Ok, so what's the difference between SUBSTANCE and ESSENCE?
Aristotle's metaphysics
Noah Harris
Isaiah Kelly
Substances are things that can be described. Primary substances are simply the real individual things that actually exist, like trees, men, dogs. "Secondary" substances are the predicates of primary substances, i.e. the concepts used to describe them, like "tree," "man," dog," "mammal" "animal," "being."
It can be said of the individual man that he is currently alive, or that he is fat or tired, but it cannot be said of the concept "man" that it is fat or tired, or currently alive. Only individual existing things, primary substances, can have "accidental" properties (ad-cadens, "falling/going with" / sum-bebikos, "going with"). It can "happen to" or "befall" a real, individual dog, in its contingent existence, that it loses a leg, and many other things not stipulated by the concept "dog," because the real, contingently existing dog has real existence (it is a primary substance), and all sorts of things can happen to it that don't negate its existence entirely (at least not immediately).
But the concept "dog" itself has no accidental properties, it only has essential ones: ones that make the concept what it is. A dog, considered essentially i.e. conceptually, has essential properties (it is a dog, which is a species of animal, which is a "species" or sub-type of mammal, which is a species of living thing, which is a species of being in general).
The original Greek Aristotle uses for "essence" translates, loosely, to "the 'what it is' that the thing is." A particular, really existing dog is a primary substance, and its essence is the total conceptual description necessary to describe what it essentially is. It is not part of the essence "dog" that the dog is currently tired, or sleeping. Those are accidental properties, i.e. they are properties that have simply happened to accrue to this particular dog at this particular time (or not). But it is essential to this dog that it is a living being, that it was born and can reproduce, that it feels hunger and must eat to live, that it "ideally" has four legs.
"Ideal" here can be understood as meaning "in accordance with its essence." Hence Aristotle's sometimes implicit, often explicit metaphysical ethics of things according with their ideal form. A dog with three legs is sub-ideal. If it's part of man's very essence to be virtuous (let's assume), then an unvirtuous man is sub-ideal. This is Aristotle's version of Plato's forms. Unlike Plato, he denies that the forms are themselves "things," floating in some other realm, i.e. he denies that they are primary substances with individual, independent being.
Aaron Nelson
Aristotle is a realist with regard to what are often called "natural kinds." The modern Darwinian would argue that there is no essence "dog," there are just genes that create spectra of creatures we identify as dogs, and even these genes are not "natural kinds," they are themselves little conglomerations of material that just happen to do certain things when they interact with the cell's machinery, etc., etc. Aristotle seems to think the world is a complete and finished (or at least relatively finished) whole, in which a hierarchy of beings "strive upward" for form, from base matter, to plants and animals, to man, and all are ultimately oriented toward God (who does not strive or need to strive, and doesn't interact with the world except by a kind of "gravity" exerted on the whole system, because the whole world tends toward perfection and "completeness" and God is the pinnacle of this).
All sorts of problems are entailed by Aristotle's system, not least its apparent incompatibility with materialism (the view that there are no "natural kinds" of things aside from the fundamental building blocks of matter, whatever those may be) and nominalism (the view, usually joined with materialism, that there are no natural concepts of things, or that our concepts of things do not "commune" with the essences of things in any way, and we simply "name" things like dog and man and Socrates according to habit and custom).
Even if one rejects materialism and nominalism there are still difficulties of explaining the ontological status and nature of secondary substances (concepts), often called "universals" (because they range indifferently over whole groups of things - "Socrates" only designates one person, but "Man" is "universally" valid for all particular men). Aristotle seems to want to deny any independence for Plato's forms, and prefers to say they are "in" the natural kinds of things that embody them and pass them on, but it isn't clear what this means or how it would work. Hence many Aristotelians read him as more platonic than he may have liked, although there are also plenty of nominalist Aristotelians who reduce his whole framework to a conceptual tool or "dialectic," the utility/validity of which then becomes suspect if one is inclined toward materialism and Darwinism.
But there's a reason Heidegger said one should spend 10-15 years studying Aristotle deeply before trying to be an original philosopher.
Eli Torres
Essences can be thought of as internal powers that ‘tend’ objects toward their ends. For example, the essence of a human being includes rationality, which tends human beings toward their ultimate end, i.e., ‘the good life’, or ‘eudaimonia’. Aristotle’s metaphysics is teleological, so all things ultimately tend toward something in virtue of what they fundamentally are. Hence, to understand essence, the connection between ends and essence (i.e., the ‘what it is’ of a thing) must also be understood.
