (Heraclitus, Empedocles, Neoplatonists).

One can say that the problem of being in the philosophy of antiquity was posed also with regard to the connection between being and harmony. In the philosophers of ancient Greece, all harmony is impersonal (Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles) and manifested in symmetry and repetition. A person must submit to this harmony, and then his life will acquire meaning. Greek philosophers were the first to abandon the tradition of philosophical animism prevailing before them, understanding the world as inhabited by spirits, where each phenomenon was simultaneously a being, a certain "You". They turned the world into "It", and the living myth was replaced by analytical thinking. In the concept of "being" they introduced the concept of "substance".

From that moment on, the problems of being in the philosophy of ancient Greece and later of Rome began to be decided with consideration of what, in fact, existence consists of. Some thinkers believed that the substance is material (Democritus), and others - that it is immaterial (Plato). Anaxagoras threw out the idea that it consists of homeomes (infinitely divisible particles), and Democritus - that of indivisible particles, atoms. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle made an attempt to unify the concept of faceless harmony with a certain hierarchical structure (Plato pictured it in the form of a pyramid, Aristotle in the form of steps, Pythagoras in the form of mathematical mysticism - geotetrism). However, ancient philosophy imagined being cyclical, repetitive. It can be said that she raised the question of the relationship between being and nothing, but had not yet thought about the connection between being and time. This became the lot of the following eras.