W. B. Yeats, at the end of his poem Among School Children asks

O chestnut tree, great rooted bloosomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The answer is that we cannot. There is no clear cut division between the dancer and the dance; the dancer is the dance inasmuch as the dance is the dancer. Being is always a doing.

In the same way, the ontological question -- "Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? -- cannot be simply answered by picking one individual feature. The three is what makes the three to be a three.

And as such we are thrown towards the problem of language. We struggle with language. We are in a struggle with language, as Wittgenstein says. When we talk, the words we use kill what we want to express. Words fall short with respect to what is looked for.

To speak about living beings is also to speak about language. The continuity of mind and life tells us that. Or yet to paraphrase Wittgenstein again, each of the sentences we say is trying to say the whole thing, the same thing over and over again.

Views of one object from different angles.