illiteratus.com

to ti ēn einai (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι)

Every person carries within them a quiet shape, a way their life has carved them into who they are. It is not just the fact that they exist, but the particular texture of their existence: the small decisions, the losses survived, the habits formed, the joys that stayed, the wounds that never fully closed. Aristotle’s old phrase, to ti ēn einai, simply tries to name this: what it was for this person to be themselves. It is the inner contour of a life, the way the past leans into the present, the way someone’s ‘having-been’ silently informs their being. It is not an abstract essence but a lived one: the quiet truth that each individual becomes who they are through the unfolding of their own story.

What is Dative?

When the ancient Greeks wanted to talk about something that belonged to a person, or something that mattered for a person, they used a special form of a word that meant “for him,” “for her,” or “for this thing.” Instead of adding a separate word like “for” or “to,” they changed the ending of the word itself. So if Aristotle said “for Socrates to be Socrates,” he would mark “Socrates” with this special form. Agamben’s point is that when Aristotle talks about someone’s essence (their “what it was to be who they are”) he uses this same structure. It’s as if Aristotle is saying: “For this person, what did it mean to become themselves?” The grammatical marker simply shows whose life, whose being, whose essence we are talking about.

The Essence: “what it was to be”

Aristotle has a strange way of talking about what something truly is. Instead of saying “the essence of a thing,” he uses a phrase that literally reads: “what it was to be.” At first glance it sounds backward, as if he were talking about the past rather than the present. But what he really means is something much more intuitive: every person or thing has a quiet history built into it, a kind of inner story that explains how it became itself.

Curt Arpe noticed that Aristotle’s expression only makes sense if you understand it as answering a very personal question: What did it take for this particular being to be what it is? For Socrates to be Socrates. For Emma to be Emma. Not a generic definition, but the unique way a life has unfolded. In this sense, a person’s essence is not an abstract label but the shape of their becoming, the way their past leans into their present and quietly defines them.

The short note that follows reinforces this reading. Aristotle, in other works, uses the same kind of expression to describe what something truly is “for” the thing itself. He isn’t concerned with universal categories but with the inner meaning of each individual being. And because his phrase blends the sense of “is” and “was,” it suggests a simple truth: that who we are now is inseparable from what has already formed us. Our essence is not a static definition but the story of what it took for us to become ourselves.

The ousia of a particular being

by transforming the question

“what is it for this being to be?”

into the answer

“what it was for this being to be.”

to ti ēn einai

“what it was for X (pure dative)

to be Y (predicative dative).”

or translated as

“being what it was.”