Being, the idea of being, belongs to aesthetics. Or perhaps it is more accurate to sat that it belongs to metaphysics and metaphysics belongs to aesthetics. Hasn't this been obvious all the way along, aren't metaphysical dispute aesthetic disputes, which is why they are both passionate and trivial? Being is a concept that serves to order other concepts while earnestly insisting that it orders what these concepts refer to. It is exhausted in the phenomenal, in that larger sense in which phenomenal includes its polar opposite the noumenal. This is to understand being as a guiding thread, something that becomes evident as the whole pattern emerges into the light, which is to say, as its efficacy drains away. It is a nostalgia for the non-symbolic in the form of a kind of symbol, a meta-symbol. Once upon a time the beauty of it opened onto the non-symbolic, so in that sense it was the symbol of all symbols. And if it succeeded in doing so it was not through its own virtue but through an ineffable determination of the non-symbolic.