Can there ‘be’ being without qualification?

Abstract

This article deals with a fundamental question of ontology that goes

as far back as the Greek philosophical heritage. Given the breadth

and depth of the question, it has been dealt with over the centuries

through various angles depending to a large extent on the

predominant each time philosophico-theological, social and, in

progressing influence, epistemological context. My own approach to

the question, and the way to vindicate its negation, is primarily

motivated by the German idealist tradition of the 18th and 19th

centuries and the subsequent evolution to what has been called the

continental thought, in particular the Husserlian phenomenology and

its main offshoot the Heideggerian brand of existentialism. In these

terms my article may be described, by and large, as arguing for the

position that the question of absolute being as `being' beyond all

ontological entities is reducible to concerns over the

irreducibility of absolute subjectivity. On this prompt I argue,

both on purely philosophical and epistemological grounds, that there

is no solid foundation to argue for a self-standing conception of

absolute being except as hetero-determined within-the-world. My

epistemological argumentation has almost exclusively to do with

quantum mechanical theory as the field of preference of modern

epistemology touching substantially on ontological issues.