1/12) St. Thomas & Kant
《Essence and The Real》

Got this request for a QRD on these two concepts from @Nix64261997 but I realised that it'd take more than a single tweet and would be useful if it was not hidden in a pre-existing thread.

2/12) Essence: The essence of a thing is just that through which something is a certain kind of being/thing. It is also that through which a thing is intelligible or capable of being grasped intellectually.

3/12) To grasp humanity is to grasp the essence of human beings–that which makes them human–and thus to understand what a human being is.

4/12) To grasp triangularity is to grasp the essence of triangles–that which makes them triangles–and thus to understand what a triangle is and so on and forth.

5/12) This, essence, is distinct from existence–except in the case of God–which is to say that we can identify something in the real and a priori, and it's essence, independent of whether it actually exists.

6/12) The real: This isn't in the thing-in-itself–the noumena that exists independent of the a priori forms of our perception–space being one of these primary forms.

7/12) Rather it actually exists in the phenomena–the sense impressions–that we do perceive which exist in mind.

8/12) In this sense, space and time are in our mind a priori as organising categories. They probably don't exist in the noumenal realm.

Will we ever know if they do exist?

Probably never–that's the nature of the-thing-in-itself.

9/12) The real isn't out there where we can't have direct unmediated contact with this from which the phenomena exists upon, but in your mind existing as phenomena by which experience itself is structured, allowed, sustained.

10/12) Both science and metaphysics–albeit Kant and St. Thomas would correctly point to the fact that metaphysics is a science as such–are made possible through these structures of experience, not through the noumena which we cannot know.

11/12) The noumena isn't the essence of the thing–that is something we can enquire into from the real, or anterior to it through the synthetic a priori if appropriate, and find through reason.

12/12) Side note: Baudrillard's philosophy being in it's essence a philosophy of images and representations does indeed inherit this usage of the term "the real", a realisation of which I personally think gives much more weight to his thinking.