Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

96 BEING QUA BEING AND PRIMARY BEING(things, or plants, that are not roses). But then the question, ‘What is abeing?’, will not be possible—at least not if this question depends on theanalogy with more familiar questions such as, ‘What is a rose?’So we cannot, apparently, conceive of being, as a whole and qua being,by setting it against something outside it. Still, perhaps we can conceive ofbeing, as a whole and qua being, by focusing instead on what is inside it,and on the fact that everything is inside it. For evidently being includeseverything that there is. So how can we conceive of being, as a whole andqua being, as the sum of everything that there is? It is natural to think thatwe can do so in the following way: just as it is familiar that there aredistinctions between different things in so far as they are all F (e.g. in so faras they are plants, we may think of the distinction between roses and otherkinds of plants), so we may suppose that there is a distinction betweendifferent things simply in so far as they are all beings, things that are. Andjust as we may conceive of all plants as the sum of all the kinds of plants thatthere are, so we may conceive of all beings as the sum of all the kinds ofbeings that there are. In this way, being, as a whole and qua being, will,precisely, be the sum of everything that there is. We may represent this sumas follows (supposing, for the sake of the example, that the distinctionbetween different things simply in so far as they are all beings is thedistinction between changing and changeless beings): (This representationwill lead to incoherence. We have set it out here precisely in order to showhow it leads to incoherence.)But there is a problem with this attempt to conceive of being, as a wholeand qua being. <strong>Aristotle</strong> states this problem in book III, the book ofaporiai; see the seventh aporia, especially 998 b 22–27. The following is aninterpretation of the way in which he states the problem there. Consider,for example, the distinction of different plants into deciduous and