⁂ Concepts · Being · No. 4
Essence

Nix v. Hedden: the same tomato, two correct answers.

Essence

What makes something the kind of thing it is, as distinct from the features it merely happens to have.

Theme
Being and reality
Tradition
Greek
Term
τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι · to ti ēn einai
Term fixed
c. 330 BC

In plain terms

Some things are true of a thing without being what the thing is. A tiger may be in a zoo, may be limping, may be the last of its kind. None of that is what makes it a tiger.

Essence is the name for whatever does. It is the answer to the question what is it, as opposed to the question what is it like. The intuition behind it is that these are different questions and that not everything true of a thing is equally central to it.

The reason this matters outside philosophy is that we act on it constantly. We think there is a fact about what something is, one that a description could get wrong, and we think that fact settles disputes. Whether there is such a fact, or whether we are only ever sorting things for our own purposes, is the whole argument.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle distinguishes essential from accidental predication: an essential predicate states what the thing is, and belongs to it necessarily and in virtue of itself, while an accident belongs to it and could have failed to. Essence is what a real definition captures - genus plus differentia - and it grounds a thing's necessary properties without being identical to them.

Avicenna's separation is the decisive later move. Essence considered in itself is neither existent nor non-existent, neither universal nor particular; existence is something added to it. That distinction gives Aquinas the argument that in God alone essence and existence coincide, and gives the whole tradition a problem about what an essence is when nothing instantiates it.

Locke's response is to distinguish real from nominal essence: the real internal constitution we do not know, and the abstract idea we actually sort by, which is our workmanship rather than nature's. Kripke's Naming and Necessity revives essentialism from the other direction, arguing that the essence of a natural kind is discovered empirically - water is H₂O, and necessarily so, though it took chemistry to find out.

Where you meet it

In 1883 an importer named John Nix sued the Port of New York over ten cases of tomatoes. Tariff law taxed imported vegetables and let fruit in free, and the collector had charged him for vegetables.

Botanically the tomato is a fruit and both sides knew it. The Supreme Court ruled against Nix anyway in 1893, on the ground that in the common language of the kitchen a tomato is served with dinner rather than as dessert, and that the tariff was written in ordinary speech and not in the language of botany.

What the court did not say is that the botanists were wrong. It said the question what is a tomato has more than one correct answer depending on what the answer is for - which is Locke's position stated by a judge. Nobody in the room thought the fruit was pretending to be a vegetable; they disagreed about which classification the law had adopted, and there was no further fact to consult.

What is actually disputed

Whether essences are found or made.

The realist position is that kinds have natures independent of us and that our classifications answer to them; on Kripke's version this is compatible with modern science and indeed presupposed by it, since discovering that water is H₂O is discovering what water was all along. The nominalist and conventionalist reply, running from Ockham through Locke to Quine, is that what we call the essence is the boundary our purposes drew, and that the appearance of necessity comes from the definition rather than the world.

Sartre's objection is different and aimed at people rather than kinds: for a human being existence precedes essence, there is no nature settled in advance, and to claim one is bad faith. Feminist and decolonial criticism extends that suspicion, arguing that essential natures attributed to groups have generally turned out to be descriptions of their circumstances.

Commonly confused with

  • Substance c. 330 BC Substance is what has the properties; essence is which of them make it the thing it is. Aristotle's own usage runs them together and the confusion is inherited rather than invented.
  • Identity 1714 Identity asks whether this is the same thing as that. Essence asks what kind of thing either of them is.

Defined against

  • Śūnyatā The Buddhist claim that nothing has an intrinsic nature is the direct denial of essence, argued in detail rather than assumed
  • Contingency An essence is what a thing could not lack; contingency is everything it could

Philosophers

  • Aristotle Fixed the distinction between what a thing is and what it happens to be
  • Avicenna Separated essence from existence, and set the medieval problem
  • John Locke Real essence we do not know, nominal essence we actually sort by
  • Jean-Paul Sartre For a human being there is no essence settled in advance

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Substance c. 330 BC · Form c. 380 BC · Universals c. 380 BC · Identity 1714 · Necessity c. 330 BC

Aristotle's phrase is literally the what-it-was-to-be; the Latin translators made it essentia, and Avicenna's separation of essence from existence around 1020 turned it into the problem it has been since.