By Dr. Adnan Bouzan

Introduction:
Since the dawn of history, humans have stood before a dual mirror: one reflecting their outward appearance, and another attempting to penetrate the depths where their essence resides. This duality is not merely a linguistic debate between form and substance, but a profound philosophical and existential problem, leading us to the heart of the question: which defines the truth of a human being? What appears to the eye, or what is hidden in the depths of the self?

The essence-appearance dichotomy has engaged human thought from its earliest stages. In Greek philosophy, Plato distinguished between the world of Forms, representing immutable and eternal essence, and the world of sensibles, which are mere deceptive shadows. Aristotle, on the other hand, accorded essence the status of a self-subsistent being, while he confined appearance to accidental attributes that do not define the identity of a thing. Since then, humans themselves have remained the subject of this debate—sometimes regarded as beings whose value lies in their intellectual and spiritual essence, and at other times as beings defined by their social appearance and the impressions they leave on others.

In the religious and spiritual dimension, this problem manifests in the distinction between intention and outward action, between the faith residing in the heart and the deeds visible to the eye. Major religions have long warned against hypocrisy and falsity, emphasizing that the essence of a human being—his intentions and sincerity—is what determines his worth before God, not mere outward rituals and observances. From this arises the ethical question intertwined with the philosophical one: is a human being accountable for what he shows the world or for what he harbors deep within?

Psychology has shed light on deeper layers of this contradiction. Freud argued that the unconscious—a hidden essence—drives the behaviors visible on the outside. Jung spoke of the “Persona” that humans wear to adapt to society, contrasted with the “Self,” representing their true essence. Thus, humans constantly live between their inner self and their social masks, in a continual tension between the inner and the outer.

Socially, appearance has become a tool of survival and belonging, and sometimes a means of falsifying essence. In the era of images and media, humans are no longer measured by the values or meanings they hold, but by the manifestations of power, beauty, fame, or wealth they project. Here lies the danger of appearance dominating essence, as substance recedes in favor of superficiality, and humans lose themselves in the spectacle and performance of life.

Yet this contradiction is not always negative; often it is an existential necessity. Appearance is not merely a mask hiding essence, but can serve as a means of expressing it, a bridge between inner reality and outer perception. The danger arises when appearance turns into an authority that crushes essence, causing humans to become strangers to themselves, subjugated to the gaze of others.

Hence arises the importance of studying humans between essence and appearance: it is not merely a theoretical philosophical debate, but a matter that touches the core of our daily existence. We live in a world where the tyranny of form increasingly outweighs meaning—a world where values are measured by the number of followers on screens rather than by the sincerity of the person and the nobility of their soul. Reopening this discussion thus means defending human authenticity in the face of alienation, and truth in the face of superficiality.

This study aims to delve into this problem from multiple perspectives—philosophical, religious, psychological, social, and literary—seeking to answer the fundamental question: is a human known by the essence hidden within, or by the appearance revealed to the world? Or does truth reside in the perpetual tension between the two, with humans incomplete without both?

Talking about humans between essence and appearance is inseparable from the essence of human existence itself, an existence that swings between truth and falsity, authenticity and imitation, freedom and alienation. Essence grants humans stability and meaning, while appearance connects them to others and situates them in the context of shared life. The tragedy begins when appearance dominates essence, turning humans into mere images in the eyes of others—images adorned according to what is socially acceptable or culturally desirable, while their inner self silently screams unheard. Here manifests the ultimate estrangement: living with two faces, one for display and performance, the other for silent truth.

This contradiction is not an inescapable fate but a call to resist objectification and to seek a balance that makes appearance a reflection of essence, not a substitute for it. Beautiful appearance, when devoid of essence, becomes a hollow shell; pure essence, if trapped inside without expression, risks isolation from existence. Thus, human life appears as an eternal struggle between revealing the self and protecting it, between being true and wearing a mask.

At its core, humans yearn for truth, striving to be seen as they are rather than as they are expected to appear. Yet the harshness of the world, societal pressures, and the authority of norms often push them to adopt faces that are not their own, crafting images in accordance with others’ expectations. Here emerges the gap between what one is and what one is expected to be, between the deep inner self and the superficial outer self. The tragedy of contemporary humans lies in the fact that the more they preoccupy themselves with appearance, the less connected they become to their essence; the more they immerse in their outer image, the more lost they are to their inner voice. Yet the question remains open: can humans achieve harmony between the two, making their appearance a language of their essence, and their essence a light manifest in their appearance? Or are they doomed to remain suspended in this division, oscillating between endless masks and a truth they fear to reveal even to themselves?

Chapter One: The Philosophical Framework of Essence and Appearance

1. Greek Philosophy

2. Medieval Philosophy

3. Modern and Contemporary Philosophy

The study of the essence-appearance dichotomy is not merely a linguistic exercise or a metaphysical term; it is an entry into the heart of philosophy itself. From the moment humans began to ask, “What is existence?” and “What is the reality of things?” emerged the distinction between what is perceived by the senses and what is grasped by the intellect, between the surface visible to all and the depth accessible only through contemplation. Early philosophers realized that the world is not reducible to what appears before our eyes, but that behind appearances lie layers of meaning and being—representing the essence that grants things their reality.

Plato, for instance, based his philosophy on the distinction between the eternal world of Forms, embodying the true essence of things, and the changing world of sensibles, which is merely an incomplete reflection, a deceptive shadow. In this framework, essence becomes the stable truth, while appearance is merely a fluctuating shell, an incomplete representation of reality. Accordingly, in Platonic thought, essence is linked to truth and knowledge, whereas appearance is associated with illusion and ignorance.

Aristotle, however, reformulated the relationship between essence and appearance in a different paradigm. He argued that essence is not a separate world but the self-subsistent reality within entities, and that appearance is not an illusion but the manifestations that emerge through essence. In this way, Aristotle introduced a more realistic dimension of thought, intertwining essence and appearance within a single entity rather than situating them in separate worlds.

As philosophy evolved, this debate continued, taking on new forms. In modern philosophy, Descartes emphasized the essence of thought as an indubitable truth: “I think, therefore I am,” where essence surpasses appearance to become the foundation of certainty. Kant, on the other hand, crystallized the distinction between phenomenon—the world as it appears to us through the senses and intellect—and the thing-in-itself, which remains inaccessible to direct perception. Hegel reversed the equation through a dialectical approach, seeing appearance not as a mask hiding essence but as a necessary moment in the unfolding of essence’s development; appearance becomes a path through which essence reveals itself.

Thus, it becomes clear that the relationship between essence and appearance has represented, across philosophical eras, one of the key tools for understanding humans and the world. It is not merely a theoretical matter but a question that touches the way we perceive existence itself: Should we trust what appears to us, or seek the hidden truth behind it? Can humans access essence without passing through appearance, or is appearance the only window reflecting and pointing to essence?

This chapter aims to trace the evolution of the concept of essence and appearance in philosophical thought, from its Greek beginnings to modern and contemporary philosophies, in order to reveal how this duality was constructed and how it influenced humans’ conception of themselves and the world around them. Between the idealism of Plato, the realism of Aristotle, the critical philosophy of Kant, the dialectics of Hegel, and the existentialism of Sartre, a multi-dimensional map emerges, making the essence-appearance dichotomy a mirror reflecting the history of philosophy itself.

1. Greek Philosophy

• Plato: The World of Forms and the Distinction between Essence and Appearances

• Aristotle: Essence as a Self-Subsistent Principle versus Accidental Attributes

When we reflect on the history of human thought, we find that Greek philosophy is the primary source from which many of the great questions that still accompany us today emerged: What is existence? What is truth? What is goodness? And what is the relationship between the outward and the inward, or between essence and appearance? Ancient Greece, since the sixth century BCE, was the cradle of reflective and critical philosophy, where humans liberated themselves from the constraints of myth and legend, beginning to view the world not as a collection of stories interpreted by gods, but as a system that human reason could understand and explain.

Greek philosophers laid the foundational conception of essence as that which makes a thing what it is, determining its stable identity despite changes in its external appearances. Conversely, they recognized that appearance—as a sensory image—can deceive the senses and mislead humans from perceiving the truth. Hence, they early on concerned themselves with the relationship between what appears to us in daily experience and the deeper truth that lies behind it.

Greek philosophy developed in two main stages:

• Pre-Socratic Stage: Focused on the search for the primal origin of the universe (Thales proposed water, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus fire…). This stage represented the first attempt to differentiate between the changing appearance of existence and its underlying essence or primary origin.

• Classical Stage: With Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the discussion took a more profound and abstract form, where essence and appearance became part of a comprehensive philosophical framework addressing humanity, the world, ethics, and politics.

Plato was among the most prominent philosophers to articulate a sharp distinction between essence and appearance. He divided existence into the world of Forms, the stable and complete realm representing truth and essence, and the world of sensibles, which are merely faint shadows or incomplete manifestations of truth. In Platonic philosophy, appearance is associated with illusion and deception, while essence is linked to knowledge and immortality.

Aristotle, however, took a different path. He did not separate existence into two worlds but considered each entity as composed of a fixed essence (its "what-it-is" or form) and changing attributes or manifestations. This gave Aristotle a more realistic and integrated perspective, making appearance a means of expressing essence rather than a mere veil concealing it.

Understanding later Western philosophy is impossible without returning to this foundational Greek moment; all subsequent discussions—from medieval philosophy through modern thinkers such as Descartes and Kant, to Hegel and Sartre—are extensions or engagements with what the early Greeks proposed. Therefore, studying Greek philosophy is not merely a historical review but a return to the first roots from which the question of essence and appearance emerged, as a question about truth and existence itself.

Plato: The World of Forms and the Distinction between Essence and Appearances

Plato was among the first philosophers to systematically articulate a clear distinction between essence and appearance. He started from the conviction that what our senses perceive in this world is not complete truth but a faint reflection or an imperfect copy of an eternal, immutable reality. This reality lies in what he called the world of Forms—a perfect, transcendent, eternal realm containing the absolute essences of all things. Every object in our sensible world has a corresponding higher Form: the Form of justice, goodness, beauty, humanity, the horse, etc. These Forms represent the true essence, granting objects their identity and meaning.

The sensible world we inhabit is merely a world of appearances, mutable and transient, providing only incomplete images and distorted shadows of truth. What the eye sees, the ear hears, or the hand touches is a "false appearance," whereas the "true essence" is apprehended only by the mind or soul. Therefore, for Plato, true knowledge does not arise from the senses but from the intellect, which contemplates the Forms and recollects them internally.

Plato expressed this relationship between essence and appearance in his famous allegory, The Allegory of the Cave, where humans are likened to prisoners inside a cave, seeing only the shadows of objects on a wall and mistaking them for reality. True reality lies outside the cave, in the light of the sun and the realm of Forms. Shadows (appearance) deceive humans and confine them to illusion, while leaving the cave symbolizes the mind’s journey toward apprehending essence and complete truth.

For Plato, appearance is deceptive, changeable, and transient, while essence is stable, complete, and eternal. His philosophical and ethical project was thus to free humans from the captivity of sensory appearances and elevate the mind and soul toward contemplation of the Forms, where absolute goodness and true beauty reside. Essence, for him, is not merely a theoretical concept but the ultimate goal of human existence: living in harmony with eternal truth rather than being misled by transient appearances.

