I find myself hoping that one small step for non-humankind as well as humankind might be made by daring to think that Heidegger's categories of the world-constructing (weltbildend), the poor in world (weltarm) and the worldless (weltlos) can be transcended to what the Scholastics referred to as Transcendentals, namely Being, Unity, the True, the Good (and possibly the Beautiful). If these are most common notions that hold of being they would seem to hold of being when this is understood as existence in abstraction from properties and predicates. But the traditional doctrine maintains that the transcendentals are coextensive with one another. As regards being as sheer existence, its overlap with the Good is displayed in what I make bold to describe as the fact that a thing's existence is a good to that thing. But this ‘fact’ has something like the status of what Kant has in mind when he refers to the moral law as a Faktum of reason. His moral law, also what Plato refers to sometimes as the Good and sometimes as the Idea of the Good, and Levinas’ notion of the good as ethicality are, I argue, implicated and somehow complicit with existence or being in what Levinas refers to as an intrigue. This intrication won't answer the limitrophic questions we have to face from time to time, questions of where and when to draw the line. But it can teach us that otherness is the only ‘category’ that operates in the thought that the pure existence of something other than ourselves imposes on us a responsibility that is logically prior to predication.

Also logically prior to predication is address. Address and existence are partners in something like what Scotus dubs distinctio formalis. The distinctness of the terms in a formal distinction goes along with their real as distinct from solely logical inseparability. Paradigm cases of this for Scotus and his contemporaries are the relations between God and His attributes, the relation of the Persons of the Trinity and the relation between the will and the intellect in the human person.