When you say that a cat is a cat, you are not describing its color or its age. You are pointing to something deeper: what makes it a cat rather than a dog or a table. This very simple question has been explored by philosophers for over two millennia under the name of the essence of being. The answer has changed form throughout the ages, and it continues to transform today.
Essence versus anti-essentialisms and the life sciences
Talking about essence implies that a thing possesses stable traits that define it. A triangle has three sides: remove one, and it is no longer a triangle. When applied to humans, the reasoning becomes much more delicate.
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Contemporary biology shows that species are not fixed categories. They transform, crossbreed, and redefine themselves over the course of mutations. A living being does not have a clear boundary between what it is and what it could become. This observation undermines any attempt to freeze the essence of being in philosophy into an immutable definition.
Anti-essentialist currents, from Sartre to gender theories or pragmatist approaches, drive the point home. Existence precedes essence according to existentialism: an individual is not predefined by a nature; they are constructed through their actions and choices. To say that a human possesses a fixed essence, for these thinkers, is to deny freedom.
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The question is therefore no longer just “what is being?”, but also “can we still talk about essence without freezing reality?”. It is precisely this tension that keeps the debate alive.
Aristotle and Plato: two ways of thinking about essence
To understand where the concept comes from, we must go back to two Greek thinkers whose positions still structure contemporary philosophy.
Plato and the separate idea
Plato places essence in a separate world, that of Ideas or Forms. The horse you see in a field is merely an imperfect copy of the Idea of a horse. Essence exists independently of sensible things. This approach establishes a metaphysics where the truest reality lies beyond what our senses perceive.
Aristotle and substance
Aristotle rejects this separation. For him, the essence of a thing is found in the thing itself, not in another world. He introduces the notion of substance: what remains when we remove accidental properties (color, size, position). Substance is what makes a being what it is, and it does not float in a sky of Ideas.
This difference between Plato and Aristotle is not a mere historical detail. It determines two ways of doing philosophy:
- Seeking essence beyond experience, in abstract and universal principles (Platonic heritage).
- Seeking essence in the internal structure of concrete beings, through observation and logical definition (Aristotelian heritage).
- Questioning the very possibility of finding an essence, considering that every definition is a human construction (empiricist then existentialist heritage).
Heidegger and the ontological turn of the 20th century
You may have noticed that classical philosophers mainly talk about the essence of things: what is a horse, what is a triangle? Martin Heidegger shifts the question. What interests him is not the essence of a particular object, but the very fact that there is being rather than nothing.
Heidegger distinguishes between being (the fact of existing, the very movement of presence) and beings (everything that exists concretely: a stone, a tree, a person). Western philosophy, according to him, has confused the two for centuries. It has studied beings while forgetting to question being itself.
This distinction between being and beings underpins contemporary ontology. It explains why Heidegger believes that traditional metaphysics misses its own question. His work, particularly in what is called the “Kehre” (the turn), pushes the reflection further: being is not an entity that we describe; it is a dynamic that we inhabit.
Recent readings of Heidegger emphasize this point. Being is not an object of knowledge placed before us. It is the very framework within which all knowledge becomes possible.
Defining essence without falling into tautology
The classic formula (“that by which a thing is what it is”) poses a problem that contemporary philosophers clearly identify: it borders on tautology. Saying that the essence of a cat is “that which makes a cat a cat” teaches nothing to anyone.
Several approaches attempt to break out of this circle:
- Scientific essentialism seeks essence in measurable physical or chemical properties. Water is H₂O: there is its essence, regardless of its color or temperature.
- Origin essentialism proposes that the essence of an individual resides in its starting point (genetic, initial conditions). You could not have been born to different parents and remain yourself.
- Relational or functional approaches define essence not by a fixed content but by a role or position in a network. Being is not a thing; it is a function.
This last avenue aligns with a current that treats being as a problem of formulation rather than as an entity. The question is no longer “what is being?”, but “how to formulate the question of being without presupposing the answer?”.
Essence and existence: why this distinction remains a major issue
The separation between essence and existence runs through all of philosophy. Essence refers to what a thing is. Existence refers to the fact that it is. A unicorn has an essence (we can describe it) but no concrete existence. A pebble in your garden has both.
This distinction has practical consequences. In ethics, asserting that humans possess an essence amounts to placing limits on what can be done to them: their dignity stems from what they are. Denying any human essence opens up a space of freedom, but also a vertigo: if nothing defines us in advance, each choice carries the full weight of our definition.
Metaphysics is not an abstract exercise cut off from reality. When a biologist discusses the definition of a species, when a jurist questions what makes a human person, when a computer scientist models categories of objects, they all mobilize, often without realizing it, the distinction between essence and existence. Philosophy provides the tools to think about these actions rigorously, as long as one does not claim that the answer is already given in the question.