Day 2 – ESSENCE OR EXISTENCE?

If “To the things themselves!” is phenomenology’s slogan, then existentialism’s is: “Existence precedes essence.” Traditional Euro-American philosophy (and perhaps some, but certainly not all, philosophical traditions) presupposes that the particular shape a thing’s existence takes originates from a pre-existing core: the essence of the thing. That essence is something like Mencius’ sprouts: a (metaphorical) genetic code which contains the blueprints for the existence of a particular kind of thing; anything that is the same kind of thing will have the same code. So these codes, or essences, reveal the character of particular categories of things; we learn how each thing will exist by learning that essence all things of that category have. And that means they also reveal what a good (natural, authentic, fulfilled, satisfied) existence will look like for that particular category. Existentialism suggests otherwise. It claims that human beings (at least) don’t have essences; there is no genetic code for the “Human Being.” Instead, our existences are radically open-ended: every action, decision, or thought could have been otherwise, because no essence dictates what they must be.