The Meaning of Life

It's a question which has struck people for as long as I'd dare to guess and one which hits at the very ground of one's being - what is it all about, all this? Human beings are confronted directly by their own existence, coming into being just long enough to realise the very being they're profoundly aware of will not actually last. It's a gruesome prospect for sure, and anybody who doesn't stir in the face of death just isn't thinking about it properly.

The long adored mechanistic interpretation of the world, the idea that the world is made up of simple atoms moving in a void giving rise to the emergence of all kinds of weird and wonderful phenomena, fans the flames of existential dread. Ultimately the universe machine will fail - we know that what comes up must come down, and that before we can even witness the shit hit the cosmic fan we'll either have obliterated ourselves through nuclear war, our sun will have died, or some other scenario you can imagine which sends an unwelcome chill down your spine.

But far from a simple spinal shiver, these sorts of notions can call into question the very meaning of life itself. What is the point if it is all literally going to be blasted to atoms before the possible summa exstinctio of the universe as a whole takes place at some point in the future, long after we are extinct? Indeed, even if the immortalists manage to secure the biological process which stops ageing, I wouldn't be too optimistic about the follow-up project aiming to reverse the universe's trend towards entropy.

It's something of a blessing and a curse to be able to look ahead in these ways. On the plus side we can plan ahead and make sure we take a piss before hopping on for that 6 hour coach journey, anticipating the future discomfort which may be wrought upon us - sat fidgeting and becoming intensely annoyed. On the other hand it lets us see what our life's work will ultimately come to - a harrowing prospect for those who want lasting results from their labour.

So what is the meaning of it all? I don't pretend to be able to give you a definitive answer, but I hope what I do have to say at least keeps the creeping backdoor nihilists at bay for a while. The idea struck me that to ask what the meaning of life is, is to assume that life itself takes place inside of a context which encompasses it and gives it meaning. The meaning of any piece of equipment, for example, is the context into which that piece of equipment fits. Without the pen (and paints, pencils, etc.), without writing (and painting, drawing, etc.), without human life itself, the paper means nothing. But with all of these things the paper can mean something. Meaning is given by this phenomenon, what Heidegger called "world", i.e. the interconnected nexus of purposes and tools and people - something I write a lot about on this blog.

To ask about life itself having a meaning, there would have to be some similar sort of meaning-giving horizon which underpins life itself. As life per se was not created towards some end, and as there is nothing apart from life for life to be useful for, it looks like we might be asking the wrong question in asking what the meaning of life in general is (a kind of category error). If only things situated in a context can have meaning, perhaps we ought to ask a different question: what is the meaning of this life?

The simplest answer is that the meaning of your life is whatever you choose to do with it. The meaning of your acts is determined by how they fit into the world, what they do. And how you choose to lead your life prefigures the meaning of certain concrete acts. But... is there really any point if it all dissapears? This idea plagues collectors and hoarders of all kinds, and is rooted in what I consider to be a very backwards view of temporality.

Remember when you were a child, and you built that big lego house (or whatever) but later on it was smashed apart and returned to a state of chaos inside the toy box? Remember how you didn't give a shit and built a better one later? This, I feel, is the meaning of that old maxim "life is play". If there is one context into which the whole of life fits, it is that of change. Everything in life changes (from people to passive substances) and to fight this fact is to defy the metaphysical grounds of life itself. Enjoy building and creating - after all, it is the best part. Once something is attained, we just end up wanting something else anyway. That's just how we are. When there's nothing left to do, nothing left to chase, life gets boring. Accordingly, then, the very idea that something only has meaning when its presence can be guaranteed indefinitely is, to put it as plainly as possible, horse shit. If anything, things threaten to become meaningless when they can be guaranteed to stick about like a drunk on a bus and never change.

My advice, then, is to discount[1] the mechanistic picture of life and it's nihilistic consequences (unless, that is, you fancy yourself a bit of a tragic type and want to spend your life sobbing into a notebook or something). It is a view of the universe which is based on the ultimately meaningless motion of matter in space, and as a result cannot penetrate to the meaning of human life which is essentially not characterised by matter in motion, but by the significance resulting from our involvements with things. Don't worry that it'll all be dust in the void one day because if you're reading this you're still lucky enough to have time left to do meaningful things.

