Reflections on the concept of essence and the essence/accident distinction

      I struggle to understand the concept of essence and its philosophical dangers and potential. One of the criticisms I might have of the line of thought that appeals to me is that the meaning of essence shifts and even seems to bear some incoherence in its very core.

    Trying to sort this out, I see essence has an epistemic meaning: in a definition, what features a necessary condition for something to count as that x – say an apple. Sweetness is not part of that definition, since not all apples are sweet (e.g. Granny Smith). Thus, logically, a particular apple is only accidentally sweet. Sweetness is not part of the essence in an apple in that sense.

     But if no apples were sweet, the entire concept would change. The apple also couldn’t disclose meaning as it does in the Garden of Eden story, in Iduna’s apples, in Sappho’s unreachable apple, Johnny Appleseed, or the apples of discord. It would be about as desirable as a lemon. In the sense the sweet apple is the paradigm (for us) and the sour apples are analogically related. The being of apples, as revealed though the meanings they have come to have for the human world, includes sweetness (especially pronounced in cultures prior to industrial sugar), ripeness, nourishment (‘an apple a day…’), attractiveness. Thus as manifested to us these qualities being to the being or reality of apples, thus their essence, even if that casts a paler light on non-sweet apples. They belong to how the apple shows itself as the kind of thing it is, one might say.

  Again, when you define apple, you ask what must something be to count as an apple? On that question, sweetness is not required. Therefore, for this purpose, it is accidental (strictly speaking). This is the level of classification, necessary conditions, clear boundaries. Which obviously doesn’t exhaust the meaning or being of apples. An essential definition (epistemic) marks what separates a thing from others, but the essence (ontological) – i.e., what the thing is – belongs to the thing itself and exceeds what any essential definition can fully capture. When we define something essentially, we are not creating its essence but trying to express it. Our definitions therefore might grasp the essence truly, but only in part. The tension comes from this: essence as a real principle (ontological), that is, what a tree is in reality independent of our thinking, which is richer than any definition vs. essence as expressed in a definition (epistemic), that is, how we try to state what a tree is, which is necessarily partial, selective, abstract. It can

capture something true, but not everything. The confusion arises if we slide between these without noticing, which can make it seem like “essence” equals full reality whereas it intends a definition. But really the definition expresses the essence but does not exhaust it.

 

. . .

 

    But am I running being and meaning together? The danger of collapsing the being of an apple with the meaning of “apple” is that it sounds like the apple is nothing but our concept: that is, like reality is constructed by thought (idealism). That for me would be a reductio. Still, I want to say that the apple is not something utterly outside meaning: it is intelligible, can be understood, described, spoken of, etc. It follows that being and meaning are connected. So rather than saying that meaning equals being or meaning does not equal being I want to say (following Heidegger, I think) that meaning discloses or manifests being. That is to say that the apple is what it is independently of us but it shows itself as meaningful, and our concepts are ways of receiving and articulating that self-showing. You take an apple in your hand. You do not first impose meaning on it. You see it as something to be eaten, picked, shared; perhaps as ripe or unripe. You are not inventing this. All this belongs to how the apple shows itself. A child who has never been taught the word “apple” can still reach for it as food. The concept apple comes later as a way of saying what is already there. When you bite into the apple, its sweetness is not something you project onto it. It is there in the experience. At the same time, the sweetness is not just a bare sensation; it is experienced as the taste of the apple, as something fitting to it. The concept does not create this, but it allows you to say This is a good apple or This apple is sweet. The concept gathers and articulates what is already given. If you try to treat the apple as a stone – if you throw it against a wall and expect it not to splatter, for instance – you will be quickly corrected by reality. The apple resists your projection. It shows itself otherwise. Your concepts must adjust to it, not the other way around. Or think of the difference between a wax apple (decoration) and a real apple. They may look the same, but when you pick them up, smell them, try to eat them, the difference discloses itself. The meaning is not added from outside. It unfolds as you engage with the thing.

     I think this preserves both sides.  Reality is not reduced to thought. The apple exists whether or not we think about it. And thought is not arbitrary. Our concept of apple is not invented; it is a response to how the apple presents itself.  Thus when I say that the sweetness belongs to the being of the apple and also to the meaning of “apple” I am not identifying the two. I am saying that sweetness is part of how the apple shows itself as the kind of thing it is, and our concept reflects that showing. Being is prior; meaning is our participation in the intelligibility of being. Or more simply, the apple is not our meaning of it, but it is not without meaning; it shows itself in ways that our concepts try to express. The meaning of a thing does not create its being, but responds to it, expressing how the thing discloses itself to understanding.

    This way of understanding avoids reductionism (i.e., being is nothing but concept) since I acknowledge that being is prior and independent; and skepticism (i.e., concepts are arbitrary) because meaning is grounded in what is disclosed. The relationship between being and meaning is not identity. Being gives itself to be understood, and meaning is that understanding taking form.

     What does this entail for the essence/accident distinction? An apple can be defined in general terms, but this does not exhaust what an apple is. Sweetness is not essential to an apple, since an apple can exist without being sweet. Yet sweetness is not merely incidental either; it belongs to how an apple typically shows itself. If all apples were permanently bitter, we would say that something had gone wrong, or even that what we call an apple had changed. Here again, we see that our definitions mark boundaries, but our understanding must go further.

