ESSENCE AND EXISTENCEthe meaning of the description which must be applied to it if it is to be identified as what it is. The nominal and the real cannot be entirely divorced. But Aristotle expresses all this in terms of the concepts of substance and of matter and form, and in so doing he appears to lay himself open to the Hobbes-Locke type of criticism. What Aristotle meant by t n 搂nai is the subject of disagreement among translators and commentators. Hugh Tredennick in translating Metaphysics 1031a15 ff.) uses ssence� Joseph Owens invents an arbitrary phrase, he What-IsBeing�of a thing, and explains it in terms of the being of a thing which is the being of its form. The form is the necessary and unchanging element in a thing, in contrast with the matter and the composite, which may change, and the generic characteristics, which may belong to some other species (Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, p. 94). Aristotle thus made the concept, under which an object must fall if it is to be identified and characterized as what it is, express a timeless and necessary element in the nature of the object itself. And insofar as Hobbes, for example, wished to deny that this timeless and necessary element was what a definition could refer to, it would be difficult to disagree. But any further discussion of Aristotle could only proceed by analysis of the doctrine of matter and form. What is clear is that Aristotle inherited from Plato the notion of a range of fixed and timeless Forms, natures or essences which are embodied in the changing physical world. Less pessimistic than Plato about the possibility of knowledge of the nature of particular material objects, he retained the view that what the intellect grasps is always a form which could have been embodied in other matter. The name given to the being that the intellect grasps is oa, which W. D. Ross renders as essence, following Quintilian and Seneca, who translated it as essentia. Essentia comes to mean the nature of a thing, the answer to the question quid sit. Augustine used substantia and essentia without difference of meaning, and Boethius translated oa as substantia. From then on the word substantia was used in this sense and essentia was reserved for a new context which was first found in explicit form in Giles of Rome. This contrast is that between essence and existence, which received its completest statement in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.THOMAS AQUINAS. A substance is composite; it is an essence upon which existence has been conferred. When existence is conferred on an essence, what was hitherto merely possible becomes actual. In the case of physicalbodies, a form receives matter. Thus the concepts of essence and existence, potency and act, form and matter are mutually correlative. The notion of esse being conferred upon an essentia so that a substance is brought into being was foreign to Aristotle because the notion of creation was foreign to him. For Aristotle, analysis in terms of essence or substance was a way of approaching what already exists or is in the process of change. For Thomas, that anything at all exists must itself be explained. It is a purely contingent fact that any particular essence is an embodied existent. The only exception to this is God, in whom essence and existence are identical. But it does not follow that by grasping what God is, we can grasp that he is, as Anselm had supposed in his vision of the Ontological Argument. For we cannot grasp the divine essence.modern viewsThe vocabulary of essence and existence was preserved after the seventeenth century both by late Scholasticism and by its intellectual first cousin, rationalist metaphysics. Christian von Wolff inherited, perhaps from Francisco Surez, whose influence he acknowledged, a view of the universe as a system of essences on which God has chosen to confer existence. But his view of essence as what can be conceived as a clear and distinct idea points to the influence of Ren Descartes and in his version of the Ontological Argument we can see the confluence of John Duns Scotus and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Knowledge of essences is expressed in propositions which are necessary truths. But these necessary truths are truths about possibilities, and it is a contingent matter of God will being what it is that these particular essences have been actualized. A line of thought that is only superficially like that of rationalist metaphysics runs from Spinoza to G. W. F. Hegel. In Spinoza the essence that entails existence is that of the single substance. But this version of the Ontological Argument is only part of Spinoza whole set of theorems determining the all-inclusive Deus sive natura. Hegel treated the transition from essence to existence as part of the logical play with concepts that is an essential preliminary to the world of becoming. Of course we cannot deny that being is; but that, for Hegel, is only because the assertion is so bare and empty. When we deal with the realm of becoming, we have the sharpest of contrasts between the Was-sein (essence) and the Das-sein (existence), as Friedrich von Schelling, the enemy of all clear distinctions, complained. The notion of an essence as a fixed possibility whose character may be delimited apart from our acquaintance350 �2nd editionENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY
