Existence Precedes Essence: Sadra vs Avicenna

[Willamena]

Does "existence precede essence" or does "essence precede existence"? Quotes are from Wikipedia.

That "existence precedes essence" states that "...reality is existence, differentiated in a variety of ways, and these different ways look to us like essences. What first affect us are things that exist and we form ideas of essences afterwards, so existence precedes essence. This position referred to as primacy of existence" (per Sadr al-Din Muhammad Shirazi, commonly known as Mulla Sadra (979 - 1050 AH; 1571-72 - 1640-41 AD).

Essence is seen as "the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity." The attributes that make a "horse" recognizably a "horse", and without which it can no longer be a "horse", are it in essence.

That "essence precedes existence" holds "...existence (wujud) as an accident that happens to the essence (mahiyya)" (per Avicenna, c. 980 AD). "Whereas existence is the domain of the contingent and the accidental, essence endures within a being beyond the accidental." This is not to imply that we can know essence apart from existence, but that it is only in existence that we know essence.

Avicenna "...argued that the fact of existence can not be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence. To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect."


Which seems more correct to you: that 'being' is essential and its existence is a property, or that 'being' is existence and its essence is its properties?

Is there any way in which the ideas come together or converge?

 

[allanpopa]

I think that this whole ontological and metaphysical project began in Plato and Aristotle.

Aristotle postulated in his Metaphysics that "What is being?" is the same question as "What is substance(essence)?" Which he devides into both "forms(eidos)" and "matter(stuff)". Unlike his predecessor and teacher, he does not contemplate the eidos in itself, through rationality. Rather he looks at both the forms and the matter realizing that we can have no knowledge of the forms outside of matter. Plato, on the other hand, contemplated the "pure forms", completely Parmenidian, changeless and perfect, timeless and transcendent; the forms existed in a purely other reality which can only be accessed by contemplation of them, ala the Analogies of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave.

Heidegger, the founder of contemporary ontology returned to the question of Being (2700 years after it was officially closed), reopened the discussion and told Aristotle that he was wrong. Being is not the substance more than it is the way the substance is percieved by Dasein; Being is presence. Heidegger owed everything to Husserlian phenomenology which bracketted the questions of skepticism and mind-world dualistic epistemologies. Rather, Husserl opened the question of perception and how things give themselves to our intentional consciousness. That is that we pay careful attention to our own conscious perceptions (as object) of the world. Heidegger modified this in talking about "ready-at-hand" and "present-at-hand" in his phenomenological ontology.

Sartre (mis?)took Heidegger in looking at the experience of the subject, beginning with that in his phenomenological project. In so doing, he moved away from ontology to discussing the subject, which exists, existentially, in a state of anxiety i.e. the human condition. In so doing, Sartre took integrated Kierkeggardian thought with his work. He further moved towards Hegelian thesis/antithesis constructionism in order to describe the essence of the human condition (ala Being and Nothingness) and he coined the slogan, "Existence precedes essence". With this slogan he constructed an existentialist philosophy of the self in which the self hovils between "being" and "nothingness" in (of course), existential anxiety.

My perspective is that the existentialist project of Sartre is deviant of the ontological project of Heidegger. I agree with Heidegger that philosophy must reorientate itself to ontology, primarily, yet, I would move more towards a post-structuralist critique of Heidegger (ala Derrida, Marion, et al.) and move towards a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence in ontology: the non-present is not non-ontological. Yet, to bring this back to the original query: existence and essence themselves are structures which we place on reality. To quote Derrida (L'écriture et la différence: 239):

(...) the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these mataphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.

I don't think that we should look for a centre or foundation upon which to build our epistemological temple, rather, we require the free-play of meanings, creating and recreating their structures without centre, with a structured genesis and an originary structure. Meaning is always already defered and never present, it is always awaiting presence, always defined on difference and never fully recieved. Philosophy begins with the question "Ti esti?" and has always answered it in terms of the presence and/or presentness of the presence of one thing or another, yet to move away from this sort of thought, to think of "Ti esti?" in terms of abandoning "essence"/"existence" dichotomies in favour of the trace and archi-trace of presence.

This would take quite some more delving in order to come to a more unambiguous answer.

Allan