Of course, there is nothing ultimately incoherent about this consequence, provided we keep in mind that the relations in such cases are mere beings of reason.
Thus, instead of thinking of relations as the items responsible for relating two or more substances, they now begin to think of them as items existing only in the mind that is, as mere beings of reason or concepts.
Like many other medievals, therefore, Aquinas concludes that in this case the relations (or relative dispositions) are not real, but mere beings of reason.[39] The claim that self-identity is a relation of reason might seem worrisome.
No longer content with mere being, we now had to be seen.
Where there should be something — a pilot, or a marriage — there is nothing, until Colin, standing in the visitors' garden of a grand house, is left almost literally beside himself, like an insect having molted its shell, struggling "to hold on, if possible, to whatever might be left of his own mere being".
Time, for Mīr Dāmād, was neither a mere being of reason nor an accident of existing things.
The lack of such interstitial moments, of touches that reveal mere being and let time flow without advancing the story, isn't just a failure of drama but of imagination or reimagination.
Gosling and Williams seem instructed to hit all the notes with a sledgehammer blatancy, and there isn't a moment when their mere being pierces the carapace of character.
Movie stars — not stage actors — can be discovered at the lunch counter of Schwab's or picked out from among one's friends; the movie camera captures not their talent, their ability, or their potential, but their very being (and their mere being), which is exactly the opposite of the sublime artifice that inspires theatrical performance.
He approached Bob Dylan's life and work with an extraordinary freedom in "I'm Not There"; here he illustrates a novel and doesn't evoke the moments between the scenes, the mere being of characters in repose and, above all, in thought.
Moreau's essential subject is love and art, private life and professional achievement, and her own taut but calm performance, seemingly undramatic and offhanded yet a lightning rod for thought and emotion, catches something here that was rare, if not invisible, in movies by other directors: the essential cinematic power of mere being, the emergence of character in presence, of energy in repose.