Another user already described substance.
Nolan Miller
De Anima is a good way to supplement your reading of Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. As I grow older and read more philosophy I tend to appreciate Aristotle more than I did initially. Heidegger was right.
Carson Edwards
Substance is what it is.
Essence is what it can be.
David Gray
So a primary substance doesn't have essence, and essence is just a sum of properties assigned to secondary substances? It's weird, it sounds like the essence of a thing lives in the mind of a subjective observer. But I expect that this essence is meant to be objective somehow?
Luis Gonzalez
Primary substances do have essences, it's what gives them form. In the simplest sense, you can think of it sort of like their "recipe" (to put it crudely). All the different material forces in a dog aren't what hold the dog together, at least not by themselves. Those material forces are organised in a "whole that is other than the sum of its parts." Without the essence, the form or recipe or concept or archetype of the thing, it would no longer BE what it is, so even if you froze time and brought a bunch of matter together into the superficial semblance of a dog, presumably at least, in the absence of a form it would just disperse according to the "lesser" laws governing the material components.
That seems to be what ARISTOTLE thought, anyway. Your mind is doing what most people's minds tend to do when reading him, which is waver been treating him as a realist (objective), and reading him as a nominalist (a concept creator and/or describer), because at least if he's a nominalist, one doesn't have to deal with tricky questions like "So what is this 'form' and 'where' is it located?" But if one reads Aristotle's biological treatises, particularly the sections on reproduction, it becomes pretty clear that Aristotle thought that something real was being passed on from parent organism to child organism (whether a fetus or a seed).
To go back to the dog being more than the sum of its parts example above, it's easier to imagine what Aristotle had in mind when you imagine a load of unformed protoplasm (cum + egg). Aristotle was trying to figure out how you go from a mushy unformed substance to something formed. That's what makes him so brilliant and fascinating to study, is that underneath any seemingly just weird idea he has, you discover the initial motivation for proposing it, and you realise that Aristotle had a knack for putting his finger right on the central mysteries and wonders of nature, like the problem "WHEN exactly, and how exactly, does the protoplasm become a formed being? Where does 'being-formed' come from in nature, what IS it?"
Thomas Fisher
It's why he proposes his four causes. They aren't just a catalogue of interesting causes, he's trying to lay everything out that needs explaining and explain it as parsimoniously as possible:
>Clearly there is 'stuff', the protoplasm is there and somehow gets 'taken up into' the final being, and seems necessary for its growth (material cause)
>Clearly there are conventional real-world instances of causation, like someone initiating the protoplasm's growth into an organism by inseminating his wife (efficient cause, the cause that effected or set off the process)
>Clearly there is a formal "ground" for things being, and staying!, the way they "are"; otherwise why would the protoplasm become SOME-THING, instead of just becoming another lump of protoplasm? (form-al cause)
>Clearly there is a TENDENCY in things that MAKES them TEND toward their form, as if by "intent," as if they "want" to be "complete" or "completely what they are" (final cause, the cause that tends toward the "final point" or "end" of something)
It's easier to understand this if you realise there are multiple senses of "cause." When we say cause in modern English we tend to think only of efficient causes. But in German for example, you can say "Grund" for cause, literally "ground," the "grounds for something being the way it is," and this is closer to Aristotle's meaning because it maintains the ambiguity between different kinds of cause (you can both say "the Grund for me waking up was my alarm clock going off" and "the Grund of reality existing is God's continuously, and not just initially, willing it to exist").
Again this is patently anthropomorphic in places, so some people will just dismiss it as prima facie absurd - he is clearly talking about how natural things, natural kinds of things, "want" or "strive" to reach an "end goal." He is extrapolating from human processes of thinking, planning, and doing (I see the "end" of the completed "form" of a barn in my mind; I act efficiently to put the "materials" together, until the barn is perfectly what it ought to be, or close to it). But you can also see he's also staying incredibly close to the raw givenness of the processes themselves, unlike a "common sense" materialist, who might just reflexively assume that nothing is real except atoms and maybe energy fields.
