What is ontology? What is ontology

It is well known that the question of existence is fundamental in the study of philosophy. In the evolution of the Western philosophical tradition, the term ontology did not appear until the 17th century. According to Wolf, a German philosopher at that time, logic is the introduction to philosophy, while philosophy can be divided into two parts: first, theoretical philosophy, including ontology, cosmology, psychology and theology; and second, practical philosophy, including ethics, politics and economics (1). It can be seen that ontology plays a very important role as the fundamental part of theoretical philosophy. It is also in this sense that Heidegger states, "All metaphysical thought is Ontologie (ontology), or, it is nothing at all." (2)

What needs to be further clarified is: what exactly is ontology? As we all know, the word "on" in ontology is written as "ov" in Ancient Greek and as being in English, and as it is usually used, to be is a copula in English, which can be interpreted in various ways in different contexts. Philosophically, its most basic uses are as follows: one is "to be", such as He is a student; the other is "to exist", such as He is. The gerund to be explains "existent", which refers to people and things that exist in an individual way; while when the first letter of to be is capitalized, which appears as "being", it explains "being". and when the first letter of being is capitalized, i.e., in the form of Being, it explains "existence". According to traditional philosophical opinion. Being is the sum of all that exists, and as the highest kind of concept, it is logically undefined.

The exploration of the question of existence goes all the way back to ancient Greece, but it is modern Western philosophy that has attracted widespread attention to this question. In reviewing the development of philosophy, Hegel once wrote: "This highest division is the opposition between thinking and being, a most abstract opposition; and what is to be mastered is the reconciliation of thinking and being. From this point on, all philosophy takes an interest in this unity." (3) By "from this time" Hegel here means the modern period. In another place, he states in a more explicit tone, "Modern philosophy is not simple, that is to say, it realizes the opposition between being and thinking. This opposition must be overcome by thinking, which means grasping unity." (4) Hegel understood the problem of existence from the standpoint of absolute idealism. In his view, since existence is an abstract category, it is itself a form of thought, in essence, thought, and thus the unity of existence and thought is self-evident. Unlike Hegel, Engels affirmed the importance of the relation between being and thinking from a materialist standpoint. He writes: "The great fundamental problem of all philosophy, and especially of modern philosophy, is the problem of the relation between thinking and being." (5) In his view, thinking is also spirit and being is also nature or the material world. According to this insight, existence is the sum total of existents, the whole material world.?

Having given a brief account of existence, ontology, and insights into recent Western philosophy on the question of existence, we are now in a position to explore the question of existence in the framework of contemporary discourse.?

I. The Reasons for the Revival of Ontological Studies

Given that recent philosophy has gained some insights into the question of existence, why has the question of existence once again become a central issue troubling contemporary philosophers since the beginning of the 20th century? Or to put it another way, why has there been a revival in the study of ontology? In our view, it is mainly due to the following reasons.?

First, traditional metaphysics is in crisis. Traditional metaphysics is often caught in the illusion that it is thinking about "being", but in fact it is thinking about "being". Aristotle emphasized that the task of philosophy is "to examine being qua being" (6), but "being qua being" does not mean existence, and this kind of examination is still circling around in Being. It clings to the Being that is at hand, but forgets Being itself. As Heidegger criticizes, "From its inception and even in its completed stage, the metaphysical statement is active in some strange way in a general confusion of Being and existence." (7) For Heidegger, the state of "homelessness" expressed by Nietzsche in his writings is a fundamental sign that traditional Western philosophy since Plato has forgotten the truth of existence, and Nietzsche's statement that "God is dead" is an important signal of the end of traditional metaphysics. However, the end of traditional metaphysics is not equal to the end of all metaphysics. In Heidegger's view, since man is a metaphysical animal, he will continue to think metaphysically, but this new thinking must start with the difference between existence and Being. In fact, the "grounded existentialism" that he advocates is a reflection along these lines.

