Essence and Existence [addendum]
There was a lively and extended debate in Islamic philosophy over the relative status of essence and existence. Avicenna argued that existence is preceded by essence, in that everything that exists only comes into existence because it is brought into existence by something else, except for the ultimate existent, God, the necessary being. Many things might exist, they have essences, but unless something brings them to existence they will remain mere essences without existence. So essence precedes existence. This view was challenged by Averroes, who argued that in an eternal universe anything that could exist would exist, and the existence of a thing is not just an attribute added onto it, but is an essential aspect of its meaning. In any case, if existence is an additional attribute, suggested Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī, then essence would have to exist before the attribute was applied for it to be an essence, and an infinite regress is started. He took this stance to show that essence precedes existence since the latter is only an idea with no reality attached to it, and it is essence that characterizes reality.
Despite Averroes's arguments, the principle that essence is the most basic concept in ontology was widely accepted in Islamic philosophy right up to the time of Mullā Ṣadrā. Mullā Ṣadrā entirely reversed al-Suhrawardī's thesis, arguing that existence is equivalent to reality. This is because existence is a necessary aspect of what it is for something to exist and so there is no regress in treating the concept as an attribute. Reality is existence, albeit manifested in a variety of different ways, and these different ways appear to one to be essences. What affects one are things that exist, and one forms ideas of essences after they impinge themselves on one, so there is no doubt that one sees here a theory in which existence precedes essence.
The significance of the debate lies in what it tells of the nature of philosophy. For Avicenna and al-Suhrawardī, philosophy is the study of the essences or ideas of things, and one then moves on to wonder whether and how far they exist. For Averroes and Mullā Ṣadrā, philosophy is a study of existing things, and as one knows more about them one knows more about their properties, but they can have no properties unless they first exist. Averroes criticized the doctrine of essentialism since it implies that something has to come from outside of something to bring it to existence, and this implies that the universe constantly requires an outside force to activate it. He saw Aristotle as arguing that the natural world consists of entities that have to have the properties they have, and that if they exist they have to exist since otherwise they would be different (i.e., nonexistent) things. Taking any other position makes the acme of Aristotelian science, the definition, vacuous, since it suggests that there are aspects of a thing (its existence) that might or might not be present, thus reducing the power of the definition.
The position that is taken on essence and existence also affects the way in which philosophy is done. An essentialist uses thought experiments in philosophy, since the imagination can rule on what notions are possible or otherwise. So Avicenna and his school accordingly used examples and potentialities to explore ideas and assess their possibility. If one's imagination cannot make sense of an idea, then that idea lacks possibility and so the state of affairs that it describes cannot exist. Those who are opposed to essentialism are critical of imagination in philosophy, since they argue that envisaging a possibility does not give one useful information about what is actually a possible existent.
Aristotle; Averroes; Avicenna; Islamic Philosophy; Mullā ṢAdrā; Suhrawardī, Shihāb Al-Dīn Yaḥyā.
Bibliography
Leaman, Oliver. Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, and Oliver Leaman. History of Islamic Philosophy. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1996.
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