[1] When writing this, it didn't seem to me as obvious as it does now that this could be seen in some way in which I would not like to be misunderstood. I am absolutely not writing off the (in my view, indispensible) value of being able to see things in such scientific terms, only that we ought to remember that this way of seeing the world is a modification of a more primary way of viewing things and so we should take care that our lives be understood in terms more suited to appreciating them. Human life cannot be adequately grasped in terms of the motion of bodies in space as other phenomena can.

Scribblings on Sympathy

The difference between understanding something merely theoretically (vorhandenheit, occurence, presence-at-hand, observation) and practically (zuhandenheit, availableness, readiness-to-hand, participation) means that if one only understands something as a matter of facts and statistics (as in understanding global poverty merely in terms of the numbers of people in poverty and their spending power, etc.) and not in terms of how it reveals itself in lived participation then they miss a large aspect of that thing.

But we can usually understand at least something of what a person means when they tell us that so many people live in poverty and sometimes also live under tyrannical governments. We understand so much more than the mere facts when we hear something like this, we can understand that suffering is taking place, though we’re certainly not able to penetrate as far as to knowing how it feels to encounter it. We understand these facts already on the basis of their being about people. It is a wholly different thing to come across statistics regarding computer hardware failures, and statistics regarding how many people are starving.

People and objects are considerably different things. Objects are defined in their substantially and objective presence. They cannot understand the being of themselves, or other beings. We are beings which understand, and through understanding ourselves we can understand others. Not having enough food on the table is something which no mere occurent fact could lead one to understand. You must already have the capacity to understand the kind of being which we are, which feel, and for which things have meaning, for which things are sought out - things which we sometimes feel in their absence more than we do in their presence, like food.

The existential basis of sympathy is our being able to understand ourselves. These facts are intelligible on the basis of our knowing what it means to go without food, or to live under tyranny. So it is that through occurent facts (not restricted to statistics, “I lost my job”, “I won the lottery”, etc.) we can come to understand something of a person’s troubles. However, without lived participation one cannot come to truly understand the significance of a person’s encounters. You cannot know what it means for “a person” to win the lottery, because the meaning is determined by the lived context in which it is an interrelated part. It would mean something different for you than it would for me. For me it would mean I could do the things which satisfy my concerns, and which affect the way my affairs hang together (what would no more student loan mean to you? or having the money to pay off your mortgage?) and therefore too the possible ways I am able to be (I could buy a house and become a house owner, or invest in a business and become an investor).

Yet, the close and mutually engaged participation between people enables them to know something of the significance of the victories and failures of who they are close to. You can know that your friend’s parents are coming to visit at some point, and so understand how they may be concerned about the nature of the items strewn around the house. Or, having followed a football team for a season, you could find yourself able to go with the ebb and flow of the feelings of the community through games and official decisions. Yet standing on the periphery you can only understand so much.

I’ll have to sod off to dwell more on how this public understanding is originally possible…

The Assumptions of Representationalism

It had seemed to me a fact of the most obvious kind that we are fundamentally related to the world as subjects perceiving objects. I’ve made sweeping epistemic and ontological decisions based on this assumption and on account of its seeming so obvious I never stopped to question it. I am me, this is this – end of story. When I began to take philosophy more seriously I found myself drawn to subjectivist or sceptical positions on account of this veil of perception which I believed occluded me to the proper nature of the things I encountered.

When I began to come across non-representationalist accounts of what had typically been known to me as “mental” phenomena, of course I was interested. This was a claim which was so fundamentally alien to me that I just had to have a peek… The idea is that we are not first and foremost thinking subjects related to objects by means of mental representations, but are rather beings with a way of unthinkingly engaging with a world in which we are wholly absorbed. The representationalist picture wanted to demonstrate how one’s world was revealed to them by the medium of “internal” representations, however what philosophers have noticed is that most of our dealings are in fact non-representational. Walking, for instance, or our use of language or equipment – all pass over us transparently, without our explicit awareness. Even our awareness of ourselves is rendered transparent in the midst of what Heidegger calls “coping” (Drefyus, 1991).