Second, a series of important concepts closely related to traditional metaphysics and put forward by traditional natural science in describing the world of beings, such as existence, entity, certainty, causal determinism, etc., are facing new challenges. Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, brought an evolutionary conception into the re-examination of the world of Being by all other empirical sciences. the principle of increasing entropy, formulated by Clausius in the second half of the nineteenth century, revealed the irreversibility of the world of Being in its evolution. Founded at the beginning of the 20th century, Einstein's theory of relativity and Planck's theory of quantum mechanics greatly changed the traditional conception of classical mechanics represented by Newton. In the vision of classical mechanics, existence precedes evolution. But when physics' examination of the world of beings went down to the level of elementary particles, scientists found that everything was reversed, and that evolution preceded existence, because time is a vector. This new idea was further confirmed in the big bang cosmology and dissipative structure theory of the second half of the 20th century. Since evolution constitutes the essence of existence, the entities examined as unchanging objects in traditional physics were also replaced by relations and functions in modern physics, as if the Impressionists had deconstructed the entities in ancient paintings into points of light. If the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics inherited the trust of classical mechanics in the idea of certainty, even this idea of certainty was completely transcended in the later development of science. Whether it is Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle" or Bohr's "Complementarity Principle"; whether it is G?del's "Incompleteness Theorem" or Zadeh's fuzzy mathematics; whether it is Mono's theory of biology or Mandelbrot's "non-linear science", all of them have impacted on the traditional concept of certainty to a different extent. As Pligotzin said, "Humanity is at a turning point, at the beginning of a new rationality. In this new rationality, science is no longer equated with certainty, and probability is no longer equated with ignorance." (8) Changes in the conceptualization of mathematics and the natural sciences have had a profound impact on philosophy and have prompted contemporary philosophers to re-examine the world of Being from new perspectives, especially using ontology as an entry point for a new account of the problem of Being. From the positivism of Comte and Mach to the logical positivism trend, from Dilthey and Zimmer to Bergson's philosophy of life, from Moore and Alexander to Whitehead's positivism trend, from Russell and Wittgenstein to Quine's theory of analytic philosophy, and from Popper and Kuhn to Feyerabend's theory of the philosophy of science, etc., all of which are permeated with the contemporary philosophers' new thinking on the question of existence.?

Third, in the transition from modern society to modern and contemporary society, the great changes in the world of life have also triggered people's rethinking of the question of existence:?

First of all, the question of existence is not a question of the existence of the world, but a question of the existence of the world.

First of all, the outbreak of the First World War in Europe showed a great rift in the life world, which made the Western scholars doubt about their own life status quo and cultural heritage. The German historian Spengler, in his famous book The Decline of the West (1918-1922), wrote: "The decline of the West seems at first sight to be, like the corresponding decline of classical culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space; but now we consider it a philosophical problem, which, understood in its full significance, contains in itself a question of every great question of Being (Being)." (9) In Spengler's view, the profound crisis facing the Western world is not external and accidental, but internal to the spiritual world, and an inevitable consequence of the Western conception of existence and way of being. Only by re-examining and understanding the world with a Nietzschean vision can Western culture get out of its own predicament. After World War I, Europeans, especially Germans, did not supersede from the spiritual and cultural crisis. Jaspers wrote in The Spiritual Condition of the Age (1931), "...men today have lost their home because they have learned that they live in a condition which is nothing more than a historically determined, changing condition. The foundations of existence seem to have been shattered." (10) Husserl revealed the same concern in "The Crisis of European Science and A Priori Phenomenology" (1936). The subsequent Second World War and the rise and fall of Nazism further intensified the crisis of the spirit of Western culture and the philosophers' reflection on the question of existence.?

