Actually, I did include the layman’s terms in what you quoted. Let me splain.
The philosophical term “essence” comes to us from Aristotle via Roman translators who ran across his phrase “to ti ên einai” — literally, “the what it was to be”. Upon realizing the significance of the phrase, they coined a new Latin term for it: “essentia”. And we take our English word from that. And so, the essence of a thing is what it could not help being were it to exist at all.
Take a unicorn, for instance. It does not exist (for all we know), but if we discovered one, we’d know it, because we know what it essentially would have to be, to be a unicorn: basically a horse with a horn. That’s what essence is, and so, as I wrote above, the essence of a wheel is “what a wheel is to be”. Another, maybe more palatable, example would be a graviton. We haven’t proved it exists yet, but if and when we do, it is by its essence that we will identify it. There are certain essential contingencies that must be met for it to be what it is to be.
It is by identifying the essence of a thing that we can identify like things. For example, once we understood the essence of stars, we understood that our sun was one of them. It is essentially “our” star. For it to exist at all, it could not have been anything else.
But none of this explains how essence is supposed to precede existence. Before someone invented the wheel, in what sense did the essence of the wheel exist? It didn’t exist as an idea, or a concept. I hope you are not going to suggest it existed as a platonic form. What gives?
Essence doesn’t exist because the existence of essence must be preceded by the essence of essence which doesn’t exist because it must be preceded by the essence of essence of essence which doesn’t exist because… well you get the idea.
I think the PC apeman’s post is closely tied to yours. It’s important to understand that using “to be” to mean “to exist” is non-copular. It is not the case that essence existed before existence did; it is that essence is a prerequisite for existence — i.e., the latter is contingent on the former. “The what it was to be” doesn’t imply a pre-existing state of existence; rather, it implies a pre-existing state of identity.
And so, it isn’t that the essence of the wheel existed before the wheel existed; it’s that the wheel could not exist without there first being the contingencies that make the wheel’s existence possible.
Look at it another way: under what condition can there exist a rational square root of 2? None. Therefore, there is essentially no such thing — that is, such a thing cannot emerge into existence. That’s why contradictions do not exist. It isn’t because we haven’t yet discovered one; it’s that that is the essence of a contradiction. That which is metaphysically impossible cannot ever be true (or exist) under any circumstance, which differs from an epistemic impossibility which simply doesn’t exist for all we know, but could under the right circumstances.
Thank you for the explanation; it sounds like the term ‘essence’ almost, but not quite, means ‘defintion’ in this context. That is, we know the definition of the term ‘unicorn’, so if we saw a unicorn, we’d know we had.
However, I suspect the term ‘essence’ tries to tenuously go the other way; a particular unicorn has its own ‘essence’ unique from every other uncorn’s ‘essence’, correct? In addition to the shared essence/definiton of mere generic unicornness. (I wonder if the essence of a person as a child is the same as their essence as an adult. And what about the essence of a wheel that’s one day old; is it the same as the essence of that same wheel an additional day later?)
Let me know if this is entirely off-base.
Is there a temporal discontinuity, or not? I get that you can’t have an object without it having an essence. But, prior to the existence of something, must there be a period where the essence of the thing exists, and the object does not? Or are you merely using the terms “first” and “pre” in ways entirely foreign to me?
We’re NOT free to chose our own particular morality.
Why do people like chocolate? Because they chose to like it? I can chose not to eat chocolate, but I can’t chose not to like chocolate. So I like chocolate for reasons that are beyond my control. And those reasons are the evolutionary history of life on earth that eventually resulted in a creature like me that has certain nutritional requirements, and a brain that evolved to percieve meeting those requirements as pleasurable.
If I were a vampire bat, I wouldn’t find eating chocolate pleasant, I’d only like drinking blood. I wouldn’t choose to like drinking blood, I’d be compelled to like drinking blood, because that would be the kind of organism I was. If I were a cow, I’d like to eat grass, if I were a vulture I’d like rotting meat, if I were a dung beetle I’d like elephant poop, and so on.