Aristotle: Essence as a Self-Subsistent Principle versus Accidental Attributes

Aristotle, a student of Plato, disagreed with his teacher’s conception of existence. While Plato located essence in a transcendent realm (the world of Forms), Aristotle brought essence into the heart of the sensible world itself, making it the primary principle that grants objects their identity and existence. For Aristotle, essence is not an abstract idea or a higher Form in another world but that which exists in itself, making a thing what it is—a "primary substance" upon which other properties depend.

Aristotle distinguished between essence and accidents: essence remains constant, while accidents are attributes that may change without altering the thing’s fundamental identity. A person’s skin color, height, or posture are accidental features; they do not touch the human essence.

Aristotle also introduced the concept of matter and form: every entity consists of matter (potentiality) and form (its defining actuality). Matter without form is indeterminate, and form without matter cannot exist in the world. Hence, essence becomes the union of matter and form within a single entity, while accidents are manifestations of this essence but do not represent its deep reality.

This approach made Aristotelian philosophy closely aligned with sensory reality and concrete existence. Essence does not reside in a transcendent realm but in the world, where individual entities are the subject of philosophy and science. Aristotle thus profoundly influenced the development of logical and scientific thought, providing the basis for distinguishing what is essential and stable—subject to scientific knowledge—from what is accidental and variable, lacking certainty.

In this sense, Aristotle restored the balance between essence and appearance: appearance is no longer a mere illusion, as in Plato, but a field for observation and analysis, provided it does not reduce the being to it alone. Essence guarantees the unity and identity of the thing, without which existence becomes a mere succession of meaningless changes.

2. Medieval Philosophy

• Christian and Islamic Philosophy: Spiritual Essence and Physical Appearance
• Avicenna and Averroes: The Soul, Essence, and Appearance

Medieval philosophy represents a central stage in the history of human thought, spanning roughly from the 5th century CE to the early Renaissance in the 15th century. It followed the decline of Greek philosophy—after the fall of the Roman Empire—and witnessed a profound interaction between the rational Greek heritage and religious thought represented by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. For this reason, this period is often described as a “bridge” connecting ancient philosophy and modernity, yet it was also an independent intellectual world with its own issues, methods, and concepts.

The central question in medieval philosophy was: How can reason be reconciled with faith? And how can metaphysics be understood in light of religious doctrines? Here, the distinction between essence and appearance took on new dimensions. It was no longer limited to epistemological or metaphysical questions as in Plato and Aristotle, but became tied to a theological question: Can humans perceive the essence of God, or is their knowledge confined to the appearances and signs manifested in revelation and nature?

In Latin Christian thought, for example, Augustine saw true essence as residing in God, who is the absolute truth and the light illuminating the human mind. The sensory world, by contrast, is merely an imperfect reflection and a changing appearance, incapable of yielding certainty unless guided by faith. Thus, the distinction between essence and appearance acquired a clear theological dimension, where essence became synonymous with the divine, and appearance with the transient or deceptive world.

In the Islamic context, profound philosophical and theological schools emerged—such as kalam, Peripatetic philosophy with al-Farabi and Avicenna, and Sufism with Ibn Arabi—all dealing with the relationship between essence and appearance from different angles. Muslim philosophers, particularly influenced by Aristotle, asserted that essence is what exists by itself, while accidents are what change. However, they linked this analysis to the concepts of creation and necessary existence, whereby God becomes the “essence of essences” and the true existence from which all beings derive. Sufis, on the other hand, viewed appearances as manifestations of the divine essence, urging humans to penetrate the veils of phenomena to attain unity with absolute truth.

In Western Scholastic philosophy, the discussion reached its peak with Thomas Aquinas, who attempted to reinterpret Aristotle in light of Christian doctrine. He argued that reason has the capacity to grasp certain natural essences, but the divine essence remains beyond human comprehension, accessible only through revelation. This illustrates the medieval balance between reason and faith—between what can be known through the visible world and what can only be known through religious submission.

Medieval philosophy, despite its apparent religious character, was not mere theological repetition; it was a profound philosophical reworking of concepts such as essence and appearance, reason and revelation, nature and the supernatural. It laid the groundwork for the birth of modern philosophy, for without this deep dialogue between Greek heritage and religious doctrines, Descartes’ dualism between thought and extension and Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and thing-in-itself would not have emerged.

Thus, studying medieval philosophy is not merely a transitional stage, but a crucial moment in the development of philosophical thought, where the relationship between essence and appearance was reconsidered from a spiritual and metaphysical perspective, forming a foundation for understanding the human relationship with God, time with eternity, and the world with meaning.

Christian and Islamic Philosophy: Spiritual Essence and Physical Appearance

When philosophy moved into the Christian and Islamic spheres, the distinction between essence and appearance took on a new form influenced by religious perspectives. The question was no longer confined to natural beings or abstract metaphysics, but became linked to a deeper existential issue: What is man? And what is his relationship to God and the cosmos? Here emerged a central duality: the separation of spiritual essence and physical appearance.

In Christian thought, Augustine saw humans as dual beings: a mortal body subject to change and a immortal soul which is the true essence and divine image. The physical appearance is merely a tool or vessel, while the soul grants identity and meaning. Knowledge of truth, he argued, is attained not through senses, which perceive only appearances, but through divine light illuminating the soul. Thus, the spiritual essence becomes the ultimate reality toward which humans must orient themselves, while the body remains a field of weakness and alienation, to be disciplined rather than indulged.

In Islamic philosophy, Peripatetic philosophers like al-Farabi and Avicenna addressed essence and appearance through their theories of the soul and body. Avicenna considered humans as composed of a soul, an independent spiritual essence, and a body, a changing and perishable accident. The soul is a simple, eternal essence capable of surviving after the body’s demise, and it grants humans their capacity for thought and reason. The body, by contrast, is a temporary appearance, subject to change and death. This distinction placed the soul as the stable essence and the body as the mutable accident.

In Islamic Sufism, this distinction reached a symbolic and spiritual peak, particularly in Ibn Arabi, who saw the entire world as manifestations of divine essence. Humans, as God’s vicegerents on earth, combine the physical appearance that ties them to matter with the spiritual essence that connects them to the absolute. The body thus becomes a temporary veil, while the soul is the essence striving for union with divine truth.

Hence, Christian and Islamic philosophy, each in its own way, redefined the relationship between essence and appearance within the duality of soul and body: the soul is the eternal fixed essence, and the body is the changing, perishable appearance. This duality was not merely philosophical analysis, but a profound existential and ethical vision guiding humans toward spiritual elevation and cautioning them against indulgence in ephemeral bodily appearances.

Scholastic Philosophy (Thomas Aquinas): The Balance Between Reason and Faith in Understanding Essence and Appearance

By the 13th century, medieval philosophical thought reached its peak with the theologian-philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who sought to reconcile Aristotelian reason with Christian faith. While Augustine held that spiritual essence is perceived solely through divine light, Aquinas aimed to grant reason a role in discerning certain natural essences, without denying that absolute truth remains beyond human reach.

For Aquinas, human existence is characterized by a duality between essence and accident, soul and body. He did not reduce the body to a mere fleeting appearance, but considered it a partner of the soul in achieving human perfection, such that human identity is realized through their union. The spiritual essence is the rational principle enabling thought and choice, while the body is the tangible manifestation of this capacity, allowing humans to live in the world.

Aquinas distinguished between two kinds of knowledge:

• Natural Knowledge: Perceived by human reason through the visible world, i.e., appearances and accidents. This knowledge is valid but limited.
• Divine Knowledge: Transcends appearances to reach the divine essence, attainable only through revelation and faith.

Thus, Aquinas established a unique philosophical balance: reason can grasp essence at the level of natural beings but cannot penetrate the divine essence, which is revealed to humans through the world and faith. Appearance therefore becomes the domain of natural science, while essence becomes the domain of religious truth.

Aquinas’ philosophy reveals the specificity of Scholastic thought: it did not deny appearances nor despise the body, but reorganized the relationship between essence and appearance in a way that balances rational truths and faith-based truths. This laid the groundwork for modern philosophy, where the question of essence and appearance would be revisited from a new perspective, beyond theological frameworks, by Descartes, Kant, and Hegel.

Avicenna and Averroes: The Soul, Essence, and Appearance

1. Avicenna — The Distinction Between Essence and Existence, and the Soul as a Spiritual Substance Using the Body

Avicenna bases his vision of humanity on a precise metaphysical framework grounded in the distinction between essence (what a thing is) and existence. Everything other than the “Necessary Being” (God) has an essence that is not identical with its existence; essence can be conceived in the mind without commitment to its actual existence in reality. From this principle, he constructs a hierarchical conception of existence through a rational emanation that culminates in the Active Intellect, which serves as an intermediary between the celestial intellects and the lower world, providing intelligible forms to the human mind.

Within this system, the soul occupies the status of a “simple spiritual substance” linked to the body in a manner of management and use, not fusion or absorption. It is neither an accident of the body nor a mere transient image of it, but a substance that exists independently, employing the body as an instrument for movement, perception, and action. In this sense, Avicenna, unlike Aristotle, emphasizes the soul’s autonomy and abstraction, thereby allowing for its survival after the body’s demise.

– Proofs of the Soul and Essence

• The Flying Man Argument: If we suppose a human created fully in the air, suspended and deprived of the senses, his awareness would turn directly to his own existence. This self-attached consciousness—unmediated by any sensory appearance—reveals the soul’s essence and its independence from sensory and material conditions.

– The Hierarchy of the Soul’s Powers:

1. Vegetative (nutrition, growth, generation), concerned with bodily management;

2. Animal (sensation, imagination, memory, and “phantasm” that apprehends partial meanings such as fear and desire);

3. Rational, divided into theoretical (attaining universal intelligibles) and practical (governing ethical and political actions).

These levels form a ladder from appearance to inner reality: from sensory perceptions (phenomena) to intelligibles (essential forms), mediated by imaginative processes that enable abstraction.

– Knowledge Between Appearance and Inner Reality

Avicenna does not deny the role of sensory appearances; they are necessary but insufficient for knowledge. True knowledge occurs when the intellect abstracts from the sensed its universal form, upon which the Active Intellect illuminates it. Thus, appearance becomes a path toward inner reality, not a complete mirror of truth. Prophecy is similarly understood: a superior imaginative faculty receiving universal forms from the Active Intellect and clothing them in sensory and symbolic forms suitable for guiding the masses. Here, appearance is the language of essence, not its mask.

– Ethics and the Purification of the Soul

Since the soul is an enduring essence, its cultivation takes precedence over adorning the body. Virtue, for Avicenna, is not merely a set of forms and behaviors but a crafting of the self, preparing it to apprehend intelligibles and communicate with the Active Intellect. Thus, inner truth surpasses outward adornment, though appearances remain necessary for expression and moral refinement.

2. Averroes — Returning to Aristotle, the Soul as the Form of the Body, and Appearance as the Domain of Proof

Averroes begins from a critical project aimed at freeing Aristotle from Eastern interpretations, notably Avicenna’s Neoplatonic-Illuminationist reading. He objects to the exaggerated separation between essence and existence and to the sequential emanation cosmology, which, in his view, departs from Aristotle’s naturalistic understanding of beings through their elements, forms, and causes within this world.