Secondly, in the development of the 20th century, modern technology was widely applied to life, giving rise to the subjectivization of things and the objectification and alienation of people. Lukács explored the issues of "objectification" and "objectified consciousness" in his History and Class Consciousness published in 1923, while Marx's Philosophical Manuscripts of Economics of 1844 first appeared in 1932, causing a great impact on Western thought, and "alienated labor" became one of the most cutting-edge theoretical research topics. Heidegger pointed out in The Question of Technology (1950) that modern technology was no longer neutral, but controlled and dominated the whole life of modern people as "Gestell". Marcuse, on the other hand, emphasized in Man in One Direction (1964) that the rationality of technology has been transformed into a political rationality, and that "technological fetishism" has spread everywhere, "the liberating power of technology - the instrumentalization of things - has turned into a yoke of emancipation, even as man is instrumentalized." (11) In the face of the increasingly new and renewed technology, modern man is no longer neutral, and it controls and dominates his entire life as a Gestell. (11) In the face of modern technology, which is increasingly being renewed, the question of how human beings can recover their dignity and value, and how to articulate the meaning of their existence, has become the most important concern of philosophers.

Again, Freud's theories on the unconscious, when generally accepted, have also had a significant impact on the contemporary life world, as Binkley said, "His (referring to Freud - quoted) doctrine of the power of the unconscious in all aspects of mental life to sway man has played a major role in changing the old conception of man as a predominantly rational animal." (12) Freud's doctrine of psychoanalysis has not only influenced the development of many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, art, religion, political science, sociology, ethics, economics, history, etc., but also promoted the real-life movements of "sexual politics," "sexual revolution," and "sexual emancipation," so much so that some people are alarmed by the fact that there are only two types of human civilization, the one being pre-Freudian and the other Freudian. The other is Freudian.

To sum up, the major events in the contemporary life world, including the spiritual world, have prompted philosophers to rethink the traditional philosophy, especially the ontology, which is the foundation and core of the traditional philosophy, and the revival of the ontological research, which is symbolized by the "questioning of existence," has become a fashionable trend in the contemporary philosophy.

Second, the various manifestations of the revival of ontological research

The revival of ontological research in contemporary philosophy has shown a diversified development trend. In the development of contemporary philosophy, since different philosophers and philosophical schools are confronted with different clusters of problems, their (their) explorations of ontological problems are also seen to be very different.?

The first tendency manifests itself in the phenomenological ontology represented by Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. Recalling a previously written Study of Logic (1900-1901), Husserl wrote in a note to Section 11 of Volume I of Pure Phenomenology and the Idea of a Phenomenological Philosophy, published in 1913, "At that time I had not yet dared to adopt the expression that for historical reasons was anathema: ontology, a study that I called part of a 'theory of the innate nature of the object itself', A.V. Meinong later condensed it into a single word, 'object theory'. In response, I think it is more correct to reuse the old concept of ontology, in keeping with the changed conditions of the times." (13) Searle accepts the traditional philosophical prescription of the mission of ontology as the study of the problem of being, but then, from the perspective of a priori phenomenology, he understands being as a priori consciousness left behind by phenomenological reduction, and goes on to name the examination of the conscious activity embedded in a priori phenomena and the objects of consciousness that are constructed by means of this activity as "formal ontology" (die formale Ontologie" and "materiale Ontologie". It is in this sense that in his later years Husserl sometimes referred to a priori phenomenology directly as ontology.

As a student of Husserl's, Heidegger, in Being and Time, understood the quest for the meaning of being (dre Sinn von Sein) to be the fundamental task of philosophy, and of ontology in particular. According to him, one of the major mistakes of traditional ontology is that it ignores the difference between "being" (Sein) and "existent" (Seiendes), and that only by starting from the special "existent", i.e., from the "existential" (Existenz) structure of the "here" (Dasein) as "human being", can one truly embark on the path of inquiring into the meaning of existence. Based on such thinking, he called his ontology "Fundamentaleontologie". He further emphasizes: "Whatever becomes the subject of ontology, phenomenology is always the way of access to it, always the way of prescribing it by way of indication. Ontology is only possible as phenomenology." (14) This is a clear indication of the importance Heidegger attaches to the idea of phenomenology as "oriented towards things in themselves" and "manifest", and it is in this sense that he understands philosophy as "universal phenomenological ontology" (universale phaenomenologische Ontologie) (15). For Sartre, a phenomenon is something that reveals itself, whereas existence manifests itself in some way through all things, and therefore there must be a phenomenon of existence, "which will reveal itself to us in some immediate outburst, i.e., boredom, nausea, etc., and which the ontology will describe as unmediated, as a manifestation of itself." (16) The idea of phenomenological ontology runs through many of Sartre's literary works and the descriptions of the psychology of being in those works.?

