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Concept

Essence

Essence
The original uploader was Magnus Manske at English Wikipedia. Later versions were uploaded by Optimager at en.wikipedia. · Public domain · source

Overview

Essence (Latin: essentia) has various meanings and uses for different thinkers and in different contexts. It is used in philosophy and theology as a designation for the property or set of properties or attributes that make an entity the entity it is or, expressed negatively, without which it would lose its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident, which is a property or attribute the entity has accidentally or contingently, but upon which its identity does not depend.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Essence is discussed.

  1. In reference also to other subjects besides God the category of Essence is often liable to an abstract use, by which, in the study of anything, its Essence is held to be something unaffected by, and subsisting in independence of, its definite phenomenal embodiment. Thus we say, for example, of people, that the great thing is not what they do or how they behave, but what they are.

    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel

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  2. 1. Is "essence" something different from "being"? Does essence indicate an abstraction of the other (four categories), and is being, on the contrary, essence with the other (four categories), motion and rest, identity and difference? Are these the elements of being? Yes: "being" is the totality of these things, of which one is essence, the other is motion, and so forth. Motion, therefore, is accidental essence.

    Plotinus, Plotinos

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  3. And here we lose even that vestige of a meaning grounded in the nature of the things themselves, which may be supposed to be attached to the word essence when it is said that genus and species must be of the essence of the thing. There can be no doubt that when the schoolmen talked of the essences of things as opposed to their accidents, they had confusedly in view the distinction between differences of kind, and…

    John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive

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  4. Consequently if the existence of one should perish, that of the other will not therefore perish; but if the essence of one could be destroyed and become false, the essence of the other would be likewise destroyed. Therefore a thing which is the cause both of the essence and of the existence of any effect must differ from that effect both with regard to its essence and with regard to its existence. But the intellect…

    Benedictus de Spinoza, The Philosophy of Spinoza

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  5. The essence of a triangle lies in a very little compass, consists in a very few ideas: three lines including a space make up that essence: but the properties that flow from this essence are more than can be easily known or enumerated. So I imagine it is in substances; their real essences lie in a little compass, though the properties flowing from that internal constitution are endless.

    John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1

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Philosophers who discussed Essence

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition

Part of Absurdism.

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