– The Soul According to Averroes: Form, Not Separate Substance

The soul is the form of the body, i.e., its primary perfection insofar as it is alive. It is not a separate substance using the body as an instrument but the realization of life in the individual’s organic matter. Averroes emphasizes the unity of the composite (matter/form) in humans, grounding cognitive powers in the senses and imagination: “No intellect without imagination.”

The Active Intellect, by contrast, is a singular, separate existence shared by the human species, which actualizes intelligibles from potentiality. This gives rise to his famous theory of the unity of the material intellect, raising issues regarding the immortality of the individual soul: immortality seems to belong to the intelligible, not the individual, though Averroes attempts to reconcile this with religious law through hierarchical levels of interpretation.

– Appearance and Inner Reality: Method and Hermeneutics

Unlike Avicenna’s cosmological emphasis on metaphysical inner reality, Averroes assigns methodological primacy to appearances: natural phenomena are orderly, subject to demonstrative reasoning, and provide the pathway to causes and essences within nature, not beyond it. He criticizes excessive recourse to transcendent causes and numerous intermediaries.

In religious exegesis, he establishes a didactic distinction:
• Exoteric law (ẓāhir): universal discourse for the masses;
• Demonstrative interpretation (bāṭin): reserved for the elite versed in reasoning, ensuring allegorical meanings are understood without misleading the general populace.

There are not two conflicting truths, but two levels of reception: outward guidance for action and inner insight into causal structures.

– Knowledge and Demonstration

The path from appearance to inner reality is through demonstrative reasoning: from ordered sensory data to universal laws (species essence) via strict application of the four causes (material, formal, efficient, final). Appearances are not illusions to be abandoned but the material through which essence is extracted.

3. A Systematic Comparison — The Soul’s Essence and Its Appearance in Two Frameworks

1. The Soul and the Body
• Avicenna: The soul is a simple spiritual essence, enduring, using the body as an instrument; the body’s appearance is only accidental and does not constitute the meaning of humanity except instrumentally.
• Averroes: The soul is the body’s form and perfection; no psychic power exists without its organic instruments and imagination. Essence is the unity of the composite, not a separate substance.

2. Essence and Existence
• Avicenna: Distinction is fundamental; the Necessary Being transcends possible essences through the Active Intellect.
• Averroes: Existence is grounded in natural formal realizations; transcendent intermediaries are minimized for an internal Aristotelian explanation.

3. Knowledge from Appearance to Inner Reality
• Avicenna: Appearances serve as a ladder to intelligibles, completed by the Active Intellect; prophecy interprets the symbolization of essence.
• Averroes: Appearances are the matter and condition of demonstration; no intelligible without imagination. The Active Intellect is singular, but the demonstration is realized individually through imaginative powers.

4. Immortality and Identity
• Avicenna: Personal immortality of the soul, as a simple immaterial substance.
• Averroes: Immortality applies to the intelligible, not the individual; personal identity remains a complex question.

5. Ethical Value of Appearance
• Avicenna: Prioritizes inner cultivation to match reason and intelligibles; appearance is instrumental in expressing truth.
• Averroes: Upholds orderly appearances of nature and law, guiding practical action; interpretation is governed by reason and the purpose of science and religion.

Conclusion

Avicenna highlights the nobility and independence of the spiritual essence, treating appearances as symbolic paths to inner reality, completed by the illumination of the Active Intellect. Averroes, conversely, restores methodological primacy to appearances, binding the soul to its bodily form and to the natural causal order. Between these two frameworks, the human image emerges in two ways:

• An enduring rational self employing the body instrumentally (Avicennian view).
• A natural composite perfected through intellect and ordered appearances (Averroesian view).

This productive divergence laid the foundation for kalam, Sufism, and Latin Scholasticism alike: Thomas Aquinas drew on Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence, while Latin Averroism fed from Averroes’ unity of intellect and return to the proof of nature. The question of the soul, between its essence and appearance, continues to provide fertile ground for contemporary philosophical debate: Is our truth in what is unseen, or in the disciplined way we manifest it? Or is human completeness only achieved in a perpetual interplay between the two?

3. Modern and Contemporary Philosophy

• Descartes and the Thinking Substance.

• Kant: Appearance and the Thing-in-Itself.

• Hegel: The Dialectic of Essence and Appearance.

• Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence (Mutable Essence).

With the emergence of the modern era in the 17th century, philosophy was turned upside down. The question was no longer, as it had been for the ancients: What is the true essence behind phenomena? Rather, it became: How can humans know themselves and the world? The focus shifted from nature and metaphysics to the rational self, and from metaphysical absolutes to the conditions of knowledge and manifestations of consciousness. Modern philosophy thus opened a new horizon for the question of essence and appearance—one that makes human beings themselves the starting point.

In the Age of Reason, Descartes established certainty in the cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) as the foundation for all knowledge. Here, essence appears in the form of the thinking self, while the external world is surrounded by shadows of doubt, grasped only through its manifestation in thought. With Kant, this transformation deepens: the human mind cannot access the “thing-in-itself” (the noumenon) but remains confined to phenomena (the phainomena) that it constructs according to the categories of understanding and the forms of sensibility. Essence is no longer a purely metaphysical given but a boundary of reason that cannot be surpassed. Appearance, then, becomes the only possible domain of knowledge.

Hegel then redefined the relationship between essence and appearance dialectically: essence is not a static reality behind things but the movement of spirit realized through its historical manifestations. Appearance, for him, is not a veil but the manifestation of essence in time and history. Philosophy thus opened to readings of religion, art, and politics as stages of the Absolute Spirit realizing itself.

The 19th century brought a violent rebellion: Nietzsche declared the death of inherited metaphysical essence, whether called “God” or “Absolute Truth.” For him, appearances are no longer mere shells over a fixed essence; they are the truth itself in its flow, the will to power wearing infinite masks. The wall separating essence and appearance collapses, replaced by a celebratory vision of surface, interpretation, and difference.

In the 20th century, Husserl developed phenomenology as a method to understand consciousness: the aim is not to grasp an essence behind experience but to describe phenomena as given in consciousness. Heidegger went further, making the question of being itself central, critiquing the history of metaphysics for hiding essence behind appearances and affirming that truth is understood only through the disclosure of Being-in-the-world. Sartre added an existential dimension: essence does not precede human existence; humans create their essence through actions and choices, always manifesting more than what is latent.

Thus, modern and contemporary philosophy did not abolish the question of essence and appearance but radically reformulated it: from searching for a fixed essence behind phenomena, to interrogating the conditions of consciousness and knowledge, to reading phenomena themselves as manifestations or even substitutes for essence. The discussion moved from a traditional duality (essence/appearance) to a more complex dialectic, where essence becomes movement within appearance, or appearance becomes the sole reality accessible to humans.

Descartes and the Thinking Substance

Descartes (1596–1650) marks the major turning point inaugurating modern philosophy, for he shifted the question of essence from classical metaphysics to self-consciousness. In response to the pervasive doubts of his age, he saw that the only path to certainty is to demolish all false appearances provided by the senses and construct indubitable knowledge on a firm foundation. Thus arose the famous cogito: I think, therefore I am.

1. The Cogito: Essence Emerging from Doubt
   Descartes begins with methodological doubt applied to everything that appears: the senses deceive, dreams disguise reality, even simple mathematical truths could be illusions if a “malicious demon” manipulated our minds. Amid this total collapse of appearances, one certainty emerges that cannot be denied: that I doubt. But doubt itself is an act of thought, and cannot exist without a thinking subject performing it. Here, essence appears in its purest form: the thinking self, whose existence is affirmed through itself without reference to any external appearance.

2. The Dual Essence: Mind and Body
   From this first certainty, Descartes builds his doctrine of substance. Existence is defined through three kinds of substances:

3. God: the infinite, absolute substance, guarantor of truth.

4. Mind: the thinking substance (res cogitans), whose essence is thought in all its forms (doubt, will, conception, judgment).

5. Matter: the extended substance (res extensa), whose essence is extension in space and time.

This opposition of mind and body presents a fundamental duality: the mind is an inner essence apprehended only by direct consciousness, while the body is an external appearance perceived by the senses. Descartes thus reinforces the distinction between spiritual essence revealed to consciousness and material appearances, which may mislead.

3. Appearance as a Field of Error
   For Descartes, the senses present only appearances, not essence. They offer images that may be distorted, partial, or deceptive. Example: a straight stick appears bent in water. Truth is not attained from sensory appearances but from pure thought, which apprehends essences clearly and distinctly. Thus, appearance is a domain of doubt, while essence is grasped by reason alone.

4. Guaranteeing Truth: God as Supreme Substance
   How does one move from self-consciousness to the external world? Descartes invokes his proof of God’s existence: since I have the idea of infinite perfection, there must be a source that is indeed perfect—God. This divine, perfect, and benevolent substance guarantees that our clear and distinct ideas are not illusions. Descartes thus links thinking substance and external appearance through the divine intermediary, ensuring that the material world is not merely deceptive.

5. The Problem of Dualism
   Nevertheless, the sharp separation between the two substances (thinking mind and extended body) raises a profound problem: how can two completely distinct substances interact? How does mental decision (thinking substance) affect bodily movement? Descartes attempted to resolve this by proposing interaction through the pineal gland, but the problem remains a major philosophical issue, later known as the “mind-body problem.”

Conclusion:
By making self-conscious thought the foundation of existence, Descartes shifted the discussion from searching for hidden essence behind natural phenomena to examining the essence of the self as the first certainty. For him, essence is thought, while appearance remains a realm of doubt and error, legitimate only when grounded in reason and divine guarantee. Descartes thus inaugurated philosophical modernity as the age of the self, turning the essence/appearance duality into the duality of thought/extension, consciousness/world—a duality that would shape the course of European philosophy.

• Kant: Appearance and the Thing-in-Itself

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) brought a radical transformation to the course of philosophy after Descartes and Hume, through what he himself called the “Copernican Revolution in Philosophy.” Instead of assuming that knowledge must correspond to external objects existing in themselves, he argued that objects are given to consciousness only under conditions imposed a priori by the human mind. In this way, he shifted the focus of the question: it was no longer about seeking essence as a reality behind appearances, but rather about asking: what are the conditions that make appearances possible as objects of knowledge?

1. Appearance: Phenomena as the Horizon of Knowledge
   For Kant, what we perceive through the senses is not “things as they are in themselves,” but things as they are given to us according to the forms of sensibility (space and time) and the categories of understanding (causality, substance, quantity, etc.). This level of existence he calls phenomena.

Thus, appearance is not merely deception or a superficial shell, as in Plato or even Descartes; rather, it is the only domain in which scientific and objective knowledge can be built. Science studies only phenomena as they appear within the mental frameworks that organize them.

2. The Thing-in-Itself: Noumenon
   Nevertheless, Kant acknowledges that phenomena do not exhaust the reality of things. There is another dimension, which he calls the thing-in-itself (Noumenon), the existence of objects independent of our perception. However, this dimension remains inaccessible to knowledge: reason cannot penetrate it because it exceeds the conditions of our possible experience. The noumenon, then, is the metaphysical essence, but a veiled essence, a limit beyond which thought cannot go.

