On Being

Pascal: One cannot begin to define being without falling victim to this absurdity: one cannot define a word without beginning with the term is, be it expressly stated or merely understood. To define being, therefore, you have to say is, thus using the term to be defined in the definition.

Gadamer: It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudgments that constitute our being.

Levinas: The great tradition of Western philosophy: to comprehend the particular being is to already place oneself beyond the particular. To comprehend is to be related to the particular that only exists through knowledge, which is always knowledge of the universal.

Eco: The moment we talk about being, we are still not talking about it in its all-embracing form, because the problem of being (the most immediate and natural of experiences) is the least natural of all problems, the one that common sense never poses: we begin to grope our way through being by carving entities out of it and gradually constructing ourselves a World.