Neither L'existence Précède L'essence Nor Essentia Precedes Existentia, But Both

To Sartre, existence precedes essence; to Heidegger, essence precedes existence. Both fundamental stipulations of philosophical systems, or sets of systems, in which the ancients and the moderns pit themselves in locked horns.

The Essentia Set or the Essence Set as the prime set of historical philosophy; the L'existence Set or the Existence Set as the prime set of modernist philosophy. The Essence Set as the superset dedicated to the search and argument for the essence of being. 

The Existence Set as the superset devoted to the examination and discourse on the existence of being. In either case, the logical orientation of one in relation to the other creates a sense of time or a necessitation of temporality for completion of a set, as such.

In this, the Existence Set characterized, properly, as existence precedes essence. Where the existence of an object or a subject comes before its essence. In some existentialist philosophy, we can consider this a formulation of self-creation, not because of but, in spite of the environment in which one finds oneself.

For the Essence Set, the appropriately staged as essence precedes existence. Where the essence of an object or subject pre-exists its actual existence. This becomes the basis of the separation between essence and existence, or existence and essence, in either formulation. 

The existence of something comprises its actuality in reality, as in something being in the world rather than not being in the world. This being in the world comes as an antipode to not being in the world. 

Not to be in reality comprises non-existence, while to be in the world comprises existence, in a philosophical sense, a traditional sense, these become, indeed, binary propositions about objects and subjects in existence and existence, Itself.

In that, the philosophical systems on offer provide a sense of the absolute in a reality of the philosophical or a discourse of the thought out rather than the thought out and tested against experience.

Existence does seem profound as if the only thing mattering in a world of sense, spite, and the Sun. Something mysterious in its evident-ness, though evident to the self as the self is self-evident to oneself. 

This explains the power and profundity proposed by existentialist school philosophers about existence coming first. The existence of something present before the self and then the self makes an essence or nature out of the existence.

The existential becomes a means by which to create an essence out of existence, hence “existence precedes essence,” as in an essence comes out of the creative possibility manifold of the existent. If nothing existed, what essence to create? 

This is the legacy of existentialism. In turn, the essentialists, who propose the primary stature of the essence, invert this or proposed this first, and then those who came later, e.g., existentialists, reversed the proposition to existence first and essence second. 

The essentialists proposing something of human nature beyond the existent, as in the essence exists in some pre-existent capacity or comes as a constraint, as nature, binding the possibilities of an object or a subject to materially operate in such a manner or to act in such a manner, respectively. 

The essence could come as a platonic Idea or the nature of the subject, or object. To make matters complex, these become dividers when connected in terms of the chicken or the egg of the matter. Which came first, essence or existence?

This explains the dictums of existence precedes essence and essence precedes existence. It comes as a matter of one or the other, and never the twain. Yet, either twangs the mind in an awkward inorganic sound, something ugly in the first and in the second.

Some principle of the ugly pervades either belying particular incorrectness of concept and principle or in formulations seen in both. The existence of something without an essence would seem to tell the tale of the Materialists.

While the essence of something without an existence would seem to explain the stories of the Spiritualists. Why one without the other? Why one preceding the other? As in, a temporality of sense hidden in the dictums; that which explains the problem and provides a more comprehensive solution to either.

In that, the essence of something amounts to its nature. Something seemingly incorporeal, other, created without the actuality of an existent thing as out there in some multi-infinite realm outside of the singular finite unicity of the universe. 

The existence of something may reflect an essence or contain an essence, but the essence exists outside of the existence of something as if accessed distal from the actual. Mathematical objects and operators may have some essence prior to actual existence in the universe. 

In this manner, the essence of something in the universe exhibits or contains the essence without itself being the fully existent thing. It is the difference between human and human nature. 

What I deem incorrect and correct in both comes in the fact of existence, the actuality of an object or a subject, or both as seen in reality, exhibits its deepest essence. 

Which is to state, the existence of something – its actualization – is its essence, as in the self-existence and contingent existence of an object or a subject, in reality, comprises both its existence and its essence, simultaneously, where the property of existence Itself is its essence, in which the fundamental essence of the existent object or the existent subject is defined by both their existence (and their self-existence). 

Every existent subject - which becomes redundant, so “every existent subject” as “every subject” - because its essence is its existence means by be-ing­, as in existence and existence through time, exhibits its essence, while even a singular moment finite object universe with a ‘frozen’ subject embedded within it; this, too, exhibits an essence as existence and essence as existence, as the exhibited essence of the singular moment finite object universe and the finite subject of the universe is existence while differentiated from one another in the form of existence.