In doing so, Aristotle is doing what the Greeks called saving the phenomena, i.e. he is keeping a healthy and mindful separation between the phenomenon to be described and his description of it. Or at least, reading Aristotle carefully and recovering what he "saw" and felt needed describing in the first place is often a very good way to save the phenomena for oneself. But it's also frustrating and fascinating at the same time because of the ambiguities. The ambiguities are why these debates raged for centuries and why people can get lost in baroque versions of Aristotelianism that seem to solve them once and for all, like Aquinas for some people.
Angel Flores
>Primary substances do have essences, it's what gives them form.
So primary substances have essences, and secondary substances have nothing but essence? Is the secondary substance then the primary substance stripped of accidental properties, and the two types of substances are tied together by having the same essence? The same essence exists in both the primary substance and the secondary substance of the same thing, tying beings with concepts? If you reject nominalism and materialism, what are valid critiques of this?
Bentley Martin
I don't really see anything wrong with it to be honest. Seems more solid than Plato's forms, and not any worse than materialism or what have you. I understand there's an aversion to teleology because of the Newtonian mechanistic view, but I don't really see anything wrong with it.
Jacob Long
Bump
Charles Edwards
havent read, but using brain,
>substance is physcial object you can interact with with your hands or body
>essence is the indescribable subjective experience when meditating on the substance
Ian Lopez
>using brain
We don't do that here.
Kevin Cooper
>havent read
It shows
David Campbell
Does anyone actually read this shit and find it interesting? I find that so hard to believe.
Julian Perry
It allows me to act as a pseud in front of normies and also call out other pseuds when theiy are pseuding at normies. Which is literally the most interesting reason to read any book ever.
Aiden Cox
>I find it hard to believe people care about metaphysics on a literature board
Nathaniel Hughes
I understand wanting to know it just because it's been read for millenia and it inspired lots of different thought throughout the ages. But actually reading it, flipping through the pages - are you really glued to it?
I guess
Jordan Fisher
>I understand wanting to know it just because it's been read for millenia and it inspired lots of different thought throughout the ages.
I don't understand this perspective. Are you saying we advanced past their theories and they've been refuted? Because that's not the case. I read them for what they are.
>But actually reading it, flipping through the pages - are you really glued to it?
100%. It's my favorite thing to read, and I've been doing it regularly for years.
Wyatt Baker
No, I just mean that it has a high status, is influential, and so you sort of want to know why.
If you are glued to it, that's cool, I guess. I don't really believe you though.
Liam Wood
>so you sort of want to know why.
Well, I know why. Because it's good. But okay.
Anthony Carter
Imagine writing all this and still failing to answer OP's question in any even remotely coherent way.
This is the only helpful post itt.
Adam Collins
But that user explained the same things about essence in more detail and tried to explained substance too.
Jacob Cook
Samuel Lee
zoomer phoneposters are an aggressive cancer
Carson Thomas
>Air-is-total
Adam Morales
the excitement comes from teaching it, or knowing something before somebody else
Thomas Perry
The terminology is fucked, this is why you should always seek out the actual Ancient Greek terms.
Essence or Secondary Substance is what type of "species" a Primary Substance belongs to. Think of species as in 'specific' not as in biology. Primary Substances can have multiple essences.
dmmbphilosophy.wordpress.com
>Secondary ousia– Essence- cannot exist independently, but instead shares in universal characteristics. Ex: Aristotle as a philosopher. (One cannot understand Aristotle as a philosopher unless Aristotle is first understood as an individual being).
Aristotle is the primary substance, and he is a "philosopher" but he can also be a "father" or a "homeowner".
I think part of the confusion comes form the fact that we think of the word "Substance" in English as referring to physical matter. "It is a hard substance" "Look at that oily substance over there" this is not what Aristotle means. A particular piece of furniture is a "primary substance", it doesn't matter if it's made of wood or gold or stone or plastic, the entire object not the material it's made of is the primary substance. Now what is the 'essence' or secondary substance of this piece of furniture? Is it a table, a throne, a bed? If it's essence is a swivel chair it may double as a dining table - it has two essences.
There are many beds - we know what they look like, but a bed cannot exist independent of some primary substance. There are many philosophers, there are many fathers, but the Primary Substance of Aristotle is different to the Primary Substance of Plato
Easton Cox
I don't understand the difference between final causes and formal causes. Doesn't the form/essence more or less establish the telos as well?
