ESSENCE / EXISTENCE

The distinction between existence and essence is anything but household. Although recondite in appearance, it has a philosophical significance which is not at all remote from everyday reality. It is a distinction with ancient roots, most classically in Aristotle, but it was re-problematized in the twentieth century by existentialists, and achieved near iconic status in the formula, due to Jean-Paul Sartre, that “existence precedes essence”. We may start by examining what this obscure dictum and ontological rally-cry could mean.

‘Existence’ captures that we exist, ‘essence’ connotes what we are. Put differently, ‘existence’ refers to the fact of human being, ‘essence’ to universal human nature. The fact of human existence varies across time and space in content and character; but human essence unites us insofar as it makes us the kind of being we all are regardless of our age or place of origin. Existence bespeaks the uniqueness of a person or a culture; essence bespeaks the sameness that makes us all one, or all one species, members of a single all-inclusive kind. Existence is beset with identity, individuality, difference, and a limited moment in history. Essence is timeless, tends to be ahistorical, detracts from differences, melds identities, and overlooks individuality.

The championed primacy of existence is a critique of all pre-conceived ideas of universal human nature, all hand-me-down doctrines that prescribe limits and impose a horizon on us by conceiving of humanity in terms of a fixed essence. Philosophy tends to address questions of how to live and the purpose of life by first settling on an account of human nature (and the human condition), and then deducing ethics and meaning from these. For instance, conservatives and liberals are sometimes distinguished based on whether one takes a low or a high estimate of individual human value. However, instead of taking human nature as established by nature or fixed in advance by God, or as delimited in one or another cultural or philosophical tradition, we can look toward the future as the open field of possibilities and proving ground of human nature. We are required to make ourselves before we become what we are; we must define who we will be through our actions going forward. We can realize human being only through protracted effort and by way of our concrete relations; in short, we must fashion our own essence. Starting from the fact of life, from human being as phenomena, we must create meaning and identity in free struggle, and never blindly accept the blinders of past visionaries, however august. Existentialism is a call to an essential rejuvenation.

Open-ended essence, essence created whole-cloth by free action, was a philosophical revolution, though perhaps older than the existential movement itself (certainly to the extent that that is taken as a French phenomenon). But the idea of essence as “up to us” only arose after the idea that essence is variable, that it is moving or shifting, which is itself a revolutionary departure from the fixed, eternal, immutable universal essence, that is evoked nicely in capitals, Human Nature. To see essence as process, or process as essential, is to break forever with the timeless traditions of Greek antiquity, Christian imperialism, and even the enlightenment rationalists who inaugurated modernity. At first it was presumed that the pattern of transformation that most defined us was itself timeless, in effect the ancient “cycles of history” theory revived. If human nature were a process of becoming, or being born and maturing, perhaps it came in identifiable stages, similar across cultures. Then culture and identity would be the dimension of difference, stages and cycles would be the new universal, the laws of growth or progress. These laws sought to reinstate the universal, the timeless pattern of time unfolding; in a word, they spelled out a dynamic essence.

Laws of progress, patterns of growth, evolutionary stages: these are all ways to construe nature or essence in dynamic ways that yet admit a kind of intelligibility, even rationality. They exemplify one sort of take on a historically shifting essence, thus departing from the Platonic, Aristotelian and Aristotelian-Christian tradition of fixed, immutable timeless essence. The history and context of origin of all things tells us what they are, not eternal intelligible entities immediately apprehended by Reason. Essence is resolved into history, made intelligible only in its context and in light of its origins. This historicism has profound metaphysical consequences, some of which instructed the existentialists of the previous century. But there is this great difference, namely the resistance to historical determination, the will to change the essence once postulated as variable. Philosophy is not a matter of comprehending the eternal patterns of change that underlie history and determine cultural change, but of transforming the given and transcending the received world. Essence becomes a category of the future, not a residue of the past.

