As you know by now, philosophy is about the dialectic. Someone puts forth an idea and then someone else responds to it. Sometimes the response comes right away. In other cases , it takes thousands of years. Way back in Ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle took it as a given that everything has an essence, a certain set of core properties that are necessary or essential for a thing to be what it is.
If those properties were missing, then that thing would be a different thing. For instance, a knife could have a wooden handle or metal handle , it really doesn't matter., but if it didn't have a blade, it wouldn't really be a knife anymore . The blade is the essential property of the knife because it gives the knife its defining function. Now, Plato. and Aristotle thought that everything has an essence including us and they believe that our essence is exist in us before we're even born. So by this thinking part of what it means to be a good human is to adhere to your essence.
Now you may or may not know what your essence is and you might be great at living up to your essence or you may be awful at it, but the important thing is that your essence gives you a purpose because you were born to be a certain thing.
This belief known as essentialism was the standard view of the universe all the way up until the late night 18th century and it's still accepted by many people today. But in the late 1800s, some thinkers started to challenge the idea that we are imbued with any essence or purpose.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, embraced nihilism, the belief in the ultimate meaningless of life. But by the mid-20th century, the path has been paved for French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre to return to the question of essence and ask, “what if we exist first?”” What if we were born without any hard-wired purpose, and then it's up to us to figure out our own essence?” Well this became the framework for what we now know as existentialism, and its mantra is the claim that existence precedes essence.
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乙亥年七月初三
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