3. Appearance is Not Illusion
   Unlike ancient conceptions that treated appearance as deception or illusion, Kant restored the status of appearance, making it the field of possible truth. We do not have access to the thing-in-itself, but this does not mean that our knowledge of phenomena is false; on the contrary, it is certain and objective within its limits. For Kant, appearance is not a veil hiding essence, but the only reality that reason can grasp.

4. Limits and Freedom
   Kant emphasizes that recognizing the limits of reason—its inability to access the thing-in-itself—is not a deficiency, but a condition that opens the way for freedom and faith. In the realm of nature, reason is constrained by its categories and phenomena, but in the moral realm, humans confront themselves as free beings, that is, moral essences that cannot be reduced to phenomena. From this arises his ethical philosophy, which is based on what transcends appearance without claiming to grasp the metaphysical essence itself.

5. Impact of the Kantian Shift
   In this way, Kant transformed the duality of essence and appearance:

• Essence (Noumenon) is no longer an object of knowledge but a boundary drawn around reason.

• Appearance (Phenomena) is no longer illusion or veil, but the positive domain of truth and science.

Kant made humans not seekers of transcendent essence, but organizers of appearances through their mental structures. Thus, he inaugurated the era of critical modernity, where philosophical thought shifted from pursuing the “absolute essence” to interrogating the “conditions for the possibility of knowledge and experience.”

• Hegel: The Dialectic Between Essence and Appearance

With Hegel (1770–1831), German idealist philosophy reaches its peak. The question of essence and appearance is no longer defined through separation or opposition, as in Plato, Descartes, or even Kant, but through dialectic—that dynamic movement that makes essence intelligible only through its manifestations, and appearance apprehensible only as a manifestation of essence. For Hegel, there is no static essence behind things, nor an appearance independent in itself; each gains meaning only within a comprehensive dialectical unity: the Absolute Spirit realizing itself through history.

1. Critique of the Classical Duality
   Previous philosophies often distinguished between a fixed, transcendent essence and changing, transient appearances. Plato saw appearances as mere shadows of the world of forms; Descartes distinguished between thinking substance and extended substance; Kant drew boundaries between the thing-in-itself and phenomena. Hegel, however, argues that such dualities lead to a philosophical deadlock: they assume an essence that never appears and a superficial appearance detached from reality. But how can an essence be real if it is incapable of appearing? And how can an appearance be intelligible if it does not express an essence?

2. Appearance as a Necessity for Essence
   In his Science of Logic, Hegel distinguishes between essence and being. Essence is the inner structure that explains phenomena, but it is not a fixed given; it is always determined through its manifestations. Appearance is therefore not deception or emptiness but essence brought into existence. Hence Hegel’s famous phrase: “What is not actual is not true.” True essence is that which reveals itself, positions itself, and becomes appearance.

3. Dialectic: The Movement of Essence in History
   For Hegel, appearance is not merely an individual moment but a stage in the dialectical movement of spirit. Essence is not given all at once; it develops through contradictions:

• It posits itself as a form (thesis).

• It encounters its opposite (antithesis).

• Then it unites them at a higher level (synthesis).

In this sense, every historical appearance—in religion, politics, philosophy, or art—is a moment in the unfolding of essence. The Absolute Spirit does not exist as a transcendent essence outside time; it gradually manifests through the course of human history.

4. Reconciliation of Essence and Appearance
   Through this conception, there is no absolute conflict between inner and outer, or between truth and appearance. Appearance is not a veil hiding essence; it is the language of essence, the way it manifests to consciousness. Philosophy’s task is therefore not only to uncover what lies behind phenomena but to understand how appearances themselves are the truth of essence in the process of actualization.

5. Impact of the Hegelian Vision
   This understanding opened new horizons in modern thought:

• History: Events are not random but forms in which spirit reveals itself in its progress toward freedom.

• Art and Religion: Aesthetic and symbolic manifestations are not superficial; they are necessary moments in the revelation of the Absolute.

• Politics: The state is not merely a social appearance but an expression of the spirit of the community at its highest realization.

Conclusion:
Hegel transcends traditional metaphysics, which separates essence and appearance. For him, there is no essence without appearance, nor appearance without essence. Both are united in a dialectical movement that makes truth a process, and history a stage for the revelation of the Absolute. The relationship between essence and appearance thus transforms from a metaphysical duality into a living dynamic: appearance becomes essence made visible, and essence becomes appearance perfected.

Through this dialectical perspective, Hegel liberates philosophy from the static tendencies that characterized the understanding of essence throughout history. Essence is no longer a complete reality in a transcendent world, nor a self isolated from the world; it is a continuous movement, a dialectic creating itself through history, nature, and consciousness. Appearance is no longer a misleading surface but the stage upon which essence performs and assumes concrete form. Consequently, the relationship between essence and appearance in Hegel is not one of separation or subordination but of a tense, fertile unity, continuously generating new meanings. It is a relationship in which humans themselves, through their consciousness, history, and struggles, become the field in which the Absolute unfolds, making the human being not merely a spectator of essence’s movement but one of its living faces and greatest manifestations.

• Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence (A Mutable Essence)

With Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the French existentialist philosopher, the traditional duality of essence and appearance undergoes a radical transformation. Humanity is no longer defined by a fixed essence or a pre-existing nature; instead, it becomes an open project—existence precedes any determination, and essence is established through one’s actions and choices. For Sartre, there is no pre-existing transcendent essence, nor a fixed nature that defines a person from the outset. Humans exist first, and then create themselves.

1. Critique of Essentialist Metaphysics
   From Greek philosophy through medieval theology to modern philosophy, humans were typically seen as possessing a predetermined "essence," whether it be reason (as in Descartes), the rational soul (Aristotle), the divine image (Christian and Islamic theology), or even the enigmatic "thing-in-itself" (Kant). Sartre rejects this entire heritage: there is no transcendent essence or metaphysical core preceding human existence. Humans are thrown into the world, confront reality as it is, and then invent their meaning through free decisions.

2. Existence Precedes Essence
   Sartre’s famous dictum—existence precedes essence—means that humans first exist as conscious beings and only then constitute their essence through actions and practices. Unlike objects such as knives or chairs, which are made according to a prior design, humans have no predetermined "existential blueprint." They are an open project, continuously self-determining. Here, essence is not a fixed given but a mutable and renewable process shaped through the trajectory of existence itself.

3. Freedom and the Existential Burden
   This absolute freedom is not merely a joyful potential but also a heavy burden. Humans are responsible for themselves and the world they create through their actions. They cannot escape freedom, nor hide behind a pre-imposed essence. From this arises existential anxiety: because I alone am responsible for shaping my essence, I bear the weight of this decision at every moment.

4. Appearance as Part of Existence
   Within this philosophy, appearance is not a false surface but a means for humans to express themselves. Appearance—whether in behavior, language, or stance—reveals the free project through which a person constitutes their essence. Yet there is a danger, which Sartre calls bad faith (mauvaise foi): when a person attempts to hide behind appearances to evade responsibility, pretending, for example, that their "essence" is fixed. In reality, even this pretense is itself a free act, demonstrating that essence is nothing other than what we create.

5. The Mutable Essence: Human as Project
   For Sartre, human essence is not something stable behind appearances but a continuous movement of formation and transcendence. Humans are not simply what they are now but what they strive to become. They are a "project," a "tendency toward the future"—an essence in perpetual flux. Essence is therefore not a hidden given behind appearance but a process manifested through appearance, action, choice, and existential engagement.

Conclusion:
With Sartre, the traditional metaphysical duality dominating philosophy for centuries—separating essence and appearance, a hidden inner truth and a changing outer shell—is dissolved. He rejects the notion of a pre-existing fixed essence and denies the idea of a false appearance concealing an absolute truth. Humans are thrown into the world without prior definition or ready-made design and gradually shape their essence through actions, choices, attitudes, and manifestations reflecting their existential project.

In this sense, essence for Sartre is not a given or inherited nature but the result of an ongoing process of creation and transformation. Humans are not only what they are but always what they intend to become. They are an open project oriented toward the future, constantly surpassing themselves. Existence is the beginning; essence is the outcome of this existence actualized in freedom and action. Essence is realized in appearance, and appearance itself becomes a creative medium for shaping essence.

This absolute freedom, which makes humans masters of themselves, carries a profound responsibility: they cannot invoke a prior essence, fixed nature, or inevitable fate to justify their actions. Every act and every chosen appearance contributes to the formation of one’s own essence, carrying existential and ethical weight. Even attempts to evade freedom, hiding behind excuses or social roles, constitute Sartre’s notion of bad faith—pretending to possess a fixed essence—but this evasion itself reveals the depth of freedom, proving that humans are compelled to choose even when they refuse to acknowledge it.

Thus, Sartre’s conception of human essence does not eliminate the idea of essence but transforms it from a fixed, transcendent reality into a mutable, dynamic process revealed through appearances. Appearance becomes the practical, existential expression of essence, which itself continuously evolves. Essence is never a completed endpoint but an infinite process of formation and transcendence.

In Sartre’s philosophy, humans are governed by freedom not as a mere privilege but as an inescapable condition. They are compelled to create themselves, to forge their essence through appearances in the world, without relying on a pre-existing truth or metaphysical nature. Human existence becomes an open space for infinite possibilities of meaning, where essence is not a final goal but an ongoing project, manifested in appearance as much as it transcends it, perpetually open to formation and self-transcendence.

Chapter Two: Humanity Between Spiritual Essence and Religious Appearance

1. Intention and Appearance in Religion: Inner Action and Outer Action

2. Spirit and Body: Duality in Christianity and Islam

3. Hypocrisy and Religious Appearances in Confrontation with True Faith

Religion is considered one of the most important domains where the duality of essence and appearance manifests in human life. Since the dawn of history, religious experience has been linked to humanity’s attempt to understand itself and its relationship with the Absolute, seeking meaning and purpose beyond mere existence. In this context, spiritual essence appears as the inner depth of the human being—the dimension connecting one to what transcends the body and the material world, granting a sense of immortality and belonging to a higher truth. In contrast, religious appearance manifests in rituals, ceremonies, symbols, and belief systems that reflect this essence at the collective and historical level.

The duality between spiritual essence and religious appearance reveals a deep philosophical tension: is religion merely an external expression of an inner spiritual reality, or are these religious manifestations the necessary condition through which one apprehends and connects with one’s spiritual essence? Mystical experiences, for instance, tend to emphasize the inner over the outer, considering rituals as shells to be transcended to reach the core of divine truth. Meanwhile, institutional theology often holds that rituals and rites are not superficial forms but indispensable mediums for embodying the spirit and educating humans in its values.

Medieval philosophy, in both Christian and Islamic contexts, addressed this issue with considerable depth. Philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes distinguished between the soul as an immortal spiritual essence and the body as a perishable manifestation, regarding religion as providing symbols and images to approximate metaphysical and rational truths. In Christian thought, the belief prevailed that the relationship with God is embodied in the Church and its sacraments, so that religious appearance becomes an institution preserving spiritual essence and giving it tangible form in history. Thus, the debate persisted: is spiritual essence alone sufficient to make one religious, or is religious appearance necessary to provide identity and grounding in reality?

