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I do not know if a history of the concept of essence has ever been written, or whether the interconnections of this concept with related terms in the history of Western philosophy—one thinks immediately of Plato's Forms, the Latin word essentia, such terms as "quiddity" and of Scheler's own term "Sosein"—have ever been adequately explored. Whatever its various meanings and uses, the term has displayed remarkable tenacity, and recurs even in everyday speech. In recent decades, the term has been the focus of attack by a variety of postmodernists and deconstructivists who take their cue from Friedrich Nietzsche, in whose work it is vilified as an idol of Western civilization that has contributed to its absolutism and intolerance.³⁷ The concept of essence has, however, fallen into disuse today not only because of the fulminations of Nietzsche. The notion, common to Greek and medieval philosophy, that things are what they are by virtue of their participation in some essential nature, is foreign to modern science, which abjures such qualitative analysis. For moderns, to know the nature of things is not to know their essence at all, but rather the forces that determine the behavior of phenomena or changes in observable states of affairs, where "force" is understood as one of the four (or perhaps five) ultimate forces that are describable in quantitative form. We are reminded by such ruptures in what we call "science" just how difficult it may be to specify just what one is looking for when one wishes to "know" or "understand" something or other.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3099-0_5

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