For one of his aims in "Ferdydurke" is to puncture the idea of essence or "wholeness" of any kind, including the wholeness of artistic form.
Plato, as he noted earlier, unconsciously borrows his idea of essence from the arts.
Like the idea of essence; staying power. .
This means that, in order to procure the fundamental truths of metaphysics, we must "withdraw the mind from the senses" (7:4, 12, 14) and turn toward our innate ideas of the essences of things, including the essences of mind, matter, and an infinite being (God).
By contrast, Locke goes on to argue, we have no ideas of real essences and so our species or genus terms refer to the nominal essences, not to the real essences (II.xxxi.6; citations to Locke's Essay are given as book, chapter, section; so Book II, chapter xxxi, section 6 is given as "II.xxxi.6").
In more ways than one, too: under one light, film adaptations tend to concentrate a literary text, reducing it to a supposed core, often based on some idea of psychological essence or narrative structure.
All such ideas are eternally contained in a single archetypal or model idea of the essence of matter called "intelligible extension".
"He loved minimalism — the idea of the essence of the essential — but he did not find that at odds with decoration".
They secure her in a masculine universe, they say in advance what she is, they render her captive to an idea of feminine essence.
The same Internet-era tools enable crowd-sourced collaboration as well as the rapid testing of product ideas — the essence of the lean start-up method so popular in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