Modern and contemporary philosophy has also engaged with this question. Descartes, despite his rationalism, left room for faith as an inner spiritual dimension independent of appearances. Kant distinguished between moral religion, which expresses spiritual essence as duty, and historical religion based on rituals. Hegel reformulated the relationship dialectically: religious appearance, for him, is not a surface concealing the spirit, but the way spiritual essence expresses itself historically, whether in myth, doctrine, or ritual.

Hence, the relationship between spiritual essence and religious appearance is neither a simple separation nor a straightforward conflict. Spiritual essence gives religion its meaning and legitimacy, while religious appearance allows this essence to manifest in social and cultural reality, making spiritual experience collective rather than solely individual. This raises the question: can the spirit exist without appearance? Can appearance preserve its meaning if severed from the spirit?

1. Intention and Appearance in Religion: Inner Action and Outer Action

Religious experience has always posed a pressing question: where does the criterion of religious truth reside? In intention as the orientation and aim of the heart, or in appearance as the action embodied in ritual, behavior, and speech? This question concerns not only ethics but the essence of religion itself: if religion is a relationship with the Absolute, does it occur primarily inwardly, or does it require an outward, visible expression? If both are necessary, what is the relationship between them?

a) Deconstructing the Concepts: Intention and Embodiment

Intention is not a fleeting thought or vague desire; it is a deliberate act that confers meaning and purpose. It is the “orientation” giving an action its moral form, so that the same act—almsgiving, prayer, or speaking truth—can have different values depending on its intended aim. Appearance, meanwhile, is not a superficial shell; it is the sum of what religion manifests in time: rituals, gestures, words, obligations, and social signs. Appearance is the language through which intention speaks, and the body is the stage upon which the will is displayed.

Thus, understanding intention and appearance as a zero-sum opposition is misleading: intention without embodiment remains an untested promise, while appearance without intention becomes empty performance or social theater.

b) Comparative Religious Approach: Foundational Inner Reality and Structuring Outer Form

• In Abrahamic traditions, the inner dimension carries great weight: sincerity, truthfulness, and repentance are acts of the heart giving worship its meaning. Yet these traditions insist that the inner must take a legitimate form: intention directed toward God, but prayer expressed in its outward form, justice enacted in the world. Intention provides moral value, appearance provides social order and collective identity.

• In Sufism, appearance is seen as a tool for disciplining the self and as a “spiritual exercise” aligning desires with a singular purpose. Form is not abolished but purified from hypocrisy (riya’), transforming appearance into a medium for truth rather than a mirror for others.

• In Christian theology, the duality of faith and works emerges: faith is the heart’s intention and trust in the Absolute, yet “faith without works is dead.” Spiritual essence does not exempt one from practical expression of love, and sacraments embody grace in visible form, so that appearance carries, rather than contradicts, the inner reality.

• In Jewish thought, the concept of kavanah (intent of the heart) accompanies performing the mitzvot (commandments): scholars debate the validity of acts performed with form but lacking sufficient intention. Appearance preserves communal memory, while kavanah directs the act toward God.

Comparative Conclusion: Inner intention grants moral legitimacy, outer appearance grants institutional and historical legitimacy. Religion constantly negotiates tension between these two legitimacies.

c) Ethical Philosophy: From “Good Intention” to “Right Action”

• Kant: The moral value of an action lies in duty and good will; the visible outcome does not confer moral worth but reveals alignment of intention with moral law.

• Aristotle: Virtue is not a momentary intention but a habit (hexis) cultivated through practice; intention and appearance unite in virtuous habit.

• Aquinas: External acts take moral species from their object, internal acts (intention) from the ultimate end; full judgment unites act and teleological form.

• Sartre (existentialism): Intention is not a pre-given essence but built through action. Bad faith occurs when one hides behind form to evade freedom. Appearance becomes a test of the truth of intention: genuine choice or defensive mask?

d) Sociology and Hermeneutics of Appearance: Between Signaling and Deception

Religious appearance functions in society:

• Durkheim: It is a shared language structuring memory, values, and expectations; rituals create the community as much as they express it.

• Goffman: Appearance signals membership and commitment, shaping responsibility; yet it can be exploited for performance.

• Hermeneutics: Appearance is a symbol, not mere movement; detached from spirit, it dies, becomes an idol when opposed to the inner truth.

2. Two Interrelated Imbalances: Spirituality without Form, Formalism without Spirit

• Spirituality without form: prioritizing intention alone reduces religion to vague subjectivity, hinders social accountability, and justifies contradictions.

• Formalism without spirit: counting gestures and words while the heart is absent reduces rituals to mechanical actions, law to lifeless form, and purpose to empty shell.

The ethical-religious balance is not a midpoint but a hierarchy: intention is the foundational source, appearance ensures truthfulness and cultivation. Intention determines purpose; form ensures realization.

3. Toward a Normative Synthesis: “Embodied Intention” and “Salvific Form”

Two interdependent principles:

1. Embodied Intention: Good intention must seek expression in the world—justice, charity, truth. Embodiment protects intention from pretense and desire.

2. Salvific Form: Religious appearance must respond to intention—mercy above harshness, sincerity above hypocrisy, purpose above literalism that nullifies spirit.

Religious education thus operates on two levels: refining the heart to cultivate intention, and refining the body/habits to improve performance. Heart without action is futile; action without sincerity is hollow.

4. Practical Implications: Criteria for Evaluation and Accountability

• Testing intention: Stability in private acts, willingness to sacrifice self-interest for principle.

• Testing appearance: Consistency, durability, and alignment with moral/religious aims.

• Integration criterion: The closer the gap between speech and action, secrecy and public, the stronger the unity of inner and outer; the wider the gap, the more need to correct hypocrisy or misunderstanding.

Conclusion:
The heart is not a substitute for the hand, nor the hand for the heart. Religion—as a relation with the Absolute and a formation of the human being—requires intention that grounds, and appearance that realizes. Intention gives the act its moral type and goal; appearance gives it reality and capacity to shape both world and self. When reconciled, religious action becomes the expression of truth through both heart and body: a directed heart, a witnessing body; sincere inner intent illuminating the path, faithful outward form walking it. Only thus does religion transcend the duality of “essence and appearance,” moving from suspicion to a living unity in which meaning is dynamically realized.

2. Spirit and Body: The Duality in Christianity and Islam

Since the beginnings of religious and philosophical thought, humanity has faced a tension between two distinct elements: the spirit, as the breath of the divine, the secret of life, and the immortal essence, and the body, as the weight of matter, the limit of time, and the theater of sensory experience. This duality, though shared across cultures, acquired distinctive features in Christianity and Islam, where the relationship between spirit and body was not left ambiguous but was philosophically and theologically formulated, reflecting the nature of the human relationship with God, between immortality and mortality, and between spiritual essence and material manifestation.

1) In Christianity: Fallen Body and Redeemed Spirit

In Christian theology, the spirit is conceived as the highest element of human existence, oriented toward God and seeking salvation in Him. The body, however, since the narrative of the Fall in Genesis, is associated with error, weakness, and desire. The body is not inherently evil, but it is the locus of vulnerability that exposes humans to deviation. Christian life thus became a struggle between “a spirit inclined to good” and “a body that desires against the spirit,” in the words of Paul the Apostle.

Christianity, however, did not stop at a purely dualistic separation. It reformulated the relationship through the doctrine of Incarnation, in which God Himself assumed a body in Christ, restoring dignity to the body and abolishing the idea of its absolute defilement. Likewise, the doctrine of resurrection affirms that the body is not a disposable shell but will be recreated in glorified form, so that human destiny becomes the unity of spirit and body in renewed eternity. Here, the body is not a final obstacle but part of human identity, to be purified and sanctified by grace, becoming a partner of the spirit in salvation.

2) In Islam: Prostrated Body and Deputized Spirit

In Islam, the Quran emphasizes the unity of the human being. Humans are composed of clay and a divine spirit breathed into them: “So when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, fall down to him in prostration” (Ṣād: 72). Here, the body itself becomes a divine sign, a honored material deserving of prostration, because it is the vessel of the spirit and the instrument of God’s vicegerency.

In the Islamic conception, the spirit is a lofty, transcendent essence, yet it cannot be understood independently of the body. Divine obligations address humans as a unified body-spirit entity: prayer requires inner intention (spirit) and bodily action (appearance), fasting involves restraining the body and purifying the spirit simultaneously. The body is not evil but a trust for which humans are accountable: “And the hearing, the sight, and the heart—all of those will be questioned” (Al-Isrā’: 36).

Regarding the afterlife, the doctrine of bodily resurrection demonstrates that humans are raised with both body and spirit to be rewarded according to their deeds. In this sense, human truth is not reducible to the spirit alone but exists in the unity of body and spirit, with the spiritual dimension guiding purpose and moral intent.

3) Between Duality and Debate: Differences in the Balance of Spirit and Body

While both Christianity and Islam recognize human duality, the balance differs:

• Classical Christianity tends toward a tragic opposition between body and spirit, quickly resolved through grace, redemption, and the Incarnation, where the spirit elevates to purify the body and reunites it in Christ.

• Islam leans toward a more harmonious conception: body and spirit are not opposed but complementary, both integral to the divine covenant and vicegerency. Worship thus becomes a field for uniting spirit and body in a single movement.

4) Toward a Philosophical Synthesis: Humanity as a Dual-Unified Being

Spirit and body are not separate poles but interwoven levels. The body is not alien to the spirit but its instrument and manifestation; the spirit is not imprisoned in the body but is its vital principle and ultimate purpose. In Christianity, the body is sanctified through the Incarnation and resurrection; in Islam, the body is honored through the divine breath and vicegerency. Both perspectives aim to transcend a rigid duality that divides humans in half, toward a vision that sees the human being as a continuous dialogue between inner and outer, between the sublime and the earthly, between immortal essence and perishable form.

3. Hypocrisy and Religious Appearances versus True Faith

The issue of hypocrisy (riyā’) is one of the deepest problems revealing the tension between spiritual essence and religious appearance. Hypocrisy represents a moment of separation between inner and outer: where the religious appearance—whether prayer, fasting, charity, or ritual—takes a formal shape devoid of meaning, because the inner motive does not stem from sincere faith but from seeking human attention and praise. Here, religion becomes appearance without essence, a shell without a core, an image empty of its spirit.

1) In the Islamic Perspective

Islam clearly distinguishes between sincerity (ikhlāṣ) and hypocrisy (riyā’). Sincerity means that the act is purely for God, so that the inner intention (niyyah) corresponds with the outward action (ʿamal). Hypocrisy, however, is described in the hadiths as “hidden shirk” because it directs worship not toward God but toward the eyes of humans. Hypocrisy transforms worship into a social performance, where rituals are performed as a display of piety, yet in reality, they deviate from the essence of religiosity. The Quran addresses this phenomenon: “So woe to those who pray, [but] who are heedless of their prayer, those who show off” (Al-Māʿūn: 4–6). Here, outward form divorced from essence is condemned, revealing the falseness of religiosity aimed at image rather than truth.

