Esse (2)
This little Latin word, I’ve discovered, means either essence or to actually exist. It’s the second one, which I’ll call esse (2), that’s mischievous. Our untrained ears hear “actually,” out of an everyday linguistic promiscuity, as an emphatic adverb, the same way we hear people “mis” use the word “literally,” when they don’t mean literally at all. (“I literally had a heart attack when I saw it!”) To actually exist in everyday emphasis really means to really exist. I know, we’re doing klutzy pirouettes, but in the Medieval Latin sense, actual meant a lot more than real . . . or literal. It was still rooted in the word act. It was a situated term, a term with context, adopted from Aristotle. Actual was paired with potential, and it meant, literally (-; , an act, something done. In the classic example, an acorn contains the potential to to act-ualize itself, or to become (change form into), an oak tree.
Becoming is not a thing; its an act-ion. An act is not just a fact.
Esse (2) means both existence and essence at once, whereas esse (1) means essence as distinct from existence, conceptually driving a wedge between being and becoming. The oak tree is (to be) and the oak tree becomes (actualizes, grows, emerges). People — not many of them, though — still argue about which is “prior to” the other, essence or existence, giving us essentialists and existentialists, terms that have likewise undergone transfigurations, both academic and more popular (in both cases to become[ahem] tangled up with agendas).
The oak tree exists as its essence — that constellation of characteristics which make it irreducibly an oak tree, instead of an elm or a frog or bicycle. Does saying that make me an essentialist or an existentialist, or neither?
Just as any thing (existent) cannot exist except in some form (essence) — existence and essence being co-constituted — Being (capital B) cannot be except as a becoming. Being is not a thing. Being is an act-ion. Being is a becoming. It can only exist act-ually, and so it (being) is not really an “it” (a thing), but an unfolding. That’s what the word esse (2) captures in the definition “actually existing” which recombines esse and essentia — where esse is defined as existence inside essentia (essence).
This is me, sharing with you, as I twist my untutored way through metaphysics — a brief inquiry into being as act.
Actual Being is something in which we, as actual beings, participate. The particular form in which we participate is such that being-as-becoming “shows up,” or in some people’s terms, emerges, where it is embraced by consciousness. In a sense, this suggests that creation — which we who subscribe to this idea often see as an event — is, in fact, an ongoing act. Balthasar, about whom I know shamefully little, appears to have wrestled with this business, said that Being is like a symphony, each moment of which is revealed to an audience, who, in their listening and appreciation, participates. When, in the modern/postmodern era, we tried to do away with metaphysics — after we’d been forcibly converted to the religion of scientism, which gives each musician different sheet music and removes the metaphysical conductor — that symphony became a cacophony.
Back to the oak tree, before I go down another rabbit hole. Once an oak tree is an oak tree and no longer an acorn — we’re veering into ontology here, or “what is the nature of being?” — the oak exists not as an inventory of its parts but as an oak tree, whole, indivisible, and irreducible. The identity of the oak tree, as an oak tree, cannot be “captured” by an inventory. Which is to say, the oak tree as an oak tree is “ontologically prior” to scientific, scientistic, or commercial reduction to some inventory of parts. It’s even ontologically prior to its history as an acorn, though that history is not somehow “eclipsed,” but incorporated into the irreducibly oak-tree-ness of the oak tree. The tree is intelligible as a tree, and its once-acorn-ness, no longer directly visible, remains relevantly within conceptual view.
As Faulkner once quipped, the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past.
“Metaphysical extrinsicism” — a term Michael Hanby uses to describe the modern predisposition to ontologically prioritize atomistic inventories over the tree-as-tree — “evacuates creatures of the unity, intelligibility, and interiority inherent in our elementary experience of them.”
Extrinsicism sees the tree as either a robotic selfish gene among many robots or as lumber and trash.
I’m going to go away now to study and think on this some more, and how it relates to God as first principle and metaphysical ground. Thanks for reading.