Freedom has limits prescribed by our essence. If essence is timeless, freedom is static. If essence is shifting and a function of growth or maturity, the extent and character of freedom will vary with level of progress or evolutionary stage. But evolution turns out to be a more continuous, tree-like or web-like structure, without pre-formed levels and with no a priori taxonomy of stages. One species evolves continuously into another, so that there is no first instance of a species, even though there is a time before which that species did not exist. Evolution is not a ladder, we are not on a rung that existed before we got here, and the same applies to every organism. Darwin did more to destroy not only the timeless view of essence (form, species, natural kind) than anyone, but he also obliterated any view that evolution had a pre-existent template that we had only to fulfill. Species becomes individuals, as individual as branches or twigs on an evolutionary tree.

To what extent are we determined by our genetics, by individual endowment, by the cultural givens of our life? How free is the individual to break away from his pack, her times, his world, and inhabit in imagination if not the future a new one of her own making? If existence is like the centre of a circle, essence is like the horizon, as it prescribes limits to one’s view. The image of the shifting or expanding horizon, moved by one’s own efforts, is an invitation to reinvent one’s world. The degree of latitude we have depends on our altitude, as it were, and the lay of the land we wish to oversee. This geographical metaphor suggests that our capacity to freely change horizons may be severely limited. No doubt freedom is not transcendent, and essence is not wholly plastic. Despite the most wide-eyed optimists, we are no doubt limited in our capacity to realize a new humanity, invent a new ethics, or command our own fate.

I will end by considering a further dimension of this problem of essence versus existence. In the Aristotelean conception, there was no such thing as an individual essence. Essence was universal, meaningful only at the species level. Since he regarded human beings, like all corporeal substances, as composites of form and matter; and since this form (Greek: eidos) was the intelligible, universal essence; it followed that only matter was left to differentiate, to individuate, to make me me, and you you. Upon death, our matter would cease to exist, and we would be resolved into the shared universal form which preceded our individual existence and survives it. If we survive death at all, it is not as individuals, but subsisting along with all the other (deceased, alive and yet to be) in the nameless universal. That he located this timeless universal in the regular motions of the celestial sphere, emotively echoed the earlier naive belief that our soul at death went to live among the stars, is cosmic poetics.

I speak of universal essence in the context of Aristotle, but he was an elitist. Women and slaves, however human, did not wholly share the essence of the human soul. They didn’t really count. But the philosophical identification of the soul as form proved too attractive to later Christian philosophers and dogmatists, so the individual soul, which had in all its particularity to be there to face divine judgment in the great moral accounting at the end of time, had to be conceptualized as an individual essence. Your soul, a free and accountable agent, is your essence, now fully particularized, and no longer simply the universal nature shared with human beings. It is answerable for itself in the final days in utmost truthfulness and without hiding.

But particularity arises not only at the level of the individual person. It also arises at the collective level of culture. Cultures arise and pass away as do individual people. If there is an individual essence, and since individuals are so thoroughly ensconced in the culture of their making, why not grant cultural essentialism, a world-historic folk-spirit that personifies a nation or ethnicity? Cultural differences also individuate: are cultures not therefore selves, spirits or essential natures?

I can hardly type this without rebelling in repugnance. I support an existential rather than an essentialist view of ethnic differences, citing material particularity and variable concrete contingencies, not the reified types of racial thinking. The differences between male and female too, while partially grounded in biology, are reduced to absurdity if conceptualized as essential differences. For recall that, post-Darwin, biology is anti-essentialist, and even sex differences are matters of degree, a composite of continua, not the gulf separating disparate essences. It is not feasible to argue for this position here. I cite only the philosophic fact, highlighted by leading Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, that the dimensions of difference relevant to the multicultural debate are not arbitrary, but seriously constrained by parameters recognizable as human concerns. These constraints give us grounds to know one another as human despite vast and often challenging cultural differences. Knowledge of one another does not eliminate differences, but it may soften them, at least where pure conflicts of resources are not involved.

With this undefended peaceable attitude on differences, essential or existential, I end my essay.