Quora answer: What is the state of being?

There is something interesting here. Being and Having are the most fragmented roots in the English language. They share that characteristic. This implies that Having and Being are both artificial constructs in Indo-European Languages. If you look at ontologies you will note that Is..a… and Has..a… relations are quite different. Isa means that it is part of the object, but hasa means it comes under the object, i.e. that the object references the possessed object, but it is not part of itself. Having gives you distance from something that Is..a.. relations do not give you. But that distance is not very great, because we think of our possessions as being close to us.

We talk about beng in a state, or having a state, but we do not talk about Being a state.

Thus we say ‘there is a state of being’, but ‘we have that state’. This suggests that ‘states have being’, but when ‘we have a state it’ is different from ourselves. On the other hand we say we ARE excited. ‘We have excitement’ sounds strange. This suggests that the difference between Having and Being runs deep. But I can’t explain why there is the strange kinship yet difference between Having and Being. I have not studied it. Many languages have words for “Have”, it is not like Being an anomaly.

Perhaps it is because we ave phrases like “has been” that talk about the past that are different than “was”. But you would think that ‘will” of “will be” would have a broken root too. I find it mysterious that “have” is a broken root along with Being.