Our most primary mode of engagement with the world is not through a canvas of conscious deliberation, calculation, belief, desire, and ultimately action. We can, and more often than not do, engage with the world unthinkingly. It was recently discovered that the brain plays a much more insignificant role in movement than was previously thought, that the spinal column and legs control movement themselves, while the brain simply sets up the nervous system to anticipate movement (sounds hauntingly like Merleau-Ponty, no?) So the act of conscious volition is not even neurologically grounded in the case of movement - it simply takes place in the body, responding to its environment accordingly, devoid of representation or any feeling of acting.

Heidegger separates two modes of dealing with things, the practical (zuhandenheit) and the theoretical (vorhandenheit). The practical mode of being involves engaged participation: one understands a piece of equipment through using it, through its having a purpose corresponding to a possibility of one’s being, e.g. the hammer is something “with-which” you hammer nails, “in-order-to” build the house, “for-the-sake-of” being a carpenter (King, 2001). The theoretical way of looking at things, however, involves detached inspection – when all using and producing, etc., has ceased and all that remains is understanding things in their “outward appearance” (Heidegger, 2010).

That we must have a practical understanding of our world (taken not to denote the totality of things in existence, but rather the inter-referential nexus in which things play a part: one cannot make sense of the paper without the pen, and neither are intelligible without the possibility of writing or drawing) before we can have detached, theoretical, mental representations is not obvious. Strong AI theorists, for instance, believe it possible to program in a list of purely objective, factual data to a machine which does not share our world, and have it demonstrate consciousness purely through such factual representations. To establish the necessity of being “worlded” in order to have such representations, I’ll borrow two examples from Hubert Dreyfus:

(1) The first example involves a chair. One could be told “this is a chair” and shown an image. The factual data gleaned from this “merely looking” at the image would allow one to point out things which have similar objective properties and say “that is a chair”. However, this is not sufficient for properly understanding what a chair is. If you had one who was from a culture unfamiliar to seating, they could reproduce the expression “chair” whenever they saw something with the same properties, but they could not know what a chair was without knowing what it is for. This understanding cannot be given over by objective, factual, representational, knowledge. One must come to understand the chair as an object of use with a purpose by engaging with it.

(2) The second example involves a broken radio. If we were to say to someone “if it is not making sound, it is broken” it would be a simple enough test for them to check if it was broken, right? So they approach the radio, fiddle around with it for a bit, try turning it on and no sound comes out. It’s broken, there – easier than we would have expected. But try doing this without world. By having a world in which things make sense, expressions like “broken” come to have significance – how? Only on the basis of an item’s being for something can it fail to do what it is supposed to do. And only by being so constituted as to reach out to things in this practical manner can we understand something’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. Our engagement, our being tangled up in things, is what is required for understanding.

The mistaken assumption is that one can simply program understanding of brokenness into a computer by giving it some list of data through which it is said to know when something is broken. However, because no previous understanding of brokenness stands with the machine, we’re left with a merely behavioural mimicry. The machine was never reaching out to the radio on the basis of a purposive aspect, and so cannot possibly grasp how something can be broken, a notion which is from top to bottom couched in purposiveness You can look at the objective properties of a broken radio all you like, “rectangular”, “weighs 2 pounds”, “silver”, “produces no sound”, but without the background of world it’s just a list of facts stripped of their significance.

So when we come to have explicit mental representations like “this is broken” or “that is a chair” we can only do so on the basis of a non-cognitive, non-representational background understanding of how things fit together in the world. We cannot hope to gain an understanding of expressions like “this is broken” or “that is a chair” without engaging with them, and being tangled up with them in this inter-referential world through which things come to have meaning.

Bibliography

Drefyus, H. (1991). Being-in-the-World. MIT Press.

Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time. SUNY.

King, M. (2001). A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time. SUNY.

Tonight's Lesson

Tonight I realised I've been thinking about my life too much to the detriment of actually living it. Socrates had it that an unexamined life was not worth living, but does this mean we should do nothing but examine our lives? Knowing things is regarded with such esteem sometimes by thinkers that you can forget that there are things you should just experience unthinkingly, letting them wash over you. That is life on the nerve end and it's time to return to it.

