Essence precedes existence.

Essence precedes existence.

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Define essence

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Esssence is essentially what is essential to something

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        I heard this a long time ago and it sounds like just as much vague bullshit now as it did then but since this is the only philosophy thread in catalogue have a bump.

        so you mean existence is contingent, whereas essence is necessary

        recanned Aquinas delivered via frogpost

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >I heard this a long time ago and it sounds like just as much vague bullshit now as it did then but since this is the only philosophy thread in catalogue have a bump.
          I'm not even joking. I've read a fair bit of philosophy. I can talk in depth about Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, and Heidegger. But I still don't know what Sartre means by existence precedes essence or whenever people say that existence is not a predicate. I give up on this gay shit, I'm filtered.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            "essentially what is essential" is poor phrasing, you should try and avoid presupposing the consequent grammatically

            read Bacon

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            you quoted the wrong guy

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            A cup is not a cup due to the essence of cup. Material is molded into a functional cup, and only then, when it exists, does that function become its essence.

            ...or man did not arrive to fill some platonic mold, but instead came into existence before the essence of man was a thing.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Essence? That's uhm... uhhh... well, essence is being, and existence is like when you're being and uhhh... huh.

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Essence is an half assed understanding of Existence
    Forms do not exist outside of us conceptualizing them, this world is made of gradients.

    Platonism is intellectual fecal matter

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      if essence didn't exist in of itself, then it would be impossible for you to know the objects of your conceptualization

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Those conceptual objects form as the result of repeated experience, pattern recognition, and linguistic labels. The mind sorts objects into convenient categories as needed and to facilitate communication. Those categories do not exist without a mind to create them, and not all minds agree upon which objects go into which categories, thus there is no prerequisite essence.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          The conceptual objects may be created by your mind, but without some kind of internal intuition about what those objects are describing, then you would not have the ability to know them.
          >not all minds agree upon which objects go into which categories, thus there is no prerequisite essence.
          Disagreement does not mean something does not exist.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >without some kind of internal intuition about what those objects are describing, then you would not have the ability to know them
            I don't believe this is true, the mind, particularly the young mind, is a pattern recognition machine, and that's all. If it never sees the color blue, it doesn't know what blue is, and instead identifies it as one of the colors it does know, as we've learned from various linguistic studies. If it had some intuition of objects a priori, we'd never have disagreements as to identifications.

            I suspect SOME of it is instinctual, basic fundamentals like round, soft, hard, symmetry, etc., but "cup" is artificial, and requires the existence of said before its essence can be imagined. Even "man" isn't instinctual, as feral children tragically demonstrate.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >If it never sees the color blue, it doesn't know what blue is, and instead identifies it as one of the colors it does know, as we've learned from various linguistic studies.
            Then how do we come to know the color blue as a color distinct from other colors?
            >If it had some intuition of objects a priori, we'd never have disagreements as to identifications.
            I don't buy this. No two people have the exact same level of background knowledge.
            >I suspect SOME of it is instinctual, basic fundamentals like round, soft, hard, symmetry, etc., but "cup" is artificial, and requires the existence of said before its essence can be imagined.
            I'm willing to concede that some concepts are entirely conceptual, e.g. cups
            >Even "man" isn't instinctual, as feral children tragically demonstrate.
            I don't know what you mean by this. Essence is related to potential.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >Then how do we come to know the color blue as a color distinct from other colors?
            You don't, if you don't have a word for blue. It's green. You have to put two greens together and make a new word for the darker/lighter one, but if you don't do that at young enough an age, an adult will still have difficulty distinguishing the color. Again, learned, not instinct or a priori knowledge.

            Granted, there's effectively infinite color gradients in the visible spectrum, and since we didn't make a system of words to describe them in RGB values, we don't have names for them all, so much as numbers. Tetrachromatics, however, have no way to describe the extra colors they see to the rest of us (though they can tell us most of them rest in a brown spectrum we can't see).

            >I don't know what you mean by this. Essence is related to potential.
            Feral children often do not recognize themselves as human, nor recognize other humans as their own, thus even the "essence" of man, is not a priori, but learned (presumably as an infant).