The second tendency manifests itself in the natural ontology represented by Hartmann. As Stegmüller puts it, "Hartmann's ontology can only be understood in terms of its role as a mediator of the modern critical philosophy of ancient and medieval metaphysics." (17) That is, Hartmann's ontology synthesizes the findings of his predecessors and incorporates the vision of critical philosophy since Kant, which puts him on a higher ground. On the one hand, he goes beyond the purely epistemological vision of neo-Kantianism and neo-positivism, and on the other hand, he goes beyond the subjectivist vision of phenomenology, and he seeks to return the philosophical and existential question to the natural existence on which everyday life is based, thus realizing an important turn in ontological research. In this sense, his ontology is essentially "a natural ontology" (eine Naturontologie), in which he delineates various levels of existence in nature and explores in depth the differences and interrelationships between these levels. As Lukács commented, "What is more interesting and important is his serious attempt to establish an ontology of nature." (18) Hartmann's ontology of nature had been an important influence on Lukács.?

The third tendency manifests itself in the new thinking on the question of ontology by analytic philosophers represented by Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine. Wittgenstein did not use the term "ontology", but many researchers believe that his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) contains an ontological foundation. It is well known that this work consists of seven propositions, and according to Stegmüller, "the two beginning propositions speak of the ontological foundations of his philosophy (worlds, states of affairs, facts); the third proposition is the transition from ontology to epistemology (the relation between the world and thoughts about the world) ......" (19) This ontology is in fact an ontology based on atomic facts. Unlike Wittgenstein, Carnap's 1950 article "Empiricism, Semantics, and Existentialism" directly expresses his views on the question of existence and ontology. He argued that a distinction should be made between two different types of existential problems: first, the existential problem of objects within a linguistic construct, which can be referred to simply as the internal problem, and second, the existential problem of a system of objects as a whole, which can be referred to as the external problem. Carnap states, "We must distinguish clearly between external questions, i.e., philosophical questions about the existence or positivity of a whole system of new objects, and internal questions. Many philosophers regard such questions as an ontological problem that must be asked and answered before new forms of language are introduced. They believe that it is justified only insofar as ontological insight provides an affirmative answer to the question of positivity and is able to justify the introduction of new forms of language. Contrary to this view, our claim is that the introduction of a new form of speech does not require any theoretical defense because it does not imply any positivistic assertion." (20) It is well known that Carnap adopts a rejection of the entire metaphysical tradition, and thus it is self-evident that he does not recognize the significance of ontology. But since he argues for tolerance in the use of linguistic forms, this creates the conditions for an ontology in the sense of linguistic conventions.

For Quine, any statement contains "the ontological commitments". For example, the statement "some dogs are white" can be rewritten as follows: there exists at least some object X, X is a dog, and it is white. Here, "is a dog" and "is white" are predicates which, together with the existential quantifier "some", indicate a definite domain of values within which the constraint variant X can only take on values that are the existential objects agreed upon by the statement. It is in this sense that Quine emphasizes that "Being is value as a variable term." (21) Quine further states, "On the ontological side, we take care to constrain the variable term not in order to know that something exists, but in order to know that some statement or doctrine of ours or of someone else's says that something exists; and this is a problem almost entirely connected with language. The question about what exists is a different one." (22) That is, Quine understands ontology as merely an approximation in the use of language. This insight profoundly reflects the linguistic turn in the evolution of twentieth-century philosophy.?