So, I’ve got all kinds of drives and needs that I didn’t ask for. And I can’t choose not to have them, I’m compelled to have them, because I’m like my ancestors, and all my ancestors had similar drives and needs, and their neighbors who didn’t happen to have those drives and needs didn’t contribute to my ancestry. An animal that doesn’t care if it lives or dies doesn’t contribute to the next generation, therefore most members of the next generation are organisms that care if they live or die. An animal that doesn’t have a drive to reproduce doesn’t contribute to the next generation, therefore most members of the next generation are organisms that have a drive to reproduce.
And so I’m the kind of animal that doesn’t like being cold or hot, that likes to eat particular foods and doesn’t like to eat other substances, that gets a boner when my sensory organs percieve a sexually available female of my species, I get frightened when large animals attack me. And further, I’m the kind of animal that when I see a younger member of my species I have the desire to take care of them, I have the desire to be a member of a social group, I want to be valued by other members of my social group, I dislike it when other members of my species don’t like me.
But I realize that my human wants and needs aren’t universal wants and needs, they are the wants and needs of a particular animal who lives in a particular time and place on a particular planet. And my wants and needs are real and meaningful…to me. To the universe they are meaningless. My life is meaningless, the survival of the human species is meaningless, just like the survival or extinction of some obscure dinosaur you never heard of is meaningless.
Except I still have my wants and needs, because I’m the sort of organism that has those wants and needs, because an organism that didn’t have those wants and needs or other equivalent wants and needs wouldn’t exist. I’m the puddle that marvels that the hole I fill exactly fits my shape. And knowing that my wants and needs are meaningless doesn’t make them go away. It’s meaningless that I love my wife and children, or that I appreciate a beautiful sunset, or that I like chocolate. It doesn’t matter, I still love my wife and children, I still appreciate the sunset, I still like to eat chocolate.
And I could decide to leave my wife, forget my children, never look at the sunset, and never eat chocolate again, but I couldn’t decide not to love my wife or my kids. I can choose not to follow my desires, but I can’t choose my desires.
I don’t think this is existentialism. Sure, the universe is morally blank, but so what? I’m a human being, so I am governed by human morality, which is partly generated by human rational thought, but also partly generated by the kind of animal humans are. So we choose, say, the right to free speech as a moral good. But we do that because if we institute the right to free speech that gives results that our ape brains interpret as pleasant.
Does this mean there’s no free will? Maybe it does, but so what? Thing is, the universe is the exact same thing it was when you believed God loved you and when you figured out that there was no such thing. Human beings are still the same sorts of beings as they were before. Nothing changed. The universe didn’t change, humans didn’t change, even you didn’t change. It’s not particularly frightening to know that there’s no such thing as God. That’s like a blindfolded guy walking along a tightrope imaging that he’s frightened because he took off the blindfold. But his situation hasn’t changed, he just understands it a bit better. He’s not in more danger because he doesn’t have the blindfold, he’s in less danger.
Very astute. Yes, I think it’s fair to say that a thing may be defined by its essence (and in fact that any other definition is incoherent).
Yes, certainly. A particular unicorn is not likely to be identical to (and therefore identified as) another particular unicorn.
I would say that there are as many layers of essence as there are of existence. In fact, I’d say that they would be required. If a person (or a wheel or an X) exists in some particular bounds today that differ from its bounds yesterday, then both were what they were to be.
I think it’s entirely on-base, unless we have a complete disconnect on basic terms. You seem informed, and likely know that you are skirting all around Miller’s view of existence and his notion that Kant was wrong about existence as a non-predicate.
