Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

of essence provided by ancient philosophy:

What’s left of a substance when all its qualities are removed. And:

The thing about a substance that makes it unique from other substances.

(I’ve used the word substance in these definitions, but its probably not crucial to the argument if we were to substitute ‘thing’ or ‘something’.)

Taking the first of these definitions, clearly this was the dilemma posed earlier. There seem to be only qualities (and if we took ‘relation’ to be a quality, we are even worse off), so for now we seem forced to conclude, on this basis, that essence does not exist. But the more mysterian definition of form offered a solution to the ancients, as well as some later philosophers.

But it’s the second definition of essence that perhaps offers us greater scope. What is it that is unique to a thing? What makes a thing into a something? It is relationship. Every object has a unique relationship to its surroundings and to other objects. ‘Relation’ may be just another quality, but it is the quality that cannot be removed. It has to be unique to every ‘something’ — and therefore, by our definition, relation is a ‘something’s’ essence. And we could say that this exists even if no-one observes it. Every something has an essence. Being is the same as essence, according to Duns Scotus. As such, individual things can differ from each other in terms of form, but not in terms of matter. This, I think, is as close a description as we can get of the principles that

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