it puts the universal cart before the universal horse
no, you’re right, it’s meant to recall the sort of sneering i detect behind your “God is too quick for philosophy” and “Nietzsche is a chimp” threads …
2 things - 1) ‘essence’ as you define it is unobservable, giving people the right to doubt its existence, and 2) we seem to live in a universe of change - nothing stays the same - and so an unchanging, permanent fixture imbedded in everything seems unlikely.
That’s not to say I don’t believe in essences myself, but I’d go with a different definition: that which things ultimately are.
I will at this point, point out the futility of identifying the first case of a circular cause and consequence, in the form of the horse and cart causality dilemma commonly stated as:
Which came first, horse that can’t come without cart, or cart that can’t come without horse?
You’re welcome to point that out - but it doesn’t have much bearing on anything - since cart before horse is just a manner of speaking, and essence and existence are no more parts of a circular cause and consequence than sculpture and sculptor. Essence is abstraction - it is preceded by what exists.
Here’s how you defined essence: “'An essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal;”
For me, there is nothing necessarily permanent, unalterable, or eternal about essences. There can be such a thing as a tree-as-it-ultimately-is without it being permanent, unalterable, or eternal.
A. OK well you can always come back later when you understand me.
B. You are entitled to your opinion. However as this is a philosophy board I will offer an alternative: if something exists it is eternal because non-existence doesn’t exist, things cannot just jump onto the non-existence plane at will. Energy is always conserved.
The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed - it can only change form. It’s the changing of form that challenges you.
sure it is, but reality doesn’t order itself according to 10110011101, 10110011101 orders itself according to reality
but there is that which is neither essence nor abstraction - if existence, on the other hand, is everything, then you tell me which is likely to have come first