Some Background

Properties: Non-essential and Essential

    Take a minute to consider some of your attributes or properties--some of the qualities that you would list if you had to take out a personal add, say. You are a certain age, sex, and race. You have a particular color hair, your body has a certain build, you are clumbsy or graceful, athletic or lazy or moderately active. You have certain likes and dislikes, desires, wants, and dreams. You might like long walks and pillow talk, pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. Notice that some of these attributes are more or less essential to you than others. For example, you were not always the age you are now, and you won't always be this age either; you need not be the age you are now to be you. At least, let's hope not, otherwise it is not true that you were born from your mother's womb, that you had your sweet 16th birthday less than 10 years ago, or the you will die at a ripe, old age. Also, you need not have the color hair you have now, nor you need not have the body that you have now. If you don't beleive me, go die your hair bright blue and eat nothing but pizzas and donuts for the next month, and you'll see that you still exist(or if your current diet consists of pizzas and donuts, then eat nothing but veggies and fruit). Moreover, you easily could have been a bit taller or shorter than you actually are--certainly you could have been shorter since you were shorter when you were a little kid--and you could have easily been more or less athletic, more or less clumby or graceful, etc. You might even think that you could have been a different race, pehaps a different sex, and you could have had different likes, dislikes, desires, wants and dreams than you have now (although, admittedly, this claim is a bit more controversial than the previous ones). But at least some of your wants and desires seem accidental. Doesn't it at least seem possible that you could have been born without a penchant for long walks and pillow talk?

    All of these attributes or properties that you actually have but you could have lacked are called non-essential properties: they are properties that are non-essential to making up you. However, some philosophers have thought that there are also essential properties--properties without which you would not be you. You might think that your sex or race is essential to you, i.e., that if you were were born a different sex or race, you would not longer be the same person you are. However, less controversially, you might think that being born form the sperm and agg that you were born from, or having the genetic make-up that you do, is essential to you. Without being born from the exact sperm and egg that you were born from, in other words, or without having the exact genetic code that you in fact have, you could not have been you. Or perhaps you think that being a human is essential to you. You could not, like Gregor in Kafka's Metamorphosis, be a cockroach and still be you, for example. Or, like Descatres, you might think that being a thinking thing--a "thing that doubts, understands, afirms, denies, wills, refuses, and also imagines and senses"--is essential to making you you. Perhaps you think that being rational is an essential feature or property of you. If you think that there is any property that you could not have lacked--since in lacking this property, you would no longer be you--then you think that you have at least one essential property.

Ancient Metaphysics and Cartesian Egos

    Ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle commonly thought that individuals had both non-essential and essential properties. Both thought that individuals were essentially human, and hence, essentially rational. Aristotle need not have been the teacher of Alexander the Great, for example, nor need he have been a philosopher at all, but he had to have been a rational human animal. It is impossible for Aristotle to have been a frog, in other words. Further, unlike Plato, Aristotle thought that one's sex or gender was an essential property. So, for example, an individual is a male or female, man or woman, essentially. If you are actually a woman, you could not have been a man; if you are in fact a man, you could not have been a woman.

    Like Plato and Aristotle, Descartes also thought that an individual had both non-essential and essential properties. However, unlike Aristotle, Descartes did not think that an individual was a male or female essentially; indeed, he did not think that we were essetnially a physical, human body, whether that body be male or female. He thought that we were essentially a thinking thing--a "thing that doubts, understands, afirms, denies, wills, refuses, and also imagines and senses". This thinking thing is often called a 'Cartesian ego': it's the subject, or the "I", when one is thinking or reflecting.

Essence Precedes Existence

    Once we've got a grasp on the difference between non-essential and essential properties, we can more fully understand the slogan "essence preccedes existence". The idea is that there arecertain properties that need to be instantiated in the world 'before' you can be said to exist. Your existence, in other words, needs to be preceded by certain properties--your essential properties--existing in the world. Without these properties, you cannot be. Essence precedes existence.


Existentialism

Existence Precedes Essence

In contrast with ancient metaphysics and the idea of Cartesian egos, existentialism claims that existence procedes essence...

Absurdity, Anxiety, and Angst

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'Bad Faith'

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The Other

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Existentialism and Feminism

Sex and Gender as Properties

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Woman as the Other

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Simone de Beauvoir

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Some helpful links:

Existentialism entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsoophy.

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