The Grammar of Being
An afterthought to last week's essay: On the ways in which being can be said to be, with recourse to Heidegger and Eckhart.
In my last essay, “Theōria and the Disappearance of Form,” I argued that a faculty of perception grows only when the reality of its proper object is affirmed.
I outlined six such faculties—aisthēsis (sensation), phantasía (imagination), dianoia (discursive reason), phronēsis (practical reason), mnēmē (memory), and theōria (contemplation)—each attuned to a distinct mode of being.
Among these, I singled out theōria, the activity of the contemplative intellect, which orients itself toward form or essence as its proper object. When a culture denies the reality of form, I argued, theōria loses its footing. Deprived of its referent, the faculty begins to atrophy, caught in a self-fulfilling loop in which the absence of the object enables the erosion of the capacity used to perceive it.
What I left implicit in that piece is how the verb “to be,” in its varied grammatical forms, reflects the layered structures of being that these faculties engage. The grammar of being, we might say, implies a specific ordering to which it refers. And by retrieving that grammar, we may better understand how the denial of form diminishes not only theōria, but the full range of human knowing.
1. Grammar and Being
The Greek expresses “to be” in three ways—einai, to on, and ousia—each one marking, in a philosophical context, a different aspect of reality.
We might gloss the three forms as follows:
Einai (infinitive): the bare act to-be, prior to any specific subject—the open field in which anything may appear at all.
To on (present participle): a being already there and nameable—the level where beings become perceptible.
Ousia (substantive noun): essence or form—the stable “what-it-isness” of a being that persists through change.
In this structure, theōria is that activity which spans the highest register of being. While it seeks form (ousia), it does so within the wider field of einai (being-as-such), the act that allows forms to appear and be known at all.
Theōria, in turning toward einai, gathers the work of reason and action into a contemplative apprehension of ousia as it shines within the act of being.
Readers of Heidegger will recognize a contemporary version of these first two layers, in that his thought preserves the infinitive sense in Sein (Being itself) and reserves das Seiende for particular beings. His ontological difference—between Sein and das Seiende—replays the older distinction between einai and to on, and reminds us that this difference is not an artifact of human grammar alone, but shapes how beings show up in our existential perceiving, and whether we notice them as such.
However, where Heidegger emphasizes the forgetting of Sein, classical thought did more than recognize these distinctions; it wove them into the structure of cognition and out onto the practices of transformation that render the distinctions available.
The faculties were aligned with these layers of being, as grammatically expressed.
Sensation and imagination engage beings at the level of to on. Discursive and practical reason reach for ousia, the enduring what-it-isness. And theōria, at its height, opens out toward einai—not just in the abstract, but as a radiant actuality in which both essence and existence become thinkable in living experience. Form appears within the horizon opened by einai. The contemplative intellect thus moves beyond static linguistic definitions and toward a living apprehension of being as such.
This being as such—the radiant field opened by the einai—is both the ground from which beings arise and, in many classical traditions, what exceeds the totality of beings altogether. In Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, and in the forms of negative theology they inspired, this horizon of being was understood as simultaneously foundational and surpassing, as the source of all that is, and yet is itself beyond ousia, beyond form, beyond finite determination—empty and luminous all at once.
Within this lineage, theōria does not stop at grasping essences, but opens out toward the unconditioned source—the Good, the One, God, or the supereminent act that makes all intelligibility possible while remaining itself ungraspable.
2. Theōria and Releasement
We could note here as well that a similar impulse runs through Heidegger’s later thought, where Sein—Being itself—is no longer simply the horizon of beings but also withdraws, conceals itself, resists capture. His language resembles in this way the apophatic tradition, particularly the mysticism of Meister Eckhart.
As one commentator has noted, both thinkers shift attention away from conceptual mastery toward receptive openness. In Eckhart, through Gelassenheit, the releasement of the soul into the ungraspable God beyond being; and in Heidegger through the same term, refigured as a meditative stance that resists the technological Gestell—the logic of enframing that reduces being to function, control, and calculability.
This latter mode of thought reflects what I described in the earlier essay as a deflationary ontology—a flattening of reality into systems, probabilities, and mechanisms, where form vanishes and theōria loses its relation to both ousia and einai. In contrast, Gelassenheit offers a path of contemplative askēsis, one that lets being be, and so makes room again for the appearance of what is as it is.
But that classical integration of faculty and form, perception and ontology, no longer holds in the way that it did for the medieval Eckhart—or for the twentieth century Heidegger, for that matter—especially when considered within the scope of einai, either as being-as-such or, more properly speaking, as that which is beyond beings.
Modern culture disrupts this alignment at multiple points.
First, it cuts out the middle rung by denying ousia, and in so doing dims the sensibility for einai, since once essence is discarded and being forgotten, reason flattens into something like calculating data management, and theōria is left to hang above the flux of particulars with no path to develop and no access to the deeper act that grants appearance at all.
In this sense, what looks like conceptual refinement turns out to be a grammatical, and so ontological, collapse, one that erodes the depth of existential experience.
And once grammar gives way, the same self-fulfilling loop reasserts itself.
Faculties lose contact with their proper objects, and those objects, no longer perceived, begin to seem unreal. What disappears is a whole register of intelligibility.
Because this loss is grammatical before it is theoretical, recovery cannot begin with metaphysical argument alone. It must begin with renewed attention to how we speak and listen. When I describe a tree, do I register only measurable traits—mere participles—or do I also sense its what-it-isness? When I ponder existence, do I sense the act that lets any description happen at all? These are perceptual questions.
And perception, as I have said before, is a skill that must be trained.
Askēsis (or spiritual exercise)—often imagined today as a regime of self-optimization or aesthetic self-fashioning—reappears here in a different light, as a kind of ontological grammar lesson. In its original philosophical setting, askēsis was not this inward-facing project of self-construction alone, but a mode of attunement to the layered orders of being, an attunement that in turn shaped the soul’s comportment toward the world by cultivating the faculties in which being becomes intelligible.
Each faculty, as I argued earlier, develops only in relation to its proper object—and through a discipline of practice. Askēsis mediates the link between soul and world.
In this light, the cultivation of theōria is not an isolated, inward activity but the summit of a broader pedagogical arc. Askēsis, we could say, is the grammar of that pedagogical formation, shaping the soul to receive what is, and to receive it rightly.
This layered grammar of being both orders us toward the structure of what is and conditions how a thing can appear to the perceiving soul. Askēsis, then, is not just training to perceive content—it is attunement to form as it gives itself to perception.
3. Appearance Is a Doorway
I also noted in the earlier piece that appearance is not illusion, at least not all of the time, and we need to hold this important distinction in mind.
Appearance is, rather, the joint between einai, ousia, and to on: the act of being, the essence or form of what is, and the concrete presence that shows itself. Each term depends on the others to make appearance intelligible. When one is lost, the appearance fractures, seeming to float free or to vanish altogether.
Thus when the grammar of being is lost, not only do the objects of knowledge vanish from view, but the knower is him or herself redefined and reduced. The intellect becomes managerial rather than contemplative, functional rather than receptive.
We ourselves become “enframed,” so to speak.
In other words, when a culture cuts the grammatical floor from under its faculties, we should not be surprised when those faculties fail to mature. What we take to be a theoretical disagreement may, then, be more properly understood as a loss of orientation and a failure to intuit the inflection of being in language and world alike.
Recovering the grammar of being and its referents offers us a practical step toward restoring the full range of human knowing, and thus toward rebuilding the conditions under which theōria can once again perceive what is.
This, then, is our exegesis of the ways in which being can be said.