2) In Christianity

Christian thought, from the Gospels onward, directed sharp criticism at hypocrisy. Christ described hypocrites as “whitewashed tombs,” beautiful on the outside but full of decay inside. In the Sermon on the Mount, he emphasized that prayer, charity, and fasting should be performed in secrecy, because their value derives from the relationship with God, not human observation. Thus, hypocrisy becomes the gravest spiritual sin, as it shifts the focus from essence (inner faith) to appearance (external display).

3) The Philosophical Dimension of Hypocrisy

Philosophically, hypocrisy can be seen as a state of existential split, in which the human being lives with two personas: one hidden and inward, the other outward and performative. This division destroys the unity of the person, turning them into a contradictory being who does not embody what they truly believe. Hypocrisy is not merely a moral defect but a crisis of spiritual identity, as it separates appearance from essence, even opposing it and covering it.

By contrast, true faith represents the unity of inner and outer: the outward form is a natural extension of essence, and rituals become genuine expressions of the spirit. At this level, religious appearances are no longer empty shells but signs revealing a living spiritual depth.

4) Between Falsehood and Truth: An Ongoing Dialectic

This tension shows that religious appearances are neither inherently good nor evil; their value depends on the degree of their connection with spiritual essence. Rituals may serve as a means of spiritual elevation if woven with intention and sincerity, but they may turn into a false mask if employed for social status or authority. Thus, religion fundamentally calls for transcending hypocrisy and seeking truth, where spirit and appearance unite in harmony, and where faith is translated into action, and action reflects faith.

Mystics and ascetics were acutely aware of the danger of hypocrisy, considering the greatest barriers separating the servant from God not the visible sins or even bodily weakness, but preoccupation with human observation and attachment to praise. Hypocrisy, for them, is a hidden disease that infiltrates the heart, turning worship from an act directed toward God into a mere social display.

Therefore, they emphasized that obedience should not be measured by the quantity of outward acts or their duration, but by the sincerity of intention and purity of heart. The true knower is one whose inner and outer self are equal, whose deeds dissolve into a secret known only to God—neither rejoicing at praise nor grieving at blame. The true value of action comes from its presence before God, not from its appearance in the eyes of creation. Hence their constant exhortation to “conceal the deed” whenever possible, for the spirit shines in truth when appearance recedes so that essence may radiate.

Chapter Three: The Psychological Dimension of Essence and Appearance

1. Freud: The Unconscious as Hidden Essence and Behavior as Manifest Appearance

Sigmund Freud marked a radical turning point in understanding the relationship between essence and appearance on a psychological level. While traditional philosophy tended to view humans as rational beings whose reality could be grasped through consciousness and will, Freud revealed that what appears on the surface—behavioral appearance—is only a small part of a deeper psychological life, hidden in a dark realm he called the unconscious.

For Freud, the unconscious is the hidden essence of the self, containing repressed desires, instinctual drives, and painful memories excluded from conscious awareness through repression. Yet this essence is not silent; it finds multiple ways to express itself, manifesting in dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, and unexpected behaviors. Thus, appearance becomes, in Freud’s view, an encrypted message from the essence, requiring interpretation and analysis to decode its meaning.

This conception fundamentally transforms the relationship between essence and appearance: appearance is no longer a mere surface or deceptive mask, but a window revealing—albeit indirectly—the depths of the psyche. Psychoanalysis thus serves as a method to probe these depths, attempting to reconcile the outward with the inner and to read in observable behaviors the signs of hidden truths.

At the same time, Freud saw this relationship as one of tension rather than harmony. Consciousness tries to maintain a rational and organized image, while the unconscious overflows with socially or morally unacceptable drives, pushing them to emerge in disguised forms. Hence, a person may be estranged from themselves: what appears externally is not always their true essence but what repression and internal control have allowed to surface.

For Freud, the human being is divided between an unconscious essence that drives from within and a conscious appearance that attempts to control and direct it. Life, then, unfolds in the tension between overflowing desire and the external manifestation that either reveals or conceals it.

2. Jung: The Self versus the Persona

While Freud focused on the individual unconscious as the hidden essence expressing itself through appearances, Carl Gustav Jung expanded this perspective by introducing the collective unconscious, where primordial symbols and archetypes accumulate, shaping the essence of shared human experience. In this context, the question of essence and appearance becomes more complex: humans contend not only with their individual conscious and unconscious conflicts but also with inherited universal images that influence behavior and representation.

At the core of Jung’s theory lies the distinction between the Self and the Persona:

• The Self represents the deepest essence of personality, encompassing both consciousness and unconsciousness, providing a sense of unity and inner completeness. It is the spiritual and psychological center that the individual seeks to realize through the process of individuation, the journey toward balancing the various components of the psyche.

• The Persona is the social mask the individual wears to perform roles in public life. It is the face shown to others to gain acceptance, recognition, and to adapt to societal expectations.

While the Persona is crucial for social interaction, it can become dangerous if one confuses it with the true Self. Here, a psychological split arises: essence becomes lost amid social roles, and the person becomes a mere image performing roles rather than being their authentic self. Liberation from the domination of the Persona is therefore essential to discover the authentic Self.

In this sense, Jung asserts that the Persona is not inherently an enemy of essence but a necessary tool for social existence. Yet when a person is absorbed into the mask, they lose connection with their deeper Self, becoming an empty being controlled by others’ expectations. The psychological and spiritual value of individuation lies in restoring balance between appearance and essence, so that appearance becomes a true expression of the inner self rather than a concealing veil.

Jung’s tension between Self and Persona transcends individual psychology and highlights a universal existential challenge. Social life imposes faces and roles necessary for survival and harmony within the group, but excessive attachment to these masks results in the loss of the authentic dimension of existence. The journey of psychological maturity begins when one recognizes the social mask as merely a passage, not an end in itself, and seeks the deeper essence beneath it—this search imparts life with meaning beyond superficial adaptation.

3. Psychological Duality: What One Conceals and What One Shows

Psychological duality is a prominent manifestation of the tension between essence and appearance in everyday life. Humans do not always live in harmony between inner emotions, thoughts, and desires, and what they express externally through behavior and speech. The distance between inner and outer may be minor and transient, or it may grow into a deep gap threatening psychological balance and existential integrity.

This duality arises from multiple factors. Social and moral constraints often compel individuals to hide what is deemed unacceptable by societal norms or values. Unconscious defense mechanisms—such as repression, projection, or rationalization—further hide some desires even from oneself, producing an inner division. Consequently, appearance does not always reflect essence but may present a selective, altered, or even misleading image that allows the individual to maintain status or equilibrium.

Yet this duality is not inherently negative. It provides the capacity to adapt, as one cannot expose their inner self entirely to others. However, it becomes problematic when the gap grows so wide that the person becomes captive to their masks, unable to confront their true self. Anxiety and alienation emerge when life feels like a mere performance imposed by external circumstances rather than a genuine expression of the inner being.

Psychological duality demonstrates that the relationship between essence and appearance is not simple or harmonious but one of constant tension: between the need for honesty and transparency on one hand, and the need for adaptation and protection on the other. Maturity is achieved when this gap narrows, so that appearance becomes a true extension of essence, neither a mask concealing it nor a burden weighing it down.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this duality is that one may grow accustomed to it, losing awareness of their true essence. Continuous repetition of socially constructed roles can make the mask feel like the authentic face, while the inner self remains repressed in silence. Over time, this leads to an internal contradiction: feelings of emptiness, dissatisfaction with oneself, or persistent anxiety without clear cause. This signals that appearance is no longer a means of communication but a prison that hides the spirit from itself, preventing it from expressing its true nature.

Chapter Four: Human Beings in Society Between Essence and Appearance

1. Appearance as a Means of Integration or a Tool for Concealment

2. Social Deception: Pleasing Others and Hiding the Self

3. Media and the Culture of Image: The Domination of Form over Essence

While the previous chapters traced the essence/appearance duality within metaphysical, religious, and psychological horizons, shifting the focus to society reveals a third dimension of the issue: humans do not live their essence in isolation, nor do they only reveal themselves to themselves. They are interpersonal beings, formed within a network of expectations, norms, and symbols, where the authenticity of the inner self and the strength of values are continuously tested against the gazes and judgments of others.

In this public space, appearance becomes a shared language that reduces ambiguity and coordinates behavior. Yet it can also turn into a mask, hiding what one does not wish to disclose or what social norms do not permit. This generates a profound paradox: we need appearance to communicate and collaborate, but we fear that appearance may engulf or distort our essence.

Society is not a neutral mirror reflecting individual selves. It is also a normative machine that rewards certain appearances and marginalizes others, regulating what is seen and what is hidden through custom, institutions, and media. Thus, the problem of essence and appearance acquires ethical and political dimensions: How do we distinguish between politeness that preserves communal life and deception that undermines trust? Between privacy that protects the inner self and concealment that distorts reality? Between necessary symbolic communication and display that transforms the means into an end?

This chapter addresses three central nodes:

1. Appearance as a tool of social integration and, at times, concealment.

2. Social deception as a mechanism for pleasing others at the expense of the self.

3. Media authority and the culture of images, pushing form to dominate over essence.

For each node, we weigh the positive functions of appearance against its risks and suggest normative principles for harmonizing honesty with communal living.

1) Appearance as a Means of Integration or a Tool for Concealment

A) Integrative Function of Appearance
Appearance—through clothing, manners of speech, and signs of belonging—serves a signaling role that reduces uncertainty among strangers. It defines roles, communicates intentions, and indicates respect for rules. In this function, appearance becomes a symbolic capital, granting access to circles of trust (family, profession, neighborhood, community). This is not mere aesthetic luxury; it is a social contract facilitating cooperation. Without shared symbols, coordinating expectations is difficult, and the cost of understanding rises.

Appearance also embodies practical cultivation: when polite habits are embodied in posture, speech, and gesture, they shape the self. Appearance, in this sense, does not merely reflect virtue but participates in its formation—from punctuality to professional discipline to public taste. Here, outward form resonates with the inner self: well-presented appearance trains the inner self, and a genuine inner self gives credibility to appearance.

B) Concealment: From Privacy to Deception
Appearance also functions as concealment, taking two ethically distinct forms:

1. Legitimate concealment (Privacy): Protecting the inner self from societal scrutiny and authority. Here, the mask is a human right, guarding dignity and boundaries, preventing constant surveillance. Privacy is essential for freedom and for developing essence away from external pressures.

2. Misleading concealment: Using appearance to hide contradictions with personal obligations or public trust (falsifying qualifications, whitewashing corruption, performative religiosity). Here, the mask shifts from a protective right to a tool of deception, undermining the social contract by separating symbol from reference and sign from substance.

C) Criteria for Distinction
How can we distinguish between protection and deception? Two criteria:

• Goal test: Is the aim protecting the space for self-formation, or obtaining undeserved advantage? The first preserves dignity; the second violates justice.

• Public effect test: Does concealment reduce harm and enhance coexistence, or endanger others and disrupt responsibility?

Where protection of the individual is the goal, concealment is legitimate; where the sign is detached from truth to harm others, concealment is deceit.

