Essence, logic and identity: a bridge to S Freud

For hundreds of years philosophers did quarrel about the nature of essence, whether it was separated from the thing and being an entity in itself (from Plato’s ideas to Kant’s ‘Sache an sich’, or thing in itself), whether it did not exist (empiricist current). It is not that difficult to understand what an essence is, and though extremely surprising why this term was so difficult to define in its own essence. This remark will certainly help us to establish differences of extreme importance, once definitions have been cleared up.
It is true that we had the extreme advantage to have separated words and phenomena into two simple categories, time and space, through the ordering principle of what is moving (time) and what is not (space). It is true, too, that the fact of not searching for anything but the relationship between language and reality was of great help.
That reality is one that does not reflect itself exactly through the given structures of language is a peculiar evidence that has little been considered all over history. While it is obvious that in reality of senses the subject is never separated from the action that is taking place, language does separate the subject (pronoun or name or other) from the verb reflecting the action. This is the evidence of support for Kant’s hypothesis of time and space as forms of sensitivity, he never made the effort to search for as he was intending to establish this fact as truth a priori. The fact that language is ordered in obvious separation of the moving from the referential not moving is evidence for the statement that the human mind does automatically order all information coming from senses into two separated cases. The fact that language is ordered in a certain logic is evidence for the statement that these fundamental categories are forms of the understanding, the human mind can’t do without.
That the human mind does operate this way, does seem to say little about reality, Kant says, though it not may be that true. We do know that the subject is linked to the action essentially (no subject without action, no action without subject) in reality, even if the structures of language introduce such a particular separation. Thus, we have at the same time the apprehension of how things are and how we do order them. The first does appear clearly to consciousness, the second through the observation of the very structure of language. I did always say to Hume, that both are empirical facts.
If we are aware of this structuring of mind through the observation of language, it becomes much easier to understand what an essence is, and what logic. Having put all words linked to a non moving characteristic on one side, and all those with moving characteristics on the other, we soon see that the non moving (short: spatial) show a certain number of similar characteristics: they are not what they are if not associated to or identified with determined words. Either they belong to a category (of animal, eg for a lion) or they have to be this and that if they want still to deserve the name. This: “to have to be something or belong necessarily somewhere in order still to be inside of the given name” is an essence. The problem of the nature of essence appears because thinkers do not become aware of the fact that they are not thinking the things, but just thinking in words, and thus, that an essence is not referred to the being as appearing to senses but to the concept as formed in understanding.
Essences will of course cause horrible problems when referred to empirical objects, even more so in our times. Is an artificially generated animal still an animal or just some kind of animal? What kind of ‘plant’ is a hybrid? Etc. These problems do clearly show that essences are not fixed, eternal or unmovable: essence is just the series of words condensing (synthesizing) the what the object is not without and this may vary and vary so much, that it may depend on culture, development of understanding and other factors whether someone understands this or that as an essence. For the child, the fact of wearing a uniform may be enough to recognize a policeman, for the adult, a policeman is submitted also to a certain number of rules and laws in social organization, without which he can’t be said a policeman anymore. To talk about ideal essence is also possible, if we accept that a better concept may be referential for behavior and thus of need if the human wants to aim at something. It does not mean in that case that the concept is real, it is only a reference and takes its justification from the fact that it may have an ordering role. (This faculty of the human has been lately shifted from the moral to the biological, causing terrible disorder in nature: from an absolute point of view we may say that it is impossible to pretend to an ideal reference on biological basis because we don’t have all the elements allowing the consideration of all possible bad side effects of an intervention made on basis of an ideal referential, but it is morally possible. To put as ideal that a couple should be faithful for a life is certainly an ideal, but the possible bad side effect of such an ideal is little if compared to the attempt of conceiving an ideal sheep, tomato field, or cow.)
An essence does thus only refer itself to things as having been put on the side of the spatial. Our temporal concepts can’t be ordered the same way, and it is impossible to talk about the essence of a movement. The movement, the process, the verb do have a logic. Logic is thus nothing but the determining characteristics of a temporal phenomenon. The essence is to the name what the logic is to the verb. Logic fixes the fundamental characteristics of the temporal in a certain number of coordinates.