Now, a condition of wisdom and existence being properties of Socrates is that they each be individuated by him. That is to say, just as the wisdom-of Socrates must differ at least numerically from the wisdom-of-Plato, so too must the existence-of-Socrates differ at least numerically from the existence-of-Plato. (Although bundle theorists of all persuasions would deny this inference, their denials can be discounted, since it can be argued that each version of the theory entails the self-defeating conclusion that in some cases even individuals could themselves be instantiated in other individuals.) It is one thing, however, to claim (correctly) that existence and wisdom have both to be individuated by Socrates, but quite another to say that both individuations must have the same ground. In the case of his wisdom and many other properties, he individuates them in being their recipient. Yet, although he clearly could not be the recipient of his existence, that need not preclude there being some other way in which he does individuate it. If there were, his existence would be no less entitled to be called a property than is his wisdom.
Is there such a way? It has been argued that there is, for Socrates would individuate his existence if he were not its recipient but its bound. (Cf. B.Miller, The Fullness of Being, chapter 4) The notion of a bound is more than a merely a spatial one, for there are also bounds of thought, bounds of desire, artistic bounds, and so on. Socrates would be the bound of his existence in respect of all human areas. In being bounded by him, his existence would be individuated and distinguished from Plato’s no less than, in being received by Socrates, his wisdom is individuated and distinguished from Plato’s. Moreover, since no bound can be real unless what it bounds is also real, the fact that Socrates is real would entail that what he bounds (his existence) must be real as well. The salient point, however, is that it makes no sense to speak of a thing that is bounded being added to by its bound. Thus, even though it makes no sense to say that Socrates’ existence adds anything to him, that would not detract from its being not only a property, but a real one to boot.
No, as I explained, essence doesn’t pre-exist in the sense of a non-copula. I would say that it is atemporal. It doesn’t rely on time or space or other contingencies of existence. You might, for example, express the notion that the essence of the universe before the Big Bang was a singularity, even though in temporal terms, speaking of the universe “before” the Big Bang will raise a few eyebrows.
Actually I’m not messing with you; I’ve never read Kant and if I’ve even heard of Miller before now, I’ve since forgotten. I actually don’t know enough to engage in this discussion, really.
So I’m not informed so much as extrapolating this from your posts as I go along.
One wonders why you’ve persisted in using temporal terms like “first” and “pre-” then. (My guess: they do it in the literature.) Regardless, realizing that something’s ‘essence’ is nothing more than the potential idea of the thing, which need not be and in fact probably usually isn’t actually known of or thought of by anything in any way before the object actually exists, I can accept that entirely. Sort of like how every formal logical argument that ever has, can, does, could, will, or might be made retains the same validity whether it’s known or not.
However, this brings us back to:
What connection could there possibly be between an ‘essence’, a potential idea that nobody, including you, necessarily knows, and the thought that actually forms in your brain? Surely the unknown fact didn’t just force itself onto you; surely you synthesized the idea in your brain all by yourself. And surely just because somebody else had an idea similar or identical to yours before, doesn’t mean that there’s some sort of telepathic connection whereby the ‘essence’ of his idea leapt up, trotted across space and time, and forced itself into existence fully formed in your mind. Right?
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.
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.
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.”
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).
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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’.)
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).
Ok, these responses are both incredibly enlightening and making me feel like a damned idiot. I’ve read almost all of Nietzsche’s works, a handful of other existentialist writers, and have covered (but not retained, god no) 17th and 18th century rationalist vs. empiricist philosophy. I tried to read Being and Nothingness–twice–but the problem with a lot of philosophy is that it requires a firm foundation in all philosophy that precedes it in order to understand it. It is this foundation I lack therefore I have trouble sorting through things like Being and being and essence (not to be confused with the zen being/not-being of course.) Few words in philosophy are generic or universal terms… essence, for example, means something specific I would never have figured out without Lib’s helpful primer. So while I own Being and Nothingness, I have failed to understand it. I read Nausea, which had a really cool scene where Antoine imagined the possibility of walking meat.
What I’m trying to say is, I never felt so consistently dumb until I started visiting The Straight Dope
So… baby steps.
An incredibly high compliment. I’m honored by what you say.