To this manner of thought, the essence defined the nature of the ‘spirit’ of the objects and the subjects found in the set of all possible realities equates to the existence, in which the essence comes into being as existence, as a complete sufficiency of identity and actuality. 

The object universe and the subject in the universe comprise reality, where both exist and self-exist apart from the non-existent; wherein, their sufficiency of differentiation become self-existent properties as individuated ‘islands’ with the subjects built as smaller ‘islands’ in the objects, as particulate synergies of objects with the agency, comprises something self-existent in a manner and form conceived as separate, individuated, while associated in the weave of existence. 

Back to essence precedes existence and existence precedes essence, to Sartre’s notion of transcendence, this becomes palpably absurd, as the nature grown over time constrains the possibilities of the human being while the range of degrees of freedom for the human being provides a modicum of ‘transcendence’ more properly deemed actualization, entirely natural. 

Thus, existence does not precede essence, while essence does not precede existence. The idea of an essence independent of the actual appears palpably absurd, as this remains an interpretation, in which the interpretation means qualitative differences on existence, where existence may exhibit properties and not essences. 

Some claim as the only essence as to exist and existence itself containing this ‘essence,’ so denuding the potential for a distinction between the two, while in existence the fact of agency implies a particular subject or set of subjects within the dynamic object universe. 

Where, the Existence Set and the Essence Set collapse one into the other, and become the Existence Set inclusive of the necessary Essence Set and exclusive of the unnecessary members of the Essence Set, the extra-natural. 

Existence exists as a union of essence and existence, while the previously considered ‘essence’ set apart from the spiritual or the supernatural can be considered properties, which would mean objective, repeatedly verifiable distinct properties of the dynamic object universe, including the properties of mass, energy, and gravitation, and so on, the properties as principles derived therefrom, where these become known to agents (“scientists”) in the dynamic object universe while existing in spite of the discovery or not. 

Within this set of properties, some dynamic object universes can derive dynamic subjective objects within the same dynamic object universe in which truly no differentiation exists except in the fact of the subjectivity of the subject in the larger object, as in our own universe.

Primary properties of existence comprise the properties discovered through later methodologies for the approximation to the facts of existence with the scientific method, hypothetico-deductivism as the means by which to accumulate the evidence and derivate principles of existence as the distinct properties and principles of existence as Primary Properties.

Secondary properties exist due to dynamic subjective objects in the universe in relation to the dynamic object universe in which the dynamic subjective objects or agents perceive and conceive the dynamic objective universe to realize Primary Properties in mind or the individual properties or the qualitative distinctions of agency in reality.

For example, “a happy Sunday,” “a holy person,” “a smell of roses on a fine spring in the meadows of my hometown,” “the love my life,” “the choir of angels of Heaven singing glory, glory, glory to the Lord God omnipotent,” “my favorite football team,” and the like. 

With capitalizations, do these become ‘official’? These Secondary Properties of the Primary Properties of the world as qualitative distinctions in mind, infinitely divisible, infinitely combinatory, with the only limitations as the mentation limits of the agents set by the armature limits of the agents’ computational apparatuses themselves, the dynamic subjective objects, in the dynamic object universe, where Existence and the Primary Properties of Existence set boundaries on the probabilistically possible and probabilistically impossible as well as the qualitative agentic-ally derived Secondary Properties of Existence.

In this sense, Existence becomes finite with no particular upper limits to its capacity while merely finite, even ‘infinite’ as seemingly infinite and so a gargantuan or large finite, in various degrees; Primary Properties exist as finite objects, spatiotemporal events, and principles of existence of Existence; whereas, the Secondary Properties come with the agency in some existences, whereby Existence becomes infinitely divisible and infinitely combinatory with the constraints on the divisions and the combinations, in an agentic qualitative sense, coming from the “armature limits of the agents’ computational apparatuses themselves.”

Existence comes with constraints based on self-consistency, order, the possible, the probabilistic, while, with agents, harboring infinite aspects, individually and combinatorially. Therefore, “Neither L'existence Précède L'essence Nor Essentia Precedes Existentia, But Both” means the bedrock essence comes “to exist” and existence exhibits “to exist” by its fact; and, therefore, neither existence precedes essence nor essential precedes existence, but both, as in essence collapses to existence while both emerge simultaneously, as one. 

Furthermore, Existence comes as it comes, emerges as it emerges, in each manifestation of the possible, while the principles of existence, the objects, and the relations between the objects through temporality comprise the dynamic object universe of Existence, and in some universes with the agency the Secondary Properties of Existence become forms of constrained infinite potentialities in Existence, while constrained by that which is evident, the Primary Properties of Existence, and coming from the sense of the self-evident, the agentic, to know that you exist and know that you know; thus, both (and more).