Of course we may say, as seen before, that in reality, there is no subject without action, nor action without subject, and thus, no name without logic nor logic without support. But these words, essence and logic, are used as referred either to one aspect (spatial) or the other (temporal) as they appear to understanding.
To know is a process, and knowledge the result of this process. Unluckily, philosophy, strongly under the influence of heavy ideological (we may say) presumptions coming from Greek philosophy, and as said, through the arrival of Indian currents of thought (Siddharta), does strain importance on the spatial, not moving, as associated to the eternal, and does hardly think the process as such. Thus, the problem of knowledge is considered from the point of view of the knowledge itself (What is true, and not, how did I know it), and the process hardly considered. Under the obligation of thinking time and process after Galilee and Newton, philosophy does soon crash itself against lacking conceptualization (Hegel’s attempt to think a process through the thesis / antitheses / synthesis does hardly reflect what an inner logic can be, and even less, what a process of knowledge is). We may suspect nowadays, that this attempt to eradicate time and process from thought is nothing but a mark of rejection of women, and her very specific and particular symbolic organization of reality, certainly in the attempt to liberate the human from strong matriarchal links: it is an evidence that the appearance of Plato and Aristotle do mark a cold rejection to more female structures of thought, as given through Homer, Herodotus and Hesiod.
This rejection though, aiming we may say almost at total destruction through the systematic invalidation of the characteristic of truth or even reality in words ordered in different way than the male spatial structures, will leave occidental thought without the possibility to understand what a logical process means: until the XIXth Century there are 3 or 4 philosophical texts on time, of not more than one page or two each, if ever: Plato (Timee), Aristotle (Theory of knowledge), St Augustin (Confessions X) and a few words about the concept of time in Newton. The XIXth Century does seem to want to recover the lost time: great number of works, mostly French, do spend ink, time and the reader’s bored attention in the attempt of considering this surprising phenomenon. Without luck. Most of the texts are simply rubbish: thinkers do not even differentiate correctly time as physical concept from process in time.
It becomes evident that men are hardly able to think time and get extremely quickly lost whenever it is to consider changing phenomena. Women though do rarely think in concepts: their somewhat peculiar way to order events in magnificent combinations determined by inner logics specified through non determined accidents, is hardly a reference to think a process as such in time.
The whole determination of identity is though suspended from the possibility to think time, as only the understanding of the concept of process as such, seems to offer the perspective of a solution. This strange concept, coming from the Greek idio (same), has it’s origin in the research of that what makes the same being like the other, or further, why one finishes to be the same as himself. Before understanding the essence (ousia), the Greek confuses slightly the essence with a principle: the identity, and derives later the essence from the verb being (what makes something be, or clearer, allows to use a name with the verb to be in an identifying link). Clearly identity is not the essence, and is said ‘principle’. Is the principle now to be ordered as a name or a verb, as temporal or spatial, as referred to a process or to a thing?
We may say that ‘identity’ is the consequence or result of a process through which something is identified in a certain way. The identity of the human may thus principally depend on how he orders the identification in process. It is obvious that if he starts from a certain number of non proofed a priori statements as: I’m my body, my image, what I pretend to be, he will order all information from inside or outside inside of the fundamental parameters used in order to fix his identity. This is what Freud calls the ‘superego’ or ‘I as image’: independently of what the proper nature of the subject is, if synthesis is made on erratic parameters, it builds up an identity, whose logic will interact with the proper nature in a certain way. Freud describes certain phenomena of interaction between the unconscious, (we would say the proper nature not synthesized in proper parameters) and the ‘superego’, which do appear to have general validity. He omits though to think that it is not necessary to build up identity on wrong parameters: logically, human beings are, for him, all mad in a certain way.
As said, the question remains on how much essence is determinable, or how much the determination is generally valid. May we really talk about a common human nature? If we do so, which may be the implications? How does the definition of the concept of time and thus the understanding of process does help us to clear up fundamental questions?