Thoughts on the Priority of Description (Part 1)

(note: you can find an updated version of this paper in the Journal of Leeds University Philosophical Society, ISSN 2047-1173)

Introduction

Recently I’ve been greatly interested in studying analytic style metaphysics and have seen (and experienced) how difficult it can be to provide rudimentary analyses of all types of beings, from persons to space itself. I’ve seen how approaching beings from a limited horizon makes it very difficult to account for many aspects of those beings. In this paper I will consider the idea that description rather than conceptual explanation is the proper founding stone in the investigation of any being. This prerogative will lead us in the direction of some developments from the school of phenomenology in how we come to understand things in the first place. We will especially have to take a good look at how the cognitive could arise from the non-cognitive if we are hoping to secure our solution to the problem of intelligibility which we’ll encounter in due course.

The Priority of Description

In the process of carrying out ontology it has become the orthodox to posit things either as mind-independent substances (which range over organic compounds, buildings, metals, atoms) or as something wholly contrasted with it, posited as abstract objects (numbers, concepts, logical truths) or some sort of immaterial substance (minds, souls). In this things are understood in terms of how well they coincide with the being of substances (King, 2001). Could you in principle encounter it? If not then we have to wonder about the mode of access we have to these things, or in the case of error theories, if we’re not altogether mistaken in our thought and talk about them.

There are a whole range of positions one can take towards the ontological categorisation of the beings we meet in our lives. I’ve never seen a number before, but I know how to make use of them and routinely and effortlessly use mathematics to anticipate and make use of the things in my life. Can it be said that I have encountered these numbers? In one sense it seems perfectly obvious that I have. Whenever I calculate the amount of money I am able to spend am I not encountering numbers then? But in another way this perhaps dubious, maybe even vacuous, and certainly in need of elucidation. What is one encountering, and how?

Platonism, Logicism, Naturalism, Fictionalism, and Formalism (roughly a kind of error theory) are a few of the ideas in commerce with one another in the contemporary discussion (Brock & Mares, 2010). Platonism, briefly, is the view that numbers are a special kind of abstract object which exist in a mysterious domain. Simple statements like “2 + 2 = 4” are true by virtue of their correspondence with an abstract object of this sort. If the semantic value of a name expression is taken as the object to which it refers, it’s natural for philosophers to think that what makes a mathematical proposition true is its correspondence to a sort of object. Of course the biggest problem is epistemological: how does one come to have knowledge of such abstracta if they are acausal and non-spatiotemporal? If we say “by encountering them with the intuitions through which we access numbers” we’re just begging the question.

Holes are also a very strange kind of phenomenon which receive much attention in analytic philosophy. David and Stephanie Lewis offer a very light-hearted investigation into the difficulties of a strictly nominalist explanation of holes. The basic idea is that when we say that the holes are simply the physical boundary surrounding the holes, we open up a large expanse of further conceptual difficulties. So we’re left in the lurch. Not only numbers and logical truths but even things we can go and encounter like holes are hard to define in their being, owing to the inadequacy of our concepts.

Early last century Edmund Husserl’s newly born school of phenomenology organised itself around the mantra “to the things themselves!” There was no doctrine, just a method of “phenomenological seeing” which involved putting off attempts to explain the phenomena and simply to describe it in its manner of approach (Moran, 2006). Husserlian phenomenology later blossomed into hermeneutic phenomenology under Martin Heidegger, and then into a widely diversified phenomenological discourse embracing fields as diverse as neuroscience and artificial intelligence to biology and philosophy (Dreyfus & Wrathall, 2006).

Perhaps it would be advisable, then, to go back to the things themselves – things such as holes and numbers – and reclassify them in terms of how they are when we let them meet us, instead of already meeting them with explanations and a conceptual taxonomy. Instead of trying to get holes, numbers, and modal truths to fit into an already existent schema, we should instead return to where we find them and describe them as and how they show up. In lieu of a sufficiently rich conceptual tapestry it is perhaps a mistake to attempt to fit a range of phenomena into an explanatory nexus based upon it (especially if the nexus cannot seem to explain what it’s trying to assimilate). But there may be a problem in answering how we could ever come to understand the phenomena originally in order to find ourselves able to describe them? Are such descriptions not themselves couched in concepts which must therefore already be understood?

