What is the difference between essence and accident?

Question

or accident and substance?

Answer 1

Essence is used in the baking of cakes and an accident is something that happened when your mother and her brother conceived you!

Answer 2

Essence is the simplest logical form for a things identity, usually used as description for its kind or a universal concept for a kind. Depending on your understanding for the concept 'accident', essence could be conceived as the result of accident, but this should not be confused or mistaken for unprincipled contingent dependency. Substance is the totality of sense experience excluding the differentiation for principle condition and contingent condition. In other words logic for substance may contain description of events or things that may exemplify both principle conditions, contingent conditions, either of them or neither. Gravity is an example of a principle condition where as a rotten branch of a tree is a contingent condition for that tree and subsequent results or relations to it, but not for all trees of its kind everywhere (something happened to THAT tree and therefore its condition is not a constant of its species).

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slactual.htm#SL145n

"Free Will

As possibility is the mere inside of actuality, it is for that reason a mere outside actuality, in other words, Contingency. The contingent, roughly speaking, is what has the ground of its being not in itself but in somewhat else. Such is the aspect under which actuality first comes before consciousness, and which is often mistaken for actuality itself. But the contingent is only one side of the actual - the side namely, of reflection on somewhat else. It is the actual, in the signification of something merely possible. Accordingly we consider the contingent to be what may or may not be, what may be in one way or another, whose being or not-being, and whose being in this way or otherwise, depends not upon itself but on something else. "

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slactual.htm#SL151

"Substance
§ 151

Substance is accordingly the totality of the Accidents, revealing itself in them as their absolute negativity (that is to say, as absolute power) and at the same time as the wealth of all content. This content however is nothing but that very revelation, since the character (being reflected in itself to make content) is only a passing stage of the form which passes away in the power of substance. Substantiality is the absolute form-activity and the power of necessity: all content is but a vanishing element which merely belongs to this position, where there is an absolute revulsion of form and content into one another."

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlessenc.htm#HL2_389

"The truth of being is essence. ®

Being is the immediate. Since knowing has for its goal knowledge of the true, knowledge of what being is in and for itself, it does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates it on the supposition that at the back of this being there is something else, something other than being itself, that this background constitutes the truth of being. This knowledge is a mediated knowing for it is not found immediately with and in essence, but starts from an other, from being, and has a preliminary path to tread, that of going beyond being or rather of penetrating into it. Not until knowing inwardises, recollects itself out of immediate being, does it through this mediation find essence. The German language has preserved essence in the past participle [gewesen] of the verb to be; for essence is past — but timelessly past — being."



http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_terms.htm