Camden Davis
>I don't understand the difference between final causes and formal causes.
The 'formal cause' of a chair is the way the pieces of wood or the mold that the plastic is poured into to give the material its shape (think about how with lego you can use the same blocks to produce different objects).
The final cause usually means 'why?' For example, a chair is for sitting. Aristotle specifically gives the example of the final cause of walking is "good health". However where things get confusing is that the final cause doesn't have to have intentionality. I think Aristotle gives the example of molars, they are flat and large (formal cause) because it is advantageous for us because it helps us masticate plant matter (final cause).
> Doesn't the form/essence more or less establish the telos as well?
All the causes do. The final cause can't be without the material, formal and proximate causes.
Chase Davis
essence is like bro that's essential
substance is like this is substantial
Adam Hall
>I don't understand the dilemma therefore it's false
Charles Miller
Huh? So the formal case relates to the shape? What's the formal case of a human, just the human shape? What does this have to do with form as in ideal forms?
David Sullivan
I tried reading this book and only could understand like 30% of it
Josiah Scott
Aristotle rejected the idea of Ideal Forms that was postulated by Plato. A thing receives its Telos from man or the Gods ("Natural Teleology" comes from the Olympians, of which there are 47-55).
>What's the formal case of a human, just the human shape?
Yes. "Form" in Aristotle is "just the shape".
Nathaniel Foster
I know he rejected Plato's forms, but I'm really not convinced "form" for Aristotle is just "shape".
For example here (plato.stanford.edu
>ohe appeals to it in his De Anima, by treating soul and body as a special case of form and matter
which sounds like soul is the form here (nothing to do with shape)
Later it says:
>The word “form” may misleadingly suggest that what is acquired in a case of substantial generation is simply a shape, and this impression is reinforced by some of the examples that Aristotle uses, especially when focusing on artefacts: plausibly the form of a bronze statue just is its shape. When we consider organisms, however, it becomes apparent that having the right shape is not sufficient to possess the form. A thing’s form is its definition or essence—what it is to be a human being, for example. A statue may be human-shaped, but it is not a human, because it cannot perform the functions characteristic of humans: thinking, perceiving, moving, desiring, eating and growing, etc. The connection between a thing’s form and its function emerges in Physics ii 3, where Aristotle distinguishes his four kinds of cause: material, formal, efficient, and final, and suggests a special connection between the formal and final cause.
Lucas Ross
>As I grow older and read more philosophy I tend to appreciate Aristotle more than I did initially. Heidegger was right.
Care to elaborate? Especially on De Anima, certain of his conclusions have been proven wrong my modern science.
Jayden Ward
I just appreciate the way his ideas mesh to form a comprehensive system of thought, complete with a metaphysics and detailed description of ‘the soul’ that undergird his ethics. Everything fits extremely well and when reading it you realize that it’s the product of an extremely careful, observant mind. The Ancient Greeks seem to have genuinely ‘seen’ the the world behave very differently to how we see it through our Newtonian lens. Our folk metaphysics are a lot more stripped down and bare bones than Aristotle’s were. I think Aristotle’s theory of the four causes illustrates this, i.e., we tend to ‘see’ things happen and interpret them exclusively in terms of what Aristotle would’ve called ‘efficient causation’, whereas an Aristotelian interpretation of any given event would take three additional ‘causes’ into consideration.
I don’t think his theories being overturned by modern science is especially important when it comes to assessing the work on its own terms, i.e., as Ancient Greek philosophy, not an up-to-date theory of reality.
Sebastian Foster
Thanks for elaborating, I see what you mean now. What philosophical system/s do you support? I'm sure there are more than a few anons here that would contest your claims about greek philosophy (or at least contest it partially, because people are debating about Aristotle's metaphysics nowadays even if they aren't about his zoology, for example).
Oliver Moore
>What philosophical system/s do you support?
I tend to shy away from systematic metaphysical theories of everything and gravitate more toward epistemic ‘approaches’ to interpreting reality, such as empiricism. Hume’s work influenced me when I was younger. Now, I’d say I’m in broad agreement on questions of metaphysics and epistemology with many of the thinkers referenced in this article. Karl Popper’s work in ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ comes to mind.
Joseph Reed
>certain of his conclusions have been proven wrong my modern science.
Which ones? Are they related to philosophy or empirical science?
