Where does being collide?

In philosophy, Being is what it is for anything to be at all, the most general and most elusive subject of ontology, the study of what there is and what it is to exist. Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time reopened what he called the question of the meaning of Being, and named Dasein, the human being for whom its own existing is at issue, as the place where that question can be asked. Here Being is not any particular thing but the fact and manner of existing shared by all that is, and it differs from a living organism counted in biology, a rights-bearing person recognised in law, or a calm mode of attention studied in psychology.[1]

Unit

Being as such, the existing shared by all that is, not any single entity

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not measured but interpreted, through phenomenological and ontological analysis of how things show up as existing

In law, a being that the legal system recognises is a person: an entity that can hold rights and bear duties and can sue or be sued in its own name. Naffine's 2003 Who are law's persons? traced how this standing has been extended and withheld, covering human beings but also corporations, and at times denied to some humans, so that legal personhood is a conferred status rather than a simple fact of being alive. Here a being is whoever or whatever the law counts as a bearer of rights, not the philosophical fact of existing, a biological organism as such, or a mode of attention in psychology.[2]

Unit

One legal person, an entity that can hold rights and bear duties

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Established by legal recognition: whether a body can hold rights, owe duties, and act as a party in its own name

In psychology, being names a mode of mind, contrasted with a doing mode driven by goals and problem solving. In the mindfulness tradition drawn on by cognitive therapy, Williams's 2008 Mindfulness, depression and modes of mind described the being mode as an accepting, present-centred way of relating to experience, letting thoughts and feelings be observed rather than fixed, which is cultivated to loosen the ruminative habits that feed depression. Here being is a trainable stance of attention within a person, not the metaphysics of existence, a whole living organism, or a rights-bearing legal person.[3]

Unit

A mode of mind within a person, a present-centred stance of attention

Recovery means

Practised in mindfulness training as a shift out of the goal-driven doing mode back toward accepting awareness

Measured by

Inferred from self-report scales of mindfulness and rumination and from experience in structured mindfulness programmes