Broadly, the phenomenological solution has been to point out that there is a sort of a priori meaning-giving “horizon” against which the things we encounter can make sense. To make this clear I will have to borrow an example from Magda King. King points out that in coming to have an understanding of something, we must already grasp it on the basis of its being-for something. A meaning-giving horizon is something like this: say someone points to a theatre and asks you what it is, how are you going to explain it to them? You will have to explain it by reference to how it fits into the human world you both understand. But being able to communicate what it does is only possible on the basis of an a priori understanding of this equipmental nexus of which it is a part (King, 2001). Man understands itself as being-in-the-world, which (stated as crudely as possible for considerations of space) entails understanding how the things in the world fit together in terms of their being for-the-sake-of some end, or their being something with-which you are able to meet some goal. The ultimate for-the-sake-of is your own existence (Heidegger, 2010).

The world is primarily encountered against this background or horizon. Things make sense in terms of how they fit into it. Coffee mugs refer to coffee machines, drinking coffee, people who harvest the coffee, etc. It comes to have meaning by virtue of fitting into this purposive and inter-referential world and can accordingly only be understood by someone who shares that world (imagine explaining eating to a species who needed no nutriment). This awareness of the meaning-giving significance of context penetrates into fields like anthropology (through Geertz’s “thick” and “thin” descriptions) as much as it does in language (through pragmatics) and epistemology (through contextualism).

Yet this is not the only horizon which we can use to get a hold on something. When physicists are being physicists they see things in terms of their substantiality, and so against this horizon the human world of significance evaporates and we’re left with straightforward matter in motion. Things like moods and purposes are not disclosed by this horizon. If this was how we primarily understood things, there would be nothing like a significant human world for us to discover (King, 2001).

But now we’re left with a problem. What is this background on which we understand things? This question tends towards a problem raised originally by Martin Heidegger who was the first to refute the “metaphysical assumption” handed down by the rationalist tradition (Andler, 2006). This inheritance had for a time landed on the lap of Leibniz during an important phase of the initial formation of what is now known as cognitive science. Leibniz felt that all intelligence was information processing, and that the background understanding on which we come to grasp things was simply more information processing (Todes, 2001). If this background is simply further cognitive understanding, then the background on which we derive our concepts are further concepts. Yet this has its own difficulties, as we must ask how it is we arrive at these concepts in the first place without some foregoing intelligible experience. How are these experiences intelligible (and thus describable) to us at all?

Primitive Signification

What I call a “primitive signification” could shed at least a little light upon what this background is through which we understand things and render ourselves able to describe them (and ultimately form concepts out of them). Explanation must stop somewhere. There must be a bedrock on which we can base our understanding. It is evident that basing this understanding on cognitive beliefs, as with epistemic foundationalism, creates difficulties (Bonjour, 2008) and so in line with the century of phenomenology following Heidegger, it may be advisable to look into the possibility of a non-cognitive (and non-empirical) foundation. The idea is related intimately to the notion of an “existential”, a term coined by Heidegger in Being and Time to denote a particular feature of our (holistic) existential structure.

An example of an existential is our “spatiality”, an aspect of our being which discloses space. However, a thoroughgoing elucidation of the role of the body is otherwise missing in Being and Time, and so the stage is set for Merleau-Ponty to expand upon Heidegger’s project in founding our understanding of space more explicitly in embodiment. The thrust behind this later phenomenology was that the body is a “here” from which directional co-ordinates “up”, “down”, “left”, “right”, “over there”, “near the bin”, and so on, are intelligible. In order to make this explicit, imagine having directions given to you to find a nearby river (or whatever you like). The un-explicit (and, as he suggests, non-conceptual) understanding through which you are able to grasp the directions is by reference to your own body. In order to get to a place one must first of all know where it is that they in fact are – which is, trivially, wherever their body is. Merleau-Ponty says that in fact: “far from my body’s being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1970).

The important thing to recognise is that this in no way leads inexorably towards a representationalist or any sort of mind-dependent conception of space. Space can still be there whether or not we’re around to grasp it. The idea is simply that the having of a body is a precondition of understanding space, which is not at all a claim as to the ontic nature of space. So existentials “disclose” things to our understanding, enable us to grasp things, or in Heidegger’s more elegant prose, they open up a clearing or horizon from which beings can show themselves in their being.

