[QUOTE=Liberal]
Well, they do, you’re right. But that’s just because it’s a bit easier than making up whole new words. Lots of disciplines do the same, which is why a word like “force”, for example, means one thing in physics, something else in law, and an entirely different thing in baseball. And so we borrow a term like “prerequisite” from the vernacular so that we don’t have to say “contingency upon metaphysical conditions” each time.
[/QUOTE]
Right, that’s normal, but I still feel compelled (since I’m sort of coming at this from the back end here) to translate everything to the vernacular at least once to make sure I know what everything means.
And to pick out subtleties that I might object to that are concealed by the phrasing. I mean, “contingency upon metaphysical conditions”? Why should I accept that there’s metaphysical conditions that things are contigent on? There’s no evidence for the like; by my understanding of them these ‘essences’ certainly don’t qualify as such. (Specifically, I think they’re descriptions, not conditions. And ‘metaphysical’ seems a pretentious way of putting it.)
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Not just the potental idea, but the necessary idea. Essence is not a potential quality; it’s an intrinsic quality. Without it, nothing would exist.
[/QUOTE]
I probably shouldn’t have used the term ‘potential’; allow me to attempt to clarify. I was trying to express that (If I’m understanding correctly,)though ‘essences’ are basically definitions, and therefore are ideas of things/intellectual constructions and not physical actualized things, that they aren’t necessarily something anyone’s actually thought of yet, and in fact they aren’t necessarily anything that will ever be thought of. There are essences/definitions that will never even be imagined. They’re still as ‘there’ as any other definition/essence, though, just the same way that arguments that never will be thought of still have a specific validity.
And I think this is where your thinking in the matter and mine diverge, with “Without it, nothing would exist”. You say that essence is an intrinsic quality [of everything that exists]; I would agree, since something’s defining properties are intrinsic to it. However to say that without a definition that describes the thing ‘nothing would exist’ seems to me to be a reversal of causation. The thing’s properties determine which definitions/essences apply to it, not the other way 'round. That’s just backwards. Isn’t it?
For example, consider a red cube; its redness is an intrinsic quality; in fact, it’s part of its essence. However, I would not say that “without the redness, the cube could not exist”. I would say that the redness is part of the essence of the cube because the cube happens to be red.
I recognize that as intellectual constructions, definitions/essences are indeed timeless and indestructible and all, but there’s nothing special about that; definitions/essences for things that don’t exist and which in fact are entirely impossible and nonsensical are just the same as the essences for real things in that regard. That a description/essence applies to any given object is not of particular note; lots of descriptions/essences apply to it. (It has the essence of ‘red’. It has the essence of ‘cube’. It has the essence of ‘red cube’. It has the essence of ‘six-sided’. It has the essence of eight-cornered’. It has the essence of ‘three-dimensional’… etcetera.)
And certainly, these essences/descriptions don’t actually do anything. They don’t cause anything, and they don’t interact with anything, except that for any given object, some essences do and some don’t describe it accurately (and they do this based on, not causing, the attributes of thing they describe/are an essence of).
Given that that’s my analysis of the situation, many of your statements read like nonsense or at least sound very, very odd. For example: “The essential idea had to be there, else where did my idea come from?”. The idea didn’t ‘come from’ any of the several essences/descriptions that can describe/apply to it; you had the idea, and the idea you had falls under the descriptions/has the essences that it ends up having. There is no causal relationship between the unconceptualized “essential idea” and the idea you actually had, since definitions don’t cause anything. They just apply to things, or don’t.
Are you sure I don’t have something wrong here? Because if I don’t then I have to conclude that you and any other essentialists are putting a great deal of value or importance on ‘essences’ that is not justified by what they actually are or what they actually do (or rather, by the stark absence of things they actually do).
[QUOTE=Liberal]
But since you mention potential, it does give us something to compare, so you can better see the difference. Werner Heisenberg wrote, “The atoms or the elementary particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” In other words, particles are purely analytic descriptions — metaphors. Or as Niels Bohr put it, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.”
[/QUOTE]
This might have been a more useful comparison if you’d mentioned how it related to essences…I am unable to deduce a relation. I presume you and Heisenberg are not actually saying that atoms don’t exist…or at least that’s what I presume. 
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Right. The idea is not just a potential, though. Once it is expressed, its potential has collapsed. The fact that it has been expressed is proof that it was necessary to express it (assuming a belief in the reality of existence).
[/QUOTE]
I think you’re using really confusing terms to say that “once the idea’s been had, it’s been had.” That is, I think that you’re using the term ‘necessary’ in the sense that in the actual world (once one has excluded other possible worlds), all things that actually happened are ‘necessary’ (‘it was necessary that I put my left shoe on first this morning, it was necessary that I had cereal for breakfast, it was necessary that I logged into the SDMB - because it happened’.)
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Probably, it was just the important distinction between potential and necessity. You say this is above your head, but I’m sincere when I say you have a knack for it. You should look into it deeper. There are people I would advise not to bother. But you’re not one of them.
[/QUOTE]
I might look into it deeper, though (as you may have noticed) I have a certain problem with specialized terminologies that reuse english words - I’m hellbent on rephrasing the things in common terms, which slows the reading considerably, especially when my interpretation boils down to something that just doesn’t seem sensible to me (I have to go back and keep trying to find the sense in it…even if there isn’t any).
