We explain what the essence is in philosophy and the different ways of understanding it. Also, its relation to existence.
The term essence is a central concept in the tradition of philosophical thought.What is the essence?
The term essence is one of those central and important concepts in the tradition of philosophical thought, which we could define in a simple way as that which a thing is naturally and invariably, that is, that to refer to the essence of something is to speak of its true nature. nature, of what, below everything, is.
This way of understanding the essence comes from Greco-Roman antiquity. The Greek Aristotle (384-322 BC), in his work Metaphysics I was trying to define what was then called ousia and that could be translated as "essence" or as "substance”, “to be”, “nature”, “reality”, “existence”, “life”And other meanings. It was so difficult to translate this term, that the Romans later baptized it as essentia (from the verb esse, "to be").
However, the philosophical debate regarding the essence was just beginning. There are two traditional ways of understanding this concept:
- The first substance, that is, what is or what exists, what the subject of a sentence is in itself. It gives rise to the essence in an ontological sense, that is, considering that the things of reality are what they are in themselves, before we come into contact with them.
- The second substance, that is, what has an entity, what the predicate attributes to a subject within the framework of a sentence. It gives rise to the essence in a logical sense, since things are what we can say about them fundamentally.
This difference may be difficult to understand, but it is central to the debate about the essence that will take place in Western philosophy.
The debate between these two positions, the one that understands the essence as something proper to the object and the one that understands it as something other than (and subsequent) to the object, continued in the work of important thinkers such as Okham, Hume or Nietzsche. The debate was accentuated when the medieval Christian tradition, which found God at the heart of the question about the essence of all things, began to crumble in the Renaissance.
Without the intention of delving further into the philosophical debate, let us agree that the word essence serves us today to refer broadly to what things are, no matter how we understand that meaning. The popular use of the term is basically synonymous of nature, reality or truth. The essence of something or someone is the depth of their way of being.
Similarly, when we say that something is essential, we say that it is linked to the essence of another thing, or what is the same, that it is part of the nucleus, of the heart of things. Thus, "an essential question" is a central, fundamental, nuclear question, which is at the center of the subject.
Essence versus existence
One of the many philosophical approaches to the issue of essence is the question of what comes first: the essence of things, or their existence. Two concepts that, initially, were understood as synonyms, until in the thirteenth century the Catholic friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) defined them as two very different views:
- The essence, as we have said before, is what things are, what makes them an understandable and definable entity by the human mind, and that if it changes it would imply that we are not dealing with the thing we thought, but with another.
- Existence, on the other hand, consists in the very fact that a thing is, that is, its belonging to the world of reality. For example, we can understand the essence of a dragon, but we cannot verify its existence, as they are imaginary. That is, the essence of a dragon exists, but the dragon itself does not.
This distinction can also be understood as a new way of retaking the two previous concepts of essence (first substance and second substance). Much of the philosophical debate in the West focused on defining which of the two was more important or came first: the essence of things, or their existence.
Realistic thinking, for example, gave all the importance to existence (in other words, to Being) and not to essence (that is, to Ideas). For their part, idealists They maintained that there was no such distinction, since a stone in the imagination or in reality were defined in exactly the same way, although one existed and the other did not.
Later, the thinkers existentialists returned to the idea that existence is the fundamental aspect of human being, and not the essence, so that subjective experiences are more important than the knowledge objective.
The choice between essence and existence can be traced in the philosophical substrate of most of the ideas on which modernity is sustained. It is still a matter of debate for thinkers and philosophers who seek, in the light of contemporaneity, to create new categories that allow us to think about it in a useful and novel way.