Thomas Aquinas

On Being and Essence

Saint Thomas Aquinas

born ca. 1225;
died 7 March 1274
Dominican

Existence as Superior to Essence

Plato maintained that ultimate reality consists of essence.
For Aristotle, existence is primary.
For Plato, the world we perceive with our senses contains nothing except
impermanent, ever-changing objects. Plato reasoned that for our observations of
the world to count as true knowledge and not just as anecdotal evidence, our minds
need to make a conceptual leap from individual instances of things to general ideas.
He concluded that there must be something permanent that lies behind and unites
individual existences, and he referred to this something as essence.
According to Plato, existence, or the everyday world of objects such as tables,
chairs, and dogs, is inherently inferior to essence. Early church thinkers saw in
Platos ideas a parallel to their own division of the universe into the inherently
imperfect, corrupt world of matter and everyday existence and the perfect and
heavenly world of spirit.

Aquinas follows Aristotle in concluding that Platos theory is deficient, in part because
it is unable to account for the origin of existence and in part because it is unacceptably
dismissive of existence. Holy Scripture states that after each of the six days of
Creation, God saw that the fruit of his days work was good or even very good.
Furthermore, when Moses asks God how he should refer to him, God responds, I am
that I am, thereby equating himself with being. In other words, God is pure existence
or Being itself.
Aquinas argues that mans purpose consists exactly in developing himself toward
Being, not in attempting to escape Being. In the traditional church view prior to
Aquinas, the difference between God and his creatures was one of kind, as existence
was something that in itself separated us from God. In Aquinass view, the difference
between God and his creatures is one of degree, and we are separate from God
insofar as we do not have as much existence as God. Prior to Aquinas, traditional
church thought maintained that existence was the chief impediment to the realization
of our spiritual destiny. Aquinas held that our spiritual destiny consists precisely in the
enhancement of our existence. (SparkNotes)

Chapter 1
Aristotle says that Being has two senses:
In one sense it signifies that which is divided into ten categories.
In another sense that which signifies the truth of propositions.
The difference is that in the second sense you can call anything being about
which an affirmative proposition can be formed even if it posits nothing in
reality. (In the sense, blindness, which is really just a privation, can be called a
substance, it as a kind of being.)
The term essence can only be associated with being in the first sense. (Think of
the blindness example. Blindness cant have an essence in that it posits
something in the real world.)
The term quiddity refers to a thing for what it is; philosophers introduce the
term to mean the same thing as essence. It is what makes the thing what it is in
relationship to other things; genus, species, etc.

Aristotle said that every substance is a nature, but Thomas Aquinas thinks that
the term nature must signify the essence of a thing as it is ordered to the proper
operation of the thing, for no thing is without its proper operation.
But the same thing is called essence, because the being has existence through it
and in it.
Some substances are simple, and some are composite, and essence is in both.
The simple substances are the causes of the composite ones, or at least this is
true with respect to the first simple substance, which is God.

CHAPTER II
In composite substances we find form and matter.
It is clear that essence is that which is signified by the definition of the thing.
The definition of a natural substance contains not only form but also matter
(otherwise it would be like a mathematical definition).
We cant say that matter is added onto this natural substance as something added
to or beyond the essence (that would be accidents, and they have a definition that
goes beyond their own genus, which shows they dont have a perfect essence).
(I take this to mean that white or heavy are accidents, and do not have a
perfect essence because they do not have a substance.)

Therefore, the essence clearly comprises both matter and form.

Individuation emerges in such composite substances by way of signate matter.
Signate matter is matter considered under determinate dimensions. Signate
matter is not included in the definition of man as man, but it would be included in
the definition of Socrates as Socrates (if he had a definition).
This term body, therefore, can signify a certain thing that has a form such that from
the form there follows in the thing designatability in three dimensions and nothing
more, such that, in other words, from this form no further perfection follows, but if
some other thing is superadded, it is beyond the signification of body thus
understood.

CHAPTER V
There are three ways in which substances may have an essence.
First, is the way God has his essence, which is his very existence itself, and so we
find certain philosophers saying that God does not have a quiddity or essence
because his essences is not other than his existence.
Even though we say that God is existence alone we do not fall into the error of
those who said that God is that universal existence by which everything formally
exists. The existence which is God is of such a kind that no addition can be made
to it. When through its purity it is distinct from every other existence.
Similarly, though God is existence alone, the remaining perfection and nobilities
are not lacking in him. (In fact, he has these perfections in a more excellent way.)
Second, essence is found in created intellectual substances.

(That material objects, for Aristotle and Aquinas, are contingent. This
problem of contingency is what he wants to explore in his second mode of
essence.)
In this second mode, existence is other than essence, even though in these
substance, it is essence without matter.
Third, substances composed of matter and form in which existence is both
received and limited because such substances have existence from another,
and again because the nature or quiddity of such substances is received in
signate matter.