Essence / Existence — A fundamental metaphysical pair that articulates two distinct questions about any being. Essence answers “what the thing is”: its definition, form, or nature, that which makes it the kind of thing it is. Existence answers “that the thing is”, the sheer fact that it is, that it stands in reality rather than remaining a mere possibility. The Latin essentia derives from the verb esse (to be), while existentia points to existere (to step forth, to come to stand). The distinction is sharpened in medieval Arabic philosophy by Avicenna (Ibn Sina), for whom, in all created or contingent beings, existence is added to essence as something that does not follow from it. Thomas Aquinas takes up and reworks this thesis in De ente et essentia (On Being and Essence): in every creature there is a real distinction between what it is and its act of being (esse), whereas in God alone essence and existence coincide, which is why God exists necessarily. Twentieth-century existentialism inverts the classical order. In the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (Paris, 1945), Sartre states that “existence precedes essence”: the human being first exists, is thrown into the world with no prior nature, and only afterward, through its choices and actions, defines what it is. This inversion grounds atheist existentialism and is bound up with the notions of freedom and of the contingency of being.
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