We explain what the essence is in philosophy and the different ways to understand it. Also, its relationship with existence.
What is the essence?
the word essence it's a polysemous term that designates that by which a thing is. To talk about the essence of something is to talk about what it is in a fixed, invariable and fundamental way. This term is also used to name the property or set of properties that make up a thing.
Since ancient times, different philosophers have tried to define what is meant when we talk about the essence of something. Already Aristotle, in Metaphysicsaffirmed the polysemy of the term (that is, its different meanings), especially in relation to the word “being.”
Essence comes from latin essentiahomologous to Greek ousia. From the multivocality of all these terms arises the confusion and difficulty that revolve around the semantic family of the word. essence.
Beyond the difficulty in defining what the essence is (a difficulty that, for its part, is a direct expression of the problem itself), it is generally accepted that when we talk about the essence of something we are talking about what is in a deep and original sense. The essence of a thing indicates what that thing is beneath everything that can be said about it.
See also: Philosophical thought
Etymology and origin of the concept
the word essence comes from latin essentia. This is the abstract of essenspresent participle of the verb esse, “be”. The history of the concept in question emerges from the parallelism between the terms in Latin and Greek, starting with Aristotle and ending in Modernity.
Essence according to Aristotle
Of the homologation between essentia and ousia the idea emerges that essence is the translation of ousia. This is not entirely correct. As a technical term, ousia was first used by Aristotle to designate substance (or substance) of something. Strictly speaking, the Latin word essentia translates to Greek term upokeimenon (ύποκείενον), which is what “is below” or what “supports” accidents (which are those accessory characteristics of things).
This confusion occurs because for Aristotle the substance (ουσία) is the upokeimenonwhich was translated as “underlying”, first, and “subject” after. Strictly, for Aristotle the essence is “what” the substance is (to you in einai). The Latin word for this is quiddites (in Spanish “quidity”), popularized during the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas, translator of Aristotle, in Of being and essence.
However, it is worth clarifying that, beyond its technical difficulties and precisions, saying that the essence of something is its ousia can be accepted. The ousia as the first substance it is that which remains identical to itself through all changes. It is enough to put the emphasis on how or what something is to decide what sense of essence we are referring to.
Essence in the early Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, different ideas coexisted regarding what essence was.
When using the term essentiaFor example, Augustine of Hippo referred to what is said to be the being. In this way he unified essence with being and was able to identify God as the first essence and supreme being: being that is.
Also Boethius, when trying to recover Aristotle, considered essence as form and nature. That it was form implied that it could be defined. For its part, whether it was nature (or nature) indicated that the essence was the causal principle of all creation.
Essence in scholasticism
It was the scholastics who dealt with the problem of essence in greater detail. They considered that one could speak of essence in three senses: regarding the thing, the concept of the thing and the self of the thing according to its form. This reintroduced to the West the problem of essence and existence.
For Avicenna, for example, existence refers to an essence possible over one necessary. Anselm of Canterbury stated that, for example, in the case of God, essence included existence. Averroes, for his part, saw no distinction between essence and existence.
Thomas Aquinas was the first to use the term quiddites as a synonym for essence. The quiddites It is the essence derived from the definition of things. Answers the question “what is it?” Some scholastics after Thomas Aquinas, however, believed that there were some errors in using quiddites as a synonym for essence in the sense of ousiaand they found in the word haecceity (“what makes the individual be himself”) a more precise meaning.
Essence in the Modern Age and contemporary thought
With the passage to the Modern Age the problem of essence acquired other meanings. began to distinguish between the “nominal” essence, which is the expression that predicates something of something and the “real” essence, which is the intrinsic reality of the thing.
A paradigmatic example of the complexity of the problem was the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In Critique of pure reason (1776) argued that a distinction had to be made between the noumenon (what the thing is in itself, of an unknowable character) and the freak (what is manifested through perception). This meant a questioning of the attempt to access the essence as ousia of things.
The work of Husserl, a contemporary philosopher of the early 20th century, evidenced the essence as an ideal unit of meaning. This meant a return to the idea of essence as timeless and a priorisince he did not consider it as a fact but as the idea or form of something.
Essence and existentialism
The question of essence and existence has a long history. However, one of the most important debates in recent years is that waged by the existentialist movement in the mid-20th century.
For existentialists, existence is the fundamental aspect of the human being and not the essence. This places the emphasis not on what the human being is but on how their experiences occur. From here comes Jean-Paul Sartre's famous phrase, “existence precedes essence.”
The choice between essence and existence is still a matter of debate for thinkers and philosophers who seek to create new categories that allow thinking in a useful and novel way.
References
- Zubiri, X. (1963). About the essence. Madrid: Society of Studies and Publications.
- De Aquino, T., & De Vío, T. (1974). The entity and the essence. EBVC (Editions of the Library of the Central University of Venezuela).
- Aristotle, & Yebra, VG (1970). Metaphysics. Gredos.
- Sanz, V. (1986). The scholastic doctrine of “esse essentiae” and the principle of sufficient reason of rationalism.
- Beuchot, M. (1986). The distinction between essence and existence in the scholastics before Thomas Aquinas. Journal of Philosophy, 19(55), 71-87.
- “Essence” in Wikipedia.
- “Essence” in the Dictionary of the language of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Essence” in Filosofía.org.
- “Essence” in Glossary of Philosophy.
- “Etymology of Essence” in Etymologies of Chile.net.
- “Essential vs. Accidental Properties” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