This, then, is how we will access the idea of a primitive signification. When describing something one must use words in order to formulate cognitively graspable statements regarding it. But this is no evidence for the claim that the understanding we have on the basis of this existential structure must also be of a cognitive nature (Andler, 2006). Consider a simple linguistic expression. Something is “hard” when it is unyielding, like the hardness of steel or marble. Yet we also say that the content of a book can be “hard”. What do we ever mean by this? Do I mean that the paper or the cover is unyielding? Not at all. I mean that it is difficult to read. Both senses of the word “hard” originate in this idea of something’s being unyielding, but they’re not unyielding in the same way. How do we come to understand these utterances? On the basis of primitive significations.

Primitive significations, then, are things like this notion of hardness. We come to understand them by having an attitude towards something, and thus an aim to accomplish. Something can only be unyielding if we are intending upon it. We can only understand the notion of something’s being unyielding by being so constituted as to intend upon things. So where does this primitive signification originate? In our own existential structure, which is always already intending upon things – is always inextricably bound with the things in the world and cannot choose to be free from them (Heidegger, 2010). Our most fundamental ways of understanding things are grounded in this non-cognitive activity which is known as “coping”. Coping is often conspicuously lacking in explicit representational content (I have only just noticed my fingers typing). One doesn’t have to work through or even know the complex of differential equations involved in correcting the course of a bicycle (Andler, 2006) any more than a one year old child needs to learn the rules of syntax before they can begin constructing sentences.

The Inadequacy of Substance

In borrowing that helpful example from Magda King earlier it may have been noticed that perhaps the difficulty with ontology rests in the interpretation of being as substance. We noted right at the very start how ontology typically tries to categorise beings in terms of how well they accord with the being of substance. We also briefly indicated that this horizon was insufficient for getting towards the meaning of the human way of being. Could it be that this “substantial” horizon is also insufficient for understanding the being of numbers and modal truths, etc.?

It’s helpful to note that this view does not lead one to positing some sort of dualism in order to explain how the substantial facts cannot account for all of the phenomena. Indeed, positing some sort of immaterial substance is to commit the error of assessing the being in question in its accordance with substance. It’s plainly obvious that human beings are made of matter, but are societies, intentions, and goals also made of matter? In one sense they are, but if you were to compile a list of every material thing of which a society is composed you would not penetrate to the real meaning of what it is for a society to be. A society cannot be grasped in terms of an objective list of material facts, but must be understood from within. Consider how no material difference comes into being when two people get married - yet husbands and wives are still meaningful roles in our world.

With some idea as to how things in the world become intelligible we can see at least a little bit as to what this a priori understanding consists in. We do not necessarily have to set up anchor next to Kant in holding that ontological categories are simply categories of the understanding. Our way of being discloses primitive significations which themselves give rise to words we can use to throw light upon those very significations and thereby enjoy communication. Only by virtue of sharing a world and an existential structure can we come to have this understanding and be able to communicate it too. What we have in common enables us to know what each other are talking about when we say “this work is hard” or “this lecture is boring”. We have the promise of avoiding an infinite regress, and may avoid traditional epistemological charges of fudging, as with epistemic foundationalism, by having to secure knowledge on further cognitive beliefs.

The problems which remain for the other parts of this essay are to give an account of how primitive significations support concept formation. The idea of non-primitive significations will have to be figured out and related to its ontological foundation.

Jordan Adshead, March 2011

Bibliography

Andler, D. (2006). Phenomenology in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. In H. Dreyfus, & M. Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (p. 390). Blackwell.

Bonjour, L. (2008). Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation? In E. Sosa, J. Kim, J. Fantl, & M. McGrath, Epistemology: An Anthology (pp. 109-123). Blackwell.

Brock, S., & Mares, E. (2010). Realism and Antirealism. Acumen.

Dreyfus, H., & Wrathall, M. (2006). A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time. SUNY.

King, M. (2001). A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time. SUNY.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1970). Spatiality and Motility. In S. Spicker, The Philosophy of the Body. Quadrangle Books.

Moran, D. (2006). Introduction to Phenomenology. Routledge.

Todes, S. (2001). Body and World. MIT Press.

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[1] I use “being” in the broadest possible (Heideggerian) sense: anything which is not nothing counts as a being in this very wide application of the term - not just concreta like dogs and cats, and tables and chairs.