Pierre Hadot on ontological difference in the Anonymous Commentary



Finally, we cannot forget that the movement which starts from the first entity and climbs to pure being is solely the application of what we have called the method of ‘paronymy.’ In climbing from the entity to being, we do not just pass from a less universal concept to a more universal concept, nor do we move from a reality composed of a subject and a predicate to the absolute predicate, in other words the idea in which the subject participates; we also rise from the substantive to the verb of the same root, in other words from a subsisting form to the activity that engenders it. Porphyry’s commentary On the Parmenides is very explicit on this point: being which is the one is a pure activity. (oude energeia, energei de mallon kai auto to energein katharton). This means that the ‘predicate’ (kategorema) in its absolute use, represents both the maximum of indetermination and abstraction and the maximum of activity. In a Platonic transposition of Stoicism, the pure ‘is,’ like the pure ‘lives,’ is simultaneously that which is most abstract, most actual and the most efficient. Thus pure being can be described at the same time as pure activity and idea. Existence, ‘incorporeal’ for the Stoics because it is just activity, becomes the principle of substance.


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It is clearly this ‘pre-notion’ (proennoia) which Porphyry’s Commentary on the Parmenides speaks of, that we will have to think in order to explain praenoscentia. Porphyry describes it as “an intellection that does not conceive anything,” does not express anything, that is not even conscious of representing god, but which is content in being unsayably unsayable. It is interesting to note that this praenoscentia or this proennoia relates to pure being which itself is ‘pre-existence.’ It is precisely because being does not have any intelligible content that it can only be the object of a ‘prenotion.’


Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus, pp 415-6.


The distinction between being and entity, proposed by Porphyry, represents a turning point in the history of ontology. For the first time in the history of thought, the verb ‘being’ is conceived as designating an activity, and this activity is identified with the first case. Being represents the maximum of activity, the maximum of simplicity and the maximum of indetermination. Here, we are in the presence of the Platonic transposition of Stoicism, but also of Aristotelianism.

Ibid., 489


This distinction between infinitive being and participle being, above all this identification of infinitive being and the absolute, opened the path to the modern problem of ontology. Heidegger himself “refuses to identify god and presence (in his language, being),” ( de Waehlens), while he refused to identify human conscience with this presence. But it is true that for him being or presence is transcendence in relation to entities. From this point of view, the Porphyrian conception of an act of being, transcendeing all determination, conceivable only by a negative method, had a considerable historical importance. Our entire study has shown that this doctrine is not the product of a christian transformation of Platonism.

Ibid., 493.