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inspired by the hyperlink…..

What does it mean for something to be?

Just a simple little question?

What parameters really make something into an existing thing?

What do we say about what lets anything be a thing at all?

The answer is that those aren’t separate questions.

To be means to be a this-thing or that-thing. Except we moderns want to object. We assume that first the world exists and then we divide it into categories.

If you’re going to exist, you have to exist as something — a table, a human, a piping hot bowl of gravy.

Thinking that the meaning of things (the table as a table) as separable from their existence (the table as a thing) is a path that leads to the triviliazation of meaning.

Say you want to know what makes a person [for instance] real, you have to see how this being is human…which means understanding them within a category (animals) with differentiated sub- categories (the animals that are rational).

Thus, taxonomy and existence are fused: To be is to be in a taxonomy of meaning.

We think there’s a real world that our taxonomies lie on top of but we must understand the modern distinction we draw; that a world apart from the categories of understanding would be by definition unknowable.

so………

Knowledge is the way the world shows itself to us in all its beauty and order.