Okay, trying to piece together from your ‘‘layman’s explanation.’’ What you are trying to say is, at the root of it all, you see existentialism as a logical contradiction because a thing cannot exist without the thing being first defined?
Bolding mine.
Isn’t that a kind of solipsism? I am having trouble grasping the difference. I think solipsism is pretty silly. But I never considered this assumption an inherent requirement of existentialism. Put that way, existentialism seems kind of arrogant. I’m not suggesting I came up with the moral concept of love all on my own, that it somehow existed in me before it was defined… I am suggesting that I chose love, as I already perceived it to be, to be an important part of my moral schema.
The argument I’m seeing (in general) in this thread is that true existentialism cannot exist because values aren’t really a choice–even the ones you choose. I think that is a valid point but it raises the notion of whether or not we have free will. I’m leaning toward the conclusion that we don’t, but ultimately, does it really matter? If I feel I am exerting my Will to Power is it relevant whether I really am or not?
In Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds (which I’ve read 25% of), Hauser makes the argument that morality is a natural neurological development similar to the linguistic function in the human brain. One’s moral ‘‘language’’ develops based on the ethical patterns in the developing brain’s environment. At a certain point in development other moral languages may become unintelligible in the same way a 15 year old who was raised speaking English will never be a native speaker of French.
But – and it’s an important but, I think especially in the context of this discussion – just because we learn a native moral language does not mean we can’t acquire second moral languages. Furthermore, logic seems to be capable of trumping gut instinct many times.
To use a loaded example, my gut instinct says that taking revenge on a person who kills my beloved is the right thing to do. I feel rage and anger and morally justified in taking another person’s life. But my logic tells me that a vigilante society is not conducive to the greater good. It is perfectly within my means to accept my logic as superior to my moral instinct and let my logic dictate my behavior, not my moral instinct.
Therefore I believe, insofar as it is possible to make any choice at all, we can choose our morality.
I think Mage the Ascension the RPG from White Wolf has in a way made me an incurable existentialist. In it, it posits that we all are sort of intersubjectively creating the world, but not just be applying meaning to what we experience, but also in that we are creating the rules and tearing them down somewhat by consensus.
From this perspective, I see the world, in its dialectical form as being a big conflict between rival factions, the ultimate synthesis being actual reality. This viewpoint is reinforced for me as we get into designer molecules and artificial intelligence. Not only are we able to perceive the world as we would like to, but we are beginning to gain the power to actually SHAPE it as we would like to. The question: “What is human?” takes on a whole new immediate relevance as we learn to edit the very code that informs upon our physical architecture.
So many of our viewpoints are based upon the limitations of our perspectives. Astronauts speak of transcendental experience when the Earth becomes a remote reference point rather than an immediate and all-consuming one. Much of our sense of the inevitable comes from our perception of our own lifespans. We still have not gotten over the terror of death that was our lot for most of history, when we died in our thirties on average, and yet we have Aubrey Grey today making bold promises of lifespans of 800 years. If we could live for 800 years, why not forever? What advances will come about within those 800 years that we can avail ourselves of?
This is not to say that I feel as though we as individuals are fully free. It is a tempting notion to believe that one can be ultimately responsible and yet guilt-free, but I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification. The death of God is in and of itself just as limiting as people like Richard Dawkins declare ware on the imagination. If you think a Christian world is binding, imagine a world of sheer materialist determinism. When things like altruism are merely tricks of evolution, there is no real choice in the matter. You are still just protons electrons and neutrons orbiting one another. A stronger argument for fate I have never heard.
The powers that be keep order by circumcising the imagination through rigorous training. The first part of it is conditioning you to stand up and sit down upon the ringing of a bell. The bell being a greater imperative than any particular aspect of what you were just doing or were about to do. The dizzying sense of freedom is created by limiting the scope of available options. Most of the available options are left within the realm of acceptability. If you truly broke down a barrier, society would exert homeostasis and you’d find yourself resisted by the powers whose territory you happen to be violating at the time. I’d love to get my hands on the talks that Tim Leary did with G. Gordon Liddy when they were on their speaking tours together.