The fourth tendency manifests itself in the ontology of social existence represented by Lukács and Gould. Lukács, in his Ontology of Social Being (1971), published in his later years, divided existence into three main types: first, inorganic nature, second, organic nature, and third, society. Inorganic and organic nature are collectively called natural existence, and natural existence as the object of study is "Ontology of Natural Existence"; while social existence as the object of study is "Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Seins" (Ontology of Social Existence); the ontology of social existence is based on the ontology of natural existence. For Lukács, Marx's philosophy, which is also the ontology of social existence, is fundamentally characterized by its practical and critical character: "The critique made by Marx is an ontological critique. The point of departure of this critique is that social being, as a positive adaptation of human beings to their surroundings, is primarily and irreducibly based on practice." (23) As Lukács has carried the vision of ontological studies through to the study of Marxian philosophy, he has thus had a significant impact on the development of this field of study. American scholar Gould published in 1978 in the book Marx's Social Ontology, Marx's philosophy is understood as "the social ontology" (the social ontology), and from this understanding, the meaning of the concepts of "society", "labor", "time", "causality", "freedom", "justice" and so on to make a new elaboration.

The fifth tendency is manifested in the new thinking of Chinese philosophers Jin Yuelin and Xiong Shili on the question of ontology. What is explored in the West by inquiring into existence is called "Tao" or "ontology" in China. In this sense, it can be said that "Taoism", "metaphysics" or "ontology" is also ontology. Mr. Jin Yuelin distinguishes between epistemology and meta-ology in On the Way (1940), emphasizing that "the referee of epistemology is reason, while the referee of meta-ology is the whole man." (24) In his view, in the context of the high development of modern science and the serious proliferation of scientism, it is of great significance to study metaphysics, to explore the underpinnings of human existence, and to promote the spirit of humanism. Mr. Xiong Shili, in his The New Theory of Vaisnavism (published in 1932 in the literary version and in 1944 in the verbal version), criticized the viewpoint that only affirms the theory of knowledge and denies the theory of ontology, and proposed, "This kind of assertion can be said to be divorced from the standpoint of philosophy. For philosophy stands well only on the ground that ontology is not to be taken away by science." (25) In his view, "ontology" cannot be sought by reason (i.e., concepts, judgments, and reasoning), but can only be witnessed or recognized (i.e., in the present moment), which reflects the influence of Bergson's intuitionism.

From the above, it can be seen that the revival of ontology since the beginning of the 20th century, although showing a very different situation, but its **** the same point is the concern for the problem of human existence and the call for humanism.

Third, the focus and prospects of the exploration of ontological issues

After the question of existence and ontology became a fashion in contemporary philosophical research, it triggered a series of debates.?

First, there are different views on the Chinese translation of the word Ontologie.?

"Existentialism" is a more popular translation. It has the advantage of directly stating the object of study of Ontologie, but it also causes certain difficulties in use, especially when the concept of "existence" is mixed with the concept of "existentialism". For example, the title of the first chapter of Hegel's Little Logic is Die Lehre vom Sein, which is translated as "Theory of Existence", but the meaning of "Theory of Existence" here is "The Doctrine of Existence", which is not the same as that of Ontologie; and for example, Lukács's late work Zur Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Sein, which was written by Lukács. Gesellschaftlichen Seins, is usually translated as "Ontology of Social Existence", but if the Ontologie in the German title is translated as "Existential", the title of the book will not become "Existential Social Existence"?

Some scholars have argued in favor of translating Ontologie as "is theory". It is generally believed that the advantage of "Ontologie" is to be able to explain the logical origin of ontology, that is to say, the study of the question of "is" is the study of ontology, can not be bypassed in the way, but in-depth into the question of the good way is not equal to the question itself, not to mention that the word "is" is always associated with epithets in the common use of the word, and so used to refer to the question of the existence of epithets and epithets separate from the question of the existence of the question is impossible, to use the "Ontologie". It is also difficult to replace ontology with "is theory" in the academic community. For example, one can translate the am in the sentence I am a student as "is", but one cannot translate the am in Descartes' famous saying I think, therefore I am as "is", otherwise the saying will become "I think therefore I am", so the am here must be translated as "being" or "being", so as to translate the sentence as "I think therefore I am". In other words, when there is no corresponding epithet in the sentence I am, it can only be translated as "I exist" or "I am".

