The problems of being in the history of philosophy are the most discussed issues. The ambivalence of this phenomenon can be seen if we compare two points of view. First of all, the view of the ancient philosopher Parmenides, who was the first among Greek thinkers to raise the question of being as a kind of wholeness and came to the conclusion that any of our thoughts is about being, and therefore non-being does not exist. Another opinion is also known, the so-called “view of Hamlet”, which admits both being and non-being (to be or not to be). Two aspects can be seen in this eternal discussion: 1) the dialectic of being and nothing, and 2) the ontological and existential dimensions of the concept of "being."
In addition, the problem of being in philosophy opens up a whole series of other debatable questions, such as: is being a reasonable prerequisite for the unity of the world, or is it some kind of condition from which the “Eternal Present” peeks? Does being have a beginning and an end? Does it exist outside our consciousness or is it a product of it? Is being just the world and things around us or something deeper? Is being something that we know directly, or is it the one unchanging foundation of all that exists, a kind of system that regulates the world? On the one hand, the questions of being sometimes seem too simple to talk about, because everyone understands what it means to be, but a clear definition of this term always eludes the researcher.
The problem of being in philosophy has always been posed in different ways, depending on a particular era and society. Even during the predominance of the mythological consciousness of primitive culture, when, according to Levy-Bruhl, a person sensed patricization (participation) in the natural world and did not analyze phenomena, but told stories (myths) about them, a certain subordination of being was established in these myths: who created the world who maintain order in it, what is the place of man in it. At the end of the mythological era, people developed two approaches to this problem - relatively speaking, eastern and western. The eastern approach consisted in transforming myth into philosophy, and the western approach in displacing it from philosophy through analysis.
The problem of being in the philosophy of the Ancient East was solved in two ways. It was presented as an absolute manifesting in the world, and the world was seen as its ghostly likeness. Another version of the vision of being described it as a “filled with emptiness”, which at every moment manifests itself in the world. In the West, Plato turned out to be closest to the first version of understanding this issue in Eastern philosophy. The East has enriched the history of philosophy by raising the problem of true and untrue, illusory and real being. Western philosophy was more concerned with the characteristics of being - it is the unity of diversity or the diversity of unity, the universe or multiversum. Greek philosophers (Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander) considered being as Cosmos and looked for its primary basis (water, air, apeiron …). They were also interested in whether being is invariably and identical with itself (almost the whole Greek tradition was inclined to this) or is it “fluid” and “becoming” (Heraclitus, Empedocles, Neoplatonists).
We can say that the problem of being in the philosophy of antiquity was also posed regarding the connection between being and harmony. Among the philosophers of Ancient Greece, all harmony is impersonal (Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles) and manifested in symmetry and repeatability. A person must submit to this harmony, and then his life will make sense. Greek philosophers were the first to abandon the tradition of philosophical animism that prevailed before them, understanding the world as populated by spirits, where each phenomenon was simultaneously a creature, a kind of “You”. They turned the world into “It, ” and replaced the living myth with analytic thinking. In the concept of "being" they introduced the concept of "substance".
From this moment, the problems of being in the philosophy of Ancient Greece and later Rome began to be solved taking into account what, in fact, being consists of. Some thinkers believed that the substance is material (Democritus), while others - that it is intangible (Plato). Anaxagoras put forward the idea that it consists of homeomerisms (infinitely divisible particles), and Democritus - that of indivisible particles, atoms. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle made an attempt to combine the concept of faceless harmony with a certain hierarchical structure (Plato imagined it in the form of a pyramid, Aristotle in the form of steps, Pythagoras in the form of mathematical mysticism - geotetrism). However, ancient philosophy imagined being cyclical, repetitive. We can say that she raised the question of the relationship of being and nothing, but has not yet thought about the relationship of being and time. This became the lot of the following eras.