I think one of the most important aspects to remember for the existentialist is that solipsism may seem like your friend, but it is not. There really are other people out there, and they really do have wills. The basic reality that you inhabit is reinforced by the salt of the Earth, and they don’t take kindly to them cosmopolitans with their queer ideas.
Nothing is real, everything is permitted, is probably the boldest statement of existentialism ever uttered, far bolder than, ‘God is dead, and we killed him.’ The assault on God is one of the more interesting aspects of modernity. Most of the foot soldiers in that war have no idea what they are doing. Telling a religious person that God does not exist is like telling them that there really is no ground under their feet. At best, it’s simply cruel, at worst it can break them. There are reasons for the rules put in place by the ancestors, it helps maintain the notion that we are even the same species, capable of relating to one another.
You certainly have the right to view reality as you like, free and without guilt, but if you do not care about the wills of others the wills of others will not care about you, and consensual reality has a habit of exiling Marauders.
First off, I’d like to say that I think Lemur866 more or less nails it.
Second, Liberal, I’m I’m reading you right, you seem to be appealing to something like the set of all possible things, where an “essence” is a single member of that set. Certainly mathematicians appeal to things like the set of infinitely differentiable functions all the time, it’s a useful way of quickly establishing the type of thing that you are talking about. I respect the fact that these are useful mental tools, but what does it mean to say that these things really exist, and how does that differ from saying that they do not?
Finally, on existence preceding essence: if it doesn’t, something sure goes through a lot of trouble to look like it does. It is commonly remarked that evolution has no foresight. This means that the function, the essence, of anything is never determined until after the first steps in its development. Light sensitive cells were never created with the intention that they would later become eyes, but once they by chance appeared evolution found a use for them. Legs and feet were never meant to turn into arms and hands, but they happened to take a form that might find another use–the existence of something that might be useful as a hand happened before it really became a hand.
Within the human sphere, we are quite bad at guessing the course of future technology. One reason for this is that we are never sure what uses will be found for things that are just beyond the horizon – that is, they exist before their essence, their purpose, is found.
Why does either have to precede? Maybe essence simply exists, it would seem to me that it is essential for it to do so. Liberal’s statement implies that the wheel’s essential wheelness, existed before the invention of the wheel. Does essence not exist, and is not existance essential to the being of essence?
Personally I am skeptical about any attempt to delve into first things. Sure we have the big bang, supposedly a big explosion occurred and here we are. What was it that exploded? We have a concept for a part of the big bang that occurred prior to the events that we can measure. Why is it that we consider the Big Bang a past event? If the universe is indeed still expanding, then wouldn’t then our lives be a part of the still occurring event?
First off, I’m not following how this disproves or faults existentialism as a life philosophy at all.
Secondly, what if one day a man had the brilliant idea to make a round object to help him move things, and he called this thing a wheel. BUT a year earlier, another man found a round disk-shaped rock with a hole in the middle, and used it in the exact same manner that the man who “invented” the wheel used his wheel.
Or what of a rock falling from a cliff and splitting in two a rock at the basin. Was there an “essence” of the two newly-formed rocks before they “existed”?
I don’t have a problem with using the vernacular so long as we don’t then turn around and pick at the vernacular to make issues. I don’t mind saying that A precedes B so long as you don’t then stop me and say that it doesn’t make sense temporally. We either speak in metaphors, or we speak formally. If we speak in metaphors, then we must allow one another leeway and make an effort to understand one another, which I think you’re doing here.
You should accept that there are metaphysical conditions that things are contingent on because you understand the mathematical concept of “function”. You understand the physical concept of gravity being contingent on mass, or force being contingent on acceleration, etc. And there’s nothing pretentious about possibly the most common term in all of philosophy, “metaphysical”, since it simply means having to do with the nature of reality. To say that X is contingent upon metaphysical conditions is to say that X could not be the way X is were it not for the conditions that reality places upon X. If you keep complaining about this, we’re going to need a whole paragraph to express “prerequisite”. You seem to want to have it both ways: be absolutely precise, but muddle it up as much as possible.