2) Social Deception: Pleasing Others and Hiding the Self

A) From Politeness to Performance
All societies require some degree of courtesy and adaptation to others’ feelings. Yet this adaptation slides into performance when pleasing others becomes an end in itself, reducing the self to an echo of collective expectations. Here arises the social self that functions from outside in: seeking recognition at any cost, adopting opinions and behaviors dictated by desire for acceptance rather than conviction.

B) The Psychological Economy of Deception
Deception offers immediate benefits: simulating belonging, ensuring safety, shortening the path to influence. But it carries a long-term psychological cost: erosion of meaning, emptiness, anxiety from the potential exposure of contradictions between words and lived reality. As fear of exposure rises, investment in appearance increases, adding new masks and widening the gap between self and essence.

C) Common Patterns of Deception

• Performative virtue: Turning values into signs for applause rather than commitments.

• Adaptive conformity: Adopting contradictory stances depending on context to maintain acceptance, losing internal judgment.

• Forced emotional labor: Obligatory smiles and standardized emotional expressions in service and administrative jobs, selling emotional appearance as part of the product.

These patterns share a common structure: the sign detaches from experience. Appearance no longer translates essence grounded in experience and responsibility, but replaces it.

D) Ethics of Resisting Deception
We do not advocate abolishing all concealment or bluntly “saying everything inside.” Sound social ethics demand:

• Practical honesty: Align public claims with verifiable actions.

• Reflective distance: Cultivate the ability to say “no” when the price of acceptance is self-betrayal.

• Cost criterion: The moral value of disclosure corresponds to the effort one is willing to expend (time, energy, risk).

These principles distinguish politeness that preserves social harmony from deception that undermines trust.

3) Media and the Culture of Image: The Domination of Form over Essence

A) From News to Spectacle
Modern media—from screens to social platforms—introduced a new system of vision: the attention economy. Truth is rewarded not for depth but for capturing attention. Content is shortened, fragmented, and presented as spectacle ready for rapid sharing. The result: form advances, with camera angles, catchy headlines, and staged visuals taking precedence, while essence—context, causality, complexity—recedes.

B) Image without Reference: From Signification to Simulation
As images proliferate at high velocity, signs gradually detach from their references. Visual alternatives multiply, often becoming more present than reality itself: reputation capital, interaction metrics, “views” as a measure of value. At this stage, the image ceases to indicate and instead replaces its referent: public priorities shift according to surface shine rather than substantive importance.

C) Shaping Taste and Conscience
Media does more than display; it coordinates attention and reshapes moral sensibilities. Through repetition, selection, and framing, secondary matters are elevated, and essential matters buried in noise. Audiences develop a fluctuating, momentary sensibility, reacting to shock rather than evidence, spectacle rather than meaning. Individuals engage in a race to perform (following trends) to maintain visibility, reproducing deception collectively.

D) The Self as a Visible Commodity
In the image culture, the individual becomes a visual product: value measured by engagement metrics, personal narrative engineered for “shareability.” Production outweighs experience: life is made to be seen before it is lived. Narcissistic feedback loops emerge through digital mirrors, training the self to respond to external signals rather than internal compass.

E) Practical and Philosophical Resistances
Alternatives to the authority of images include:

1. Slowing the pace: Favor media that allow reasoning and context (long texts, dialogue, analytical documentaries) to counteract rapid snapshots.

2. Accountability for production: Each image should indicate its origin—who created it, how it was edited, what was omitted. Transparency does not invalidate the image but restores it as a means, not an end.

3. Restoring essence as criterion: Reorder values to reward verified actions and accurate knowledge over spectacle, within institutions, education, and public space.

Concluding Synthesis: Balancing Sign and Truth

Appearance is a social necessity: without it, there is no communication, trust, or law. But it becomes dangerous when detached from or replacing essence. Essence, in turn, requires some appearance to manifest ethically; yet it loses moral potential if it rejects all symbolic constraint, resulting in isolation or bluntness.

A dual balance is therefore required:

• For the individual: Align declarations with actions, preserve privacy without using it as an excuse for deception, resist easy acceptance when its price is betraying the inner self.

• For institutions and media: Reward content over cover, make transparency a criterion of value, and restore the slow time in which meaning is formed.

With this balance, society ceases to be a marketplace of images or a cage of masks, becoming a space where humans can reveal their essence with dignity and craft appearance with honesty, so that signs serve truth and form serves meaning.

Chapter Five: The Duality of Essence and Appearance in Literature and Art

1. Classical Literary Models (Example: Shakespeare, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

2. Arabic Poetry: Essence Confronting Ornamental Language and Appearance

3. Visual Arts and Cinema: Revealing Essence Through Appearances

Art and literature possess a unique ability to transform the essence/appearance duality from a theoretical problem into a sensory and existential experience—one that can be lived, contemplated, and confronted. Literature and art are not superficial mirrors reflecting only what is visible, nor are they isolated towers that proclaim absolute truths. Rather, they occupy a mediating space where signs transform into meanings and shells become windows onto the depths of the self, society, and history. Here, appearance becomes artistic material serving as a mediator: not merely to cover essence, but to create, reveal, and shape it.

Artists and writers, as curators of linguistic and visual worlds, understand that human essence cannot be grasped directly. It cannot be extracted as a fixed tool from an inner box; it is inferred through signs, symbols, and narrative or visual forms. Thus, they open a network of appearances—language, imagery, sound patterns, movement, ritual—to make appearance a tool of inquiry rather than a mere shell. At the same time, they reveal how social and cultural appearances can suffocate truth or be used to conceal it. Literature and art thus become experimental laboratories for philosophical inquiry: Is essence prior to the scene, or does the scene itself shape essence? Is appearance a veil or a mirror?

This chapter explores these questions in three central domains: classical literary models (where dramatic conflict between façade and selfhood is articulated), Arabic poetry (where rhetorical ornamentation confronts calls for truth and essence), and visual and cinematic arts (where image, movement, and time are tools for deeper revelation). In each domain, we examine artistic mechanisms, techniques, and ethical and epistemic capacities to reveal, exploit, or manipulate essence.

1. Classical Literary Models: Shakespeare, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Double Identity

Playing with Scene and Actor
In classical works, the essence/appearance duality emerges in its most dramatic forms. Shakespeare provides a prime example: theater serves simultaneously as a stage for social and personal enactment. Characters such as Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth offer a complex vision of humans who present a façade while hiding an inner reality—or who believe in an inner truth only to discover its impossibility. Shakespeare’s performative language—internal monologues, rhetorical entanglements, wordplay, and symbols—makes appearance itself a theater of revelation. When Hamlet speaks in his soliloquy, he does not declare a fixed truth; he experiments with doubt, intention, and feigned motives. The stage becomes an instrument measuring internal division.

The Double and Dual Identity: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde condenses the question textually: How does science create an alternate appearance of the self? How does moral division become a doubled persona? In the narrative, social representation of respectability confronts a dark, latent desire. Importantly, literature does not merely describe division; it enacts it, concentrating language and space—the house, city, night—around it to show how essence can emerge as an effect of appearance, and sometimes vice versa. The complex appearance that seeks to conceal genuine aspects can, paradoxically, generate them. The story thus becomes a symbolic reading of culture, respectability, and suppressed weakness.

Literary Techniques of Revelation

• Unreliable narration undermines the reader’s certainty, making appearance a field for inquiry.

• Monologues and intimate rhetoric access inner spaces hidden from external behavior.

• Symbols and motifs (mirrors, night, the house) channel appearances into meanings that hint at essence.

In these texts, literature exposes social pretense and shows how appearance can be a tool of survival or destruction.

2. Arabic Poetry: Essence Confronting Ornamental Language and Appearance

From Rhetorical Ornament to Sincerity: An Ethical-Rhetorical History
Arabic poetry has long been a stage for negotiating between rhetorical ornamentation (al-badi‘, puns, rhymed endings) and the imperative to convey essence: moral truth, emotional sincerity, or political testimony. In the pre-Islamic era, poetry showcased tribal pride and honor—a public appearance reinforcing the poet’s and tribe’s status. With Islam, ethical and religious concerns entered poetry, turning rhetoric into a vehicle for deeper meanings while still employing a wide range of ornamentation.

Al-Mutanabbi: The Tension Between Image and Essence
Al-Mutanabbi exemplifies this: rhetorical pride and personal assertion intertwine with complex inner sentiment. His eloquence forms a poetic façade that attracts admiration, yet his texts pose essential questions about dignity and existence. The tension is: does ornamentation enhance meaning or overshadow it? Al-Mutanabbi emerges as a creator who uses decoration to evoke essence.

Sufism and Mystical Poetry: Transforming Appearance into a Path to the Inner
Sufi poets (Ibn al-Farid, al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi) championed the inner over outward appearances, yet they used refined linguistic forms to represent the mystical experience. Poetic ritual does not cover essence; it condenses spiritual experience into transferable images: wine, love, ecstasy, annihilation. Ornamentation becomes a meditative tool, metaphors piercing the surface to reveal spiritual truth.

Modernity: Liberating Form to Reveal Essence
Modern Arabic poetry (Nizar Qabbani, Mahmoud Darwish, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab) breaks free from rhetorical constraints to adopt a language closer to contemporary human reality. Here, appearance changes—classical ornamentation diminishes—to focus on experience, identity, and memory. Yet ornamentation persists strategically to achieve new authenticity.

Poetic Tools for Revealing Essence

• Complex metaphor transforms sensory scenes into spiritual symbols.

• Sound duality (noise and silence) unveils gradations of essence.

• Pruning imagery: removing excessive details to produce a concentrated image conveying core feeling.

Arabic poets continually negotiate between language that excites the audience (appearance) and language bound to inner truth (essence)—a rhetorical game with ethical and cultural dimensions.

3. Visual Arts and Cinema: Revealing Essence Through Appearances

Painting: Light, Space, and Intention
Visual arts possess dense tools: color, light, space, composition. Techniques like chiaroscuro (Caravaggio, Rembrandt) visually reveal inner emotions; light does not merely show form but exposes motives, anxieties, and conscience. In abstraction (Picasso, Klee, Mondrian), color and shape become appearances of multifaceted essence: fragmented self, multiple perspectives, deconstructed reality. Art does not present essence directly; it transforms it into a visual experience, inviting viewer participation in discovery.

Cinema: Time and Editing as Tools for Depth
Cinema combines time, image, and sound, becoming an effective instrument for representing intersections of essence and appearance:

• Close-ups reveal facial details invisible in dialogue, exposing the inner self.

• Editing (Bertolucci, Eisenstein) generates new relations between sequential appearances, uncovering contradictions or manipulations of façade.

• Score and sound design add psychological layers, giving appearance emotional depth.

Films by Bergman, Tarkovsky, or Hitchcock do more than narrate; they construct appearances enabling viewers to penetrate essence: silent dialogues, camera angles, extended time, symbolic intersections.

Documentary and Art-Focused Films: Truth and Scene
In documentaries, the filmmaker bears an ethical responsibility: How is appearance produced? Does the image document essence or manufacture alternative reality? Here emerges an ethical concern: the image’s power to generate awareness or distort reality. Photography and cinematography ethics are thus central to the discourse on essence and appearance.