   We can see that understanding goes further when we attend to how things are experienced in life, in story, and in imagination. In myth and poetry, the sweetness of the apple is not treated as a minor feature, but as expressive of what the apple is: something desirable, nourishing, even tempting. In this sense, sweetness can appear almost defining, not because it is required in every case, but because it belongs to how the apple discloses itself most fully and meaningfully to us. The distinction between essence and accident therefore remains, but it must be handled with care: some features, though not essential in the strict sense, are so bound up with the way a thing shows itself that they shape our understanding of what it is.

      Let me try to lay it out. Essence (strict) is what must be there. Accident (strict) is what can vary. But within the accidental, some features are deeply expressive of what the thing is like. Myth, poetry, lived experience bring those expressive features to the foreground. There is 1) what a thing must be; 2) what it can be; and 3) what it is most characteristically. Sweetness belongs to the third.

     Thus I can say without contradiction that the scientist is right, i.e., that sweetness is not essential. And the poet is right. i.e., sweetness reveals something central. I am just trying to square a Thomist distinction with our common sense experience.

 

. . .

   

I want to use an example of bad thinking to illustrate this and to explore the idea of essence more deeply. Human beings have an essence telling us what a human being is. But we are not just a what but a who (Arendt). The not being reducible to our nature seems to belong to our essence.

    So here is the example of bad thinking (from my critical thinking coursebook). Imagine the father of a daughter who is about to finish primary school. Now this father is a university scholar of the classics and finds a Gymnasium in the city (they live in a village) that features Latin. He wishes he could have studied Latin in the 5th grade. He has dreams of his daughter following in his footsteps, obtaining an advanced university degree in the classics some day. The only alternative is the village high school (Gesamtschule). All his daughter’s friends will go there and he knows she is deeply rooted in village life but he judges her daughter’s prospects will be limited if she doesn’t follow his plan. Even if his daughter doesn’t want to study the classics, at least many more doors would be opened to her by the Gymnasium. Now the daughter wants to stay and attend the local high school but he eventually gets his way and enrolls her in the Gymnasium. It turned out to be a disaster.

    Now this is a paradigm of bad thinking because the father was confronted with a reality, a reality who he loved and knew intimately. But he could not prevent his purely subjective projections from blinding him to that reality. Good thinking, therefore, involves attending to reality, to knowing it intimately and being able to make sound judgments regarding it, impersonal in a way, objective in a way, though not like an android or a natural scientist. Not unemotional even since the father’s knowledge of his daughter is informed by his love for her. In this example, a failure of knowledge was also a failure of love.

 

    The father’s mistake can be described more precisely. He did not fail to think at all; he failed to think about this child. He allowed a general idea of education, of success, of what a good life looks like to take the place of the reality before him. He saw something true, but not the truth that mattered here.

      This brings me to the question of essence. When we speak of the essence of something, we mean what it is. But we must be careful. The essence belongs to the thing itself, not to our ideas about it. At the same time, we only grasp this essence through our concepts and definitions, which express it but do not fully capture it. The father had, in a sense, a concept of what a good education is. There is truth in it. A Gymnasium does open certain doors. The study of Latin can form the mind in valuable ways. But this concept, though not false, was applied without sufficient attention to the particular reality of his daughter. He treated what may be essential in one context as if it were essential in all.

    Moreover, the essence of a thing is not only the essence of a kind, but also the reality of a particular. His daughter is not only a human being in general, but this child: with her attachments, her temperament, her ways of responding to the world, her place within a community. To understand what is good for her requires attending not only to what belongs to human beings as such, but to who she is. This cannot be captured in a general definition or reduced to a plan.

    This shows the importance of distinguishing the essential from the accidental. An essential feature is something a thing must have to be what it is. But not everything that belongs to a thing belongs in this strict way. Some features are characteristic, fitting, expressive of what a thing is like, even if they are not required in every case. To confuse what is essential with what is merely typical, or to elevate what is good in general into something necessary in every case, is already a failure of judgment. The essence of a person is not something that can be captured in a definition or reduced to a plan. It must be known in experience, in relationship, in attention. The father did know his daughter in this way, but he did not allow that knowledge to guide his judgment. His concept of education remained too fixed, too narrow, and it overrode what he in fact knew. In the case of the daughter, attending a Gymnasium was not essential to her flourishing. True, staying with her friends is not essential either (in a strict sense). However, her rootedness, relationships, and way of being may be characteristically bound up with her flourishing.

That is exactly what the father failed to see.

    Good thinking, therefore, requires more than having the right concepts. It requires that our concepts remain answerable to reality. We must distinguish what is essential from what is accidental, but we must also recognize that our understanding of what is essential may be partial or misapplied. The failure in this case was not simply a logical error. It was a failure to let reality, in all its richness, correct and deepen one’s thinking.

In this sense, a failure of knowledge was also a failure of love. To know well is to attend, and to attend is already, in some measure, to love.