As we all know, scholars in Hong Kong and Taiwan tend to translate Ontologie as "the theory of existence", but this kind of translation can also cause misunderstanding, because in the translation of "the theory of existence", there is both the meaning of "existence" (Sein) and "possession" (Haben), and there is a significant difference between the meanings of Haben and Sein in the German language. For example, a book by the German scholar Fromm is entitled Haben oder Sein, which has been translated as "Possession or Existence". In fact, this book is devoted to exploring the difference between "possession" and "existence". So, in a sense, it can be said that the translation of "existentialism" rather complicates a simple issue.

Some scholars advocate translating Ontologie as "theory of everything", and the difficulties caused by this translation are: on the one hand, as we have pointed out earlier, the meaning of "to have" is more complicated, and in the German es gibt, the meanings of "to have" and "to exist" are similar, but in the sentence pattern using the word haben, the meanings of "to have" and "to exist" appear to be substantially different. On the other hand, in the usual context, "everything" refers to all beings, while Ontologie is the study of "existence", so the translation of "universalism" tends to confuse "existence" with "all beings".

As for the translation of "ontology", it has the advantage of recognizing the fundamental position of the question of existence in philosophical research, but its disadvantage is that it is easy to give people the impression of "reductionism" or "fundamentalism".

Secondly, some scholars take a skeptical attitude towards the whole study of ontology. For example, Adorno sharply criticized phenomenological ontology, especially Heidegger's ontology, from the point of view of the "dialectic of negation", especially the non-identity of concepts and objects, and pointed out that "the critique of ontology does not intend to establish either another ontology, or a Nichtontologischen." (26) For a long time, the domestic theoretical theory of ontology has been in a state of disbelief, and the critics of the ontology have been in the process of criticizing it, but they are not in a position to criticize it. (26) For a long time, domestic theoretical circles have also been using the concept of "worldview" to replace ontology, and even believe that ontology is only a concept used in traditional philosophy and should be denied. But in fact, according to Quine's idea of "ontological commitment", ontology can not be erased, as long as we use language to make statements, there will be ontological commitment.

Again, the relationship between ontology and epistemology is being questioned in new ways. The neo-positivists argued that nothing we talk about can be separated from language, thought, and consciousness, and that therefore all relations are reducible to epistemic relations, and that epistemology is the basis of ontology. This view is in fact a manifestation of the recent notion of focusing on epistemological and methodological research under new historical conditions. Heideggerians, on the other hand, believe that any cognition unfolds on the basis of existence, and that cognition is nothing but the style of this being-in-the-world. In other words, ontology is foundational, and epistemology can only be explored on the basis of ontology. This insight in fact continues the tradition of thinking since Schopenhauer. Both sides of the **** knowledge is just the following point, that is, epistemology and ontology can not actually be separated from the discussion.?

In recent years, the new tendency in the exploration of the problem of existence and ontology is that, on the one hand, the commentaries on Heidegger's foundational ontology have aroused widespread interest in the academic community. Even in his later years, Heidegger himself took a negative attitude toward the foundational ontology proposed in his early years. He wrote in "What is Metaphysics? (1949), he wrote: "The name immediately reveals itself to be as bad as any name in such a case. From the metaphysical point of view the name certainly says something right; but it is precisely for this reason that it is misleading; for the important thing is to win the passage from metaphysics to the thought of the truth of being." (27) So in his later years Heidegger was keen to talk about the end of philosophy and the beginning of true thought. Why did this important shift in Heidegger's thought occur? How to evaluate the relationship between his foundational ontology and traditional ontology? All these questions remain to be pondered. On the other hand, inspired by Lukács, the re-examination of Marx's philosophy from an ontological point of view has attracted the attention of more and more scholars. It is widely recognized that Marx's historical materialism is not a sociological theory, but an ontology: the epoch-making revolution accomplished by Marx in the field of philosophy is not a revolution in the purely epistemological sense, but above all a revolution in the ontological sense.