            >I'm willing to concede that some concepts are entirely conceptual, e.g. cup
            I'm willing to concede that some properties are instinctual, but essence is artificial, an assemblage of fundamental properties, the number of which increase with experience.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >You don't, if you don't have a word for blue. It's green. You have to put two greens together and make a new word for the darker/lighter one, but if you don't do that at young enough an age, an adult will still have difficulty distinguishing the color. Again, learned, not instinct or a priori knowledge.
            How do we learn about the first color?

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Probably someone realized X thing was poisonous, and told people to avoid anything that looked like that, and thus passed this valuable knowledge down to subsequent generations. Suspect the first word for a color was also the word for a particular fruit, as while that's prehistory, it isn't unusual in some primitive languages. Red does not an apple make, is likely a post-agriculture notion.

            Granted, the color exists whether you have a concept for it or not, lest you wanna go pure anti-phenomenology solipsism, but the concept is learned.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            As far as anyone can tell, new colors are typically named after fruits/flowers/materials/etc, so that's a good guess even if we lost the etymology.

            There are various incremental/evolutionary theories for the origin of color, and interesting cases to study.
            It's noted that if there are only two colors, they will black and white (or dark and light rather, or thick and thin)
            If there's a third color, it's invariably "red" (note that because no other colors exist, that's a very broad range of hues!)
            The 4th is "green" (or blue), later to be split into green/blue once more color are added but not before yellow is recognized.

            Thus the ancient Japanese reckoned that there are 4 colors: "black", "white", "red" and "blue". I use scare quotes because naturally they're not equivalent to the modern concepts of these colors, their etymological red is really "dusk", that sun on their flag, their blue is green-blue "grass" etc
            For the other colors, or when they needed to be specific, they just used pseudo-adjectives like "peach-colored" (pink) or "tea-colored" (brown) or "onion-colored" (yellow), wheat-colored (yellowish-brown) etc etc, which were conceptually different from the fundamental 4 they identified. Eventually some of those were so useful that they joined the other 4 in being standard colors, but even now their names remain stuff like "tea-color" instead of having a proper term. For comparison "ivory" and "orange" and "emerald" became colors in our languages, but there's no distinction to mark orange as not being a proper color.

            Speaking of, in China and the East Asia, they look at the rainbow and see 5 colors associated with their cardinal directions (including the center.) The ancients and the naturalists generally saw 7 because that's the sacred number in our culture (days of the week, the visible planets, musical notes...) Aristotle saw 3 or 4, red blue and green with maybe yellow in the middle, note the compatibility with RYB or RGB schemes.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Forget about the history. How does a baby come to learn about their first color, whatever shade it may be?

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >Forget about the history.
            This is IQfy, sorry.
            >How does a baby come to learn about their first color
            Dunno, why don't you ask one?
            If I had to guess, it's because they're taught the colors by adults isn't it? It's not like a baby is born with the word "red" on the tip of their tongue.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Mommy points to apple and says "Red", points to ball and says, "Red". Baby tries to eat ball, and realizes "red != food", and tries to match the word with the commonality found in other objects until it learns the concept of red (and possibly colors).

            That, and shit like pic related.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            (Forgets pic related)

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >This is IQfy, sorry.
            History and HUMANITIES.

            Learning is more than acquiring names. The understanding must precede the name or else naming is useless.

  3. 2 years ago
    Une Chienne Andalou

    >essence precedes existence
    I have one question for you. Is “essence” real? That is, does essence exist??

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      It is real, but it does not exist.

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Just dissociate the material world with the world of abstractions of the intellect and you're set.

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Colors do not exist outside of our heads.
    They're just mental interpretations of certain wavelength of light our ocular cells manage to detect.
    Certain animals can see beyond the visible spectrum, meaning they would see more colors than we do. They can see infrared, UVs or radio waves.
    Colors are not even universal, how exactly you perceive "red" might not be how I or anyone else perceive it. Some people "smell" or "hear" colors, it's called synesthesia. Neural plasticity make it so no one has an identically wired brain and experience things differently.

    Same with forms, it's all just pattern recognition, what our senses manage to detect and how our brain interpret that information, simplifying or accomodating it... which is why you can be tricked by optical illusions.
    Our brain takes many shortcuts... not that it is a bad thing, we would be unable to navigate our surrounding world if it didn't.

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    > Essence precedes existence
    > that means I can be a woman!!!

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      essence preceding existence means you can't be a woman IMO. if gender is an essence then you can't just call yourself a woman. you have to be born it. that's why trans seethe against "gender essentialists" like TERFs

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