It has been over three years since I preliminarily sketched what I want to positively say about being and beings (see also Ethical Being; Back to Ethical Being). Since then, further work on Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel has provided many additional resources for addressing various aspects of this question.
Kant stresses the ethical notion of respect for others, meaning other humans. I advocate respect for all beings, including animals and even inanimate objects that cannot share with us in a full mutuality of recognition, as a fundamental guiding attitude. For example, we respect objects by practicing benevolent stewardship and avoiding any form of wanton destructiveness. As I understand this generalized respect, it rules out the ascetic, world-denying attitude that Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness, which abases itself and everything else before an infinite God. It also rules out the negative attitude toward anything that is not Dasein that is promoted by the Heideggerian ontic/ontological distinction.
As to what being is in the most general sense, I think Aristotle has the right idea in starting out from the ways in which the transitive verb “is” is said (see Things Said; “Said of”). This becomes an investigation into the proprieties of saying, asserting, or claiming — or, as Aristotle might put it, what it is that makes anything said to be well said. This kind of normative saying broaches the distinction between essence and appearance.
It ultimately turns out that the distinction between essence and appearance can only be sustained within some given context. The very “same” thing that is nonessential in one context can be essential in another, and vice versa.
Being primarily expresses the “what” of things. I broadly agree with Dietrich of Freiberg that essence says all there is to say about being and beings. A human being is the same as a human.
The essence of things is not fixed in advance; rather, it is emergent. (See also What and Why; What We Mean by Meaning.)
What things are can only be a matter of what Kant and Hegel call reflective judgment. There is no external authority to which we could finally appeal. (See Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; The Scope of Reflective Judgment in Hegel.)
As Kant might remind us, existence is not a predicate. Etymologically from the Greek, to exist is to be able to be picked out or distinguished from other things in some context. A mathematical proof of something’s “existence” means that if certain things are true in a given context, it is then possible to pick out a distinct something within the context, and we then say that that something “exists”.
Finally, I agree that poetry, music, and other arts can tell us something qualitative about being that we do not get any other way than through the appreciation of beauty. (See also Adverbial Otherness.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 