Elijah Anderson
>Karl Popper’s work in ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ comes to mind.
>plato.stanford.edu
Lol
Eli Nelson
Huehuehue guess what. I read NE, then Metaphysics and I just bought... De Anima but the delivery company fucked something up so I have to wait.
Ethan Parker
How come the Greeks never had the mind-body problem?
Noah White
Essence don't real just use your brain to figure it out. Btw fuck Plato
Alexander gang rise up
Jackson Lewis
Zeno's paradox and Heraclitus river. Dissolving mereological arguments and unifying absolutist arguments converge each other in scope.
Cooper Davis
Good question deserves more than this off the hip explanation I gave
Descartes was a christkek
Luke Martin
>Lol Karl Popper was Jewish bro!
>He was friends with le George Soros bro!
Okay, but the demarcation problem is still an interesting problem and falsification is a better way to test the veracity of theories than most other approaches.
Bentley Perry
>Huh? So the formal case relates to the shape?
It can include the shape and is perhaps easiest to think of it that way, but it's more the 'arrangement' of the material. Think about how with an anagram the same phonemes in different orders produce different words. Yes, the phonemes are the 'material cause' in this case.
> What's the formal case of a human, just the human shape?
Sorta, I mean most definitions of a human revolve around being hairless and bipedal. But think about things like the heart, your digestive system.
>What does this have to do with form as in ideal forms?
That's Plato
>A statue may be human-shaped, but it is not a human, because it cannot perform the functions characteristic of humans: thinking, perceiving, moving, desiring, eating and growing, etc
Yes, because it lacks a lot of the internal machinery, it is shaped liked a human, but it is not identical in shape to a human.
Remember that not only can you have multiple of each cause (a piece of jewellery is made of silver and sapphires, a cake is made from flour, water, eggs, sugar etc.), but Aristotle explicitly states that you can can General and Specific causes.
>"This statue was made by a Sculptor" vs. "This statue was made by the Athenian Sculptor Polytechnes"
They believed the soul resided in the body, Aristotle believed it was in the heart, others the brain. No reason to differentiate or separate.
Leo Perry
>They believed the soul resided in the body,
No they didn't lmao
Charles Johnson
It's better to translate cause as principle (or even explanation) generally. Even "efficient cause" gets misused sometimes because it gets treated like a cause in a chain of cause-and-effect, when that is only one possible meaning.
Kevin Gonzalez
They did
Aristotle actually argued that the soul was coextensive with the body in De Anima, or at least it was his most favored explanation. There are other excerpts where he assumed the soul is centered in the heart. It's possible he meant the essence of the person is in the heart, and the primary substance spread throughout the body (which also applies to plants, minus the heart).
Lincoln Mitchell
Because they didn't hypostatize the mind or reason in the way moderns did. It's true, logos was always treated with great respect, but it was never seen as something uniquely human or necessarily related to consciousness as such. The human mind lacked certain associations which it gained in modern philosophy. Read De Anima and you'll find what some modern commentators consider to be "lack of introspection" on Aristotle's part, because he does not privilege his own consciousness or mind over anything else.
James Cooper
>They did
Here bro, read some wikipedia before embarrassing yourself more en.wikipedia.org
Cooper Moore
Rationality was seen as uniquely human by both Plato and Aristotle
Carter Harris
>Implying all the Greeks are Plato
>implying you can retrofit post-Kantian concepts onto the Ancient Greeks
>implying Wikipedia is written by people who actually have any understanding of Ancient Greek and thus any clue what the actual intent of Philosophers were
Big oof chief.
Carter Clark
Extremely cringe backpeddling
Adam Perry
There is a mind-body distinction in a platonic dialogue, the First Alcibiades.
Julian Reyes
Not raising a counterargument is even more cringe. What's even worse is this user came up with receipts that you didn't. But I again would counter: what is the explicit terminology used to distinguish 'soul' and 'body'. You can't straight off assume it directly overlaps with the Cartesian concept.
Luke Baker
>Not raising a counterargument is even more cringe.
Counterargument to what dimwit?
>Why did Greeks not have the mind-body problem?
>Greeks believed the soul resided in the body
>No, one of the greatest and most influential Greek philosopher had an entire philosophy around the body being immaterial
>NOT ALL GREEKS ARE PLATO
You're just retarded