I see. That’s acceptable, and the looseness of it doesn’t really bother me.
An essence implies a definition, but an essence itself is an identity, and I’ll explain that because I realize it’s subtle. Consider any tautology — say, “a bachelor is an unmarried man”. Note first of all that our usage of to be is a copula; that is, we are merely tying the subject and predicate together. We’re not saying that there exists, in fact, some particular bachelor or for that matter any bachelor. We’re merely identifying what a bachelor must of necessity be if he is to be a bachelor. The entire tautology is the definition; the subject (or the predicate) is the essence.
Not at all. When we were defining the sun as a coal burning furnace, the essence of the sun was there nonetheless and stood in contradiction to our definition of it. Were the sun actually to be a coal burning furnace, it would not exist, at least not as the sun.
That’s an equivocation. If you’re going to talk about a “red cube”, then your postcedent (what you use to refer to it later) must reference a red cube and not just any cube. And so it is not the case that without the redness, the cube could not exist; it is that without the redness the *red cube * could not exist.
Whether you call it “special” or not makes no difference to me. Nevertheless it remains that without all those qualities, it would not — and could not — be the cube that it is. No one is saying that there is something mystical about essence. It is merely an Aristotlean substance.
Well, sure. I don’t know why you would have expected essence to be some creative force or something. I have my own ideas on why and how existence emerges from essence, but they aren’t pertinent to what essence and existence are. The only question existentialism presents is a chicken and egg one: which is a necessary prerequisite for the other, essence or existence? Can something exist that has no essence at all? It stands to reason, as far as I’m concerned, that if it is something, then it must be something. In other words, if there is an ontology, then there must be a copula. There cannot be a bachelor unless first a bachelor is in fact an unmarried man. That way, if you define it incorrectly, as with the sun, it still is what it is.
Again, you seem to have brought causality in out of the blue. No one is saying that the essential idea caused me to post. What we’re saying is that my post was contingent on the essential idea.
I think this new post does reveal some misunderstandings, notions that I didn’t know you were presuming before. Hopefully, those are cleared up.
It relates by opposition. We were talking about potential versus necessity. Particles are potentialities — specifically, they are mathematical constructs that describe reality. In fact, the universe may be defined as a probability distribution.
In fairness, you are *calling upon me * to say things in a variety of ways, I would think in order to help you clarify your understanding. I don’t think my terms are “confusing”, but I can see how given three different explanations of the same thing, confusion can result.
There’s no problem with using plain language as long as you don’t lose the precision. Don’t, for example, use “definition” when you mean “identity”. And don’t use “cause” when you mean “precedent”. I think if you discipline yourself in that regard, you’ll have no problem.
Sort of. The “definition” thing is confusing because definitions are tautologies, but **begbert2 ** and I drifted into metaphors. What I would say is that at the root of it all, existentialism is a logical contradiction because a thing cannot exist without there being a way in which reality can accomodate it. There cannot, for example, be a thing that is a triangle with four sides. But existentialism allows us to modify metaphysical demands to suit ourselves. There is nothing wrong, for Sartre, in calling a triangle a square because it can be justified ethically or aesthetically. Metaphysics is trumped by will.
Nothing wrong with that. Jesus Himself taught that love is the very essence of morality. But you didn’t need existentialism for that.
I think it is critically important to differentiate between moral free will and physical free will. I think moral choices are made in an entirely different context from motor choices. I think, for example, that the moral choice was made to kill before the physical choice was made of whether to use a bat or a tire iron.
I absolutely agree with you. But I accept Jesus’ teaching that man is a dual creature: born of water (physical) and of spirit (moral). We are animals like any other in a physical sense, and are constrained by physical reality, but in a moral sense we are like God — free to make our moral choices unconstrained by anything other than what we choose to value most.
