Chapter Two
We will now attempt to reflect on the Aristotelian-Platonic determination of the essentiality of the essence. The "essence" of a thing, so it is said, is one and universal and applies to the many particular instances. The essence "table" indicates what applies, as something one and the same, to every table as table. The universal is therefore a standard "over" the whole extent of its real and possible particularizations. The Greeks use the word κατά (cf. κατηγορία) to signify what extends over particulars and holds for them from "above." The whole which includes every particular within itself is called ὃλον. Accordingly, the essence is what holds for many: τὸ καθόλου.
This essence, as it were, hovers over the particular and is therefore also conceived as γένος. We usually translate this as "genus" or "class": table in general is the class with regard to the species: dinner table, writing table, sewing table, which "really" occur themselves first i n their repeatedly varied particularizations. Γένος, however, in the more original sense of the word,