Thefirst strategy is via arguing for a kind of idealistic metaphysic on which
everything is a person, or is at least intimately related to a person in some way.
McTaggart’s (1927a, 1927b) staggeringly immense work,The Nature of Existence,
defends the view that, as a matter of necessity, reality consists of persons, parts of
persons, states of persons (such as perception and love), and nothing else. Now
McTaggart does not believe in degrees of being, and he is not inclined to give much
weight to commonsensical judgments about what there is.^20 On McTaggart’s view, it
is justflat out false that there are holes, mere aggregates, and so forth, so it is justflat
out false that there are the sort of counter-examples that I worried about earlier to the
claim that being is fundamental. We have a radically false view of what beings there
are. Strictly, on McTaggart’s view, being a person does not correspond to a funda-
mental mode of being, but being either a person, part of a person, or state of a person
does, since it corresponds to being, the only mode that there is.
A second McTaggartian route towards the conclusion that persons are fully real is
via the claim thatpersonalityis a fundamental property. This route is an instance of a
more general strategy that will be pursued in detail in section 6.5. The strategy relies
on the claim, made in section 5.7, that instantiating a fundamental property suffices
for being fully real. For now, we will focus specifically on the claim that personality is
fundamental. Personality is the property of being a self. According to McTaggart
(1927b: 62; 1996: 88), the quality of personality is both simple and indefinable, and is
known to us via self-perception of something that has this quality. I submit that if a
property is both simple and indefinable, then it is a fundamental property in the
sense at issue. Unfortunately, McTaggart does not have an argument that personality
is simple and indefinable, but merely rests on the claim that it appears to be so. The
general idealism of McTaggart and McTaggart’s claim that personality is simple and
indefinable do not strike me as promising. Let’s move on.
The second strategy relies not on argument but rather on phenomenological
description. In Heidegger’sBeing and Time, we are confronted with, among other
things, the task of accounting for the various fundamental modes of being and
determining how those modes relate to one another and to being itself. The task of
phenomenology is to describe what is given in experience as it is given, and
Heidegger thinks that among what is given are the modes of being of various entities
encountered in experience. Recall that among the modes encountered arereadiness-
to-hand, the mode of being of tools;presentness-at-hand, roughly, the mode of being
of lumps of matter;life, the mode of being of living things that are not persons; and
Existenz, which is the mode of being of Daseins, which is the kind of thing we are.^21
Although Heidegger would be unhappy with the claim that“Dasein”just means
“person,”I believe we can set aside this worry. Here’s why: something is a Daseinonly
(^20) See McTaggart (1927a: 4) on degrees of being, and McDaniel (2009d) for brief discussion, as well as
an overview of McTaggart 21 ’s methodology for metaphysics.
On these modes of being in Heidegger (1962), see pp. 67, 97–8, 121, and 285 respectively.