A Comprehensive Vision
In visual arts and cinema, appearance functions as a tool for revelation rather than concealment: light, framing, rhythm, and sound dissect appearances into a semantic fabric, allowing essence to emerge as “dynamic truth.” The viewer participates in interpretation, completing the creative act by perceiving relations between symbols and the structures they signify.

Concluding Synthesis: Art as Revelation and Ambush of Appearances

In literature, poetry, and visual arts, appearance is not merely a cover for essence; often, it becomes a cognitive device that reveals, records, and reshapes essence. Literature tests masks on stage, poetry experiments with concision and auditory effects, and visual art turns the image into a field for argumentation. Cultural history shows that social and rhetorical appearances can also be exploited to conceal or falsify essence. Artistic works thus remain ethically and epistemically potent: they teach us to read appearances, discern when they signal truth, and when they deceive.

Art and literature provide humans with a living laboratory for examining the tangled relationship between essence and appearance. They do not merely display faces or depict events; they strip away masks, expose hidden layers, or, conversely, demonstrate how appearances can mislead. Literary and artistic texts thus transcend aesthetic pleasure: they constitute a philosophical experience, training perception, cultivating critical awareness, and guiding eye and heart in the quest beyond surface, in a continuous journey between image and meaning, shell and core, appearance and essence.

Chapter Six: The Moral Dimension of Essence and Appearance

1. Human Value: Ethics and Essence versus Appearance and Wealth

2. Superficial Judgment and the Danger of Deception by Appearance

3. Moral Justice: Should We Judge Intention or Observable Outcome?

The duality of essence and appearance enters the realm of ethics, transforming from a cognitive or existential question into a strict tribunal that determines the value of actions and actors within society. Ethics is not merely a rigid system of values applied mechanically to behavior; it is an ontological space in which human worth is measured: Is a person considered human for the patterns of their intentions and the purity of their heart, or because their external behavior produces benefits and ensures stability?

With the rise of contemporary societies and the dominance of market logic and media, appearance has become a powerful factor in evaluating individuals: wealth provides outward signs of honor, and performative skills guarantee social acceptance. This raises a fundamental ethical question: By what standard do we measure human value? Is it enough for society to witness an ethical façade without the essence behind it?

This chapter examines this problem from three interconnected angles: the value of humans between moral essence and signs of wealth and power; the pitfalls of superficial judgment and the danger of being deceived by appearances; and the issue of moral justice—whether to judge by intentions or outcomes. Each section presents philosophical readings (virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism), practical implications, and suggested standards for restoring balance between inner sincerity and outer credibility, so that society does not become a market trading values for images.

1. Human Value: Ethics and Essence versus Appearance and Wealth

Essence as an Ethical Standard
Traditional ethical thought, particularly Aristotelian virtue ethics, holds that human value stems from moral essence: good character, inner equilibrium, and the striving for active excellence (ἔργον). In this view, humans are evaluated based on virtues that become habitual through belief and action. The principle here is that essence—the stable qualities cultivated through belief and practice—is the true measure of dignity and respect. A virtuous human being does not fluctuate based on external circumstances but produces meaningful actions, earning ethical recognition even if unable to display lavish appearances.

Appearance and Wealth as Market Values
In contrast, contemporary reality often treats human value as a purchasable appearance: wealth confers respectability, charisma is equated with media performance, and influence is measured by followers or digital metrics. In this symbolic economy, appearance becomes a quick indicator of success, while essence requires careful scrutiny—it does not sell well in a fast-paced market.

Ethical and Economic Tensions
The ethical problem is not merely theoretical but produces tangible consequences:

• Proliferation of hypocrisy: seeking recognition through appearances rather than merit undermines public trust.

• Weakening justice: opportunities are evaluated based on financial or social appearance rather than actual competence or virtue.

• Goal displacement: acquiring appearances becomes an end in itself, while living with inner honesty becomes secondary.

A Restorative Ethical Position
A balanced ethical approach acknowledges the human right to symbolic media (clothing, language, office) but prioritizes what truly makes a person human: dignity, empathy, and commitment to duty. It is insufficient to merely appear good; neglecting appearance as a means of expression and social education (clothing signaling respect, institutional procedures shaping behavior) leads to disorder as well. Conclusion: moral dignity is inferred from essence, while appearances should serve essence rather than replace it.

2. Superficial Judgment and the Danger of Deception by Appearance

Mechanisms of Deception
Being deceived by appearances is not merely an ethical problem but also a cognitive one: perception is influenced by biases like the Halo Effect (judging based on a single trait) and social conditioning that strengthens snap impressions. In politics, markets, and everyday interactions, judging people by their appearance—clothing, car, social media posts—without verifying essence is easy.

Ethical and Social Consequences of Superficiality

• Undeserved legitimacy: conferring trust and power on those who only appear competent.

• Corruption proliferation: performing ethical behavior without genuine commitment facilitates exploitation and manipulation.

• Erosion of solidarity: emphasizing superficial appearances deprives the poor and marginalized of participation and respect despite their inherent human worth.

Societal and Institutional Responsibility
To counteract these phenomena, society needs:

• Robust verification mechanisms: regulatory institutions, auditing processes, and exposing falsehoods.

• A culture of critical citizenship: teaching critical thinking and reinforcing values that prioritize essence (quality work, honesty).

• Authentic leadership models: leaders who align words with actions and accept public accountability.

3. Moral Justice: Should We Judge Intention or Observable Outcome?

Theoretical Divergence: Analytical Frameworks
Ethical philosophy frames the debate primarily within two perspectives:

• Kantian (Deontological) Ethics: prioritizes intentions; the moral value of an act is measured by the actor’s adherence to universalizable ethical principles. An act stemming from morally obligatory will is right, regardless of incidental outcomes.

• Utilitarian/Consequentialist Ethics: considers outcomes as the standard of correctness; an act is right if it maximizes collective good, irrespective of the actor’s intentions.

Virtue ethics focuses on the character and quality of the actor as the basis for judgment, while contractualist perspectives ask whether the act aligns with principles agreed upon by rational agents.

Illustrative Examples

1. A donor performs a charitable act for media attention (self-interested intention), producing genuine benefit for the recipients.

• Utilitarian: applauds the act for increasing welfare.

• Kantian: condemns the act because it lacks purely good intent.

• Virtue ethics: questions the actor’s character; the act is useful but not morally admirable.

2. A doctor errs in treatment (good intention, negative outcome). Judgments differ: those weighing intentions may see less fault; outcome-focused frameworks may see significant ethical lapse.

Toward a Balanced Integrative Framework
Blind reliance on either measure is insufficient. A balanced ethical approach proposes:

1. Dual verification: assess both intentions and outcomes; neither alone suffices.

2. Escalating responsibility principle: the greater the potential impact, the higher the standard for intentions and precautionary measures.

3. Justifiability standard: can the act be justified to a rational audience demanding clarity on intent and consequence?

4. Moral accountability and institutional consideration: actions should be evaluated within institutional frameworks that reward genuine intentions and punish hypocrisy.

Moral Luck
Finally, the effect of circumstances and luck on outcomes cannot be ignored. One may be rewarded for a positive result despite poor intent or condemned for a negative result despite good intent. Philosophically, this raises the challenge of balancing fair assessment with realistic outcomes. Practically, corrective justice principles—balancing compensation, accountability, and procedural rectification—help navigate this tension.

Concluding Synthesis: Toward an Ethics of Committed Appearance

The ethical reflection on essence and appearance cautions against sanctifying either side in isolation. The goal is to craft an ethical policy that refines appearance to serve essence, while reinforcing essence through sincere, transparent appearances. Practically, this entails:

• Teaching virtue: fostering essence through action, not mere claim.

• Building transparent oversight institutions: exposing falsehood and rewarding honesty.

• Promoting a culture of accountability: evaluating not only outcomes but also intentions and execution methods.

Ethical engagement with the essence/appearance duality does not devalue appearances; it channels them ethically: appearances build trust, bridge gaps, and indicate a responsible essence. In this vision, truth is not replaced by show, nor is appearance absolved of responsibility; rather, a balance is established, making humans an ethical and civic value, not a commodity in the market of appearances.

Perhaps the most crucial insight this moral dimension reveals is that the contemporary human dilemma lies not only in distinguishing essence from appearance but also in the readiness to reconcile the two. Societies content with appearances sow hypocrisy and internal division, while those who disdain appearance risk isolation or symbolic chaos. True ethics demands a dual courage: the courage to live with genuine essence without betraying conscience, and the courage to express that essence through appearances that are fitting, without deceit or falsification. Only then does appearance become a clear mirror rather than a mask, and essence take root in the world rather than remain imprisoned within, completing the moral dimension as the fruit of a balanced encounter between inner and outer, essence and appearance.

Chapter Seven: The Existential Human Between Self and Masks

1. Freedom as the Possibility of Liberation from the Authority of Appearances

2. Authenticity and Alienation in Heidegger and Sartre

3. The Tension Between “Who Am I Really?” and “How Do I Appear to Others?”

From the moment humans presented a face to others, they also carried a mask. Here, the mask is not merely a piece of clothing; it is a system of roles, signals, habits, and images through which we engage with the world: a job, a title, taste, accent, posture, and a glance. Through these masks, we understand others and are understood. Yet, at the same time, they can shift the center of gravity: instead of serving as a medium for communication, they become an authority that defines us externally and dictates how we should appear—and therefore how we should be.

Here arises the existential concern: Am I what I appear to be, or what I choose to be behind this scene? Can I exist without a mask at all, or is the real question how I craft my mask instead of allowing it to be crafted for me?

Existential philosophy escalates this question to its extreme. It does not stop at the ethical opposition between honesty and hypocrisy, nor at the social distinction between the authentic and the artificial. Rather, it considers the mask as an ontological hinge: how humans appear in the world (appearance) and how they appropriate their being (essence as a project).

• For Heidegger, human existence (Dasein) is thrown into a world already structured by habits, language, and “the They” (das Man); one must reclaim authorship of existence through authentic resoluteness.

• For Sartre, “existence precedes essence”: there is no pre-given core; rather, we are free projects that construct themselves in constant tension between given reality and transcendence (freedom).

In both cases, the mask is not a simplistic adversary; it is a social necessity that can become a prison or a tool for shaping the self if we learn to wear it consciously.

This chapter is divided into three axes: (1) freedom as the possibility of liberation from the dominance of appearances—not by eliminating them, but by reclaiming them; (2) authenticity and alienation in Heidegger and Sartre; and (3) the constant tension between “Who am I really?” and “How do I appear to others?” within the horizon of the self’s relation to the other, to time, and to the narrative one writes about oneself.

1) Freedom as the Possibility of Liberation from the Authority of Appearances

a) What is freedom here?
For existentialists, freedom is not merely “the ability to do as I wish” but a structure of human existence: the ability to negate what is given and to choose the meaning of what cannot be negated. We do not choose our birth, our first language, or the constitution of our body, but we choose how to take these givens upon ourselves: as an excuse to evade responsibility or as material for action. Freedom is thus not the denial of appearances but their appropriation: transforming them from imposed authority into tools stamped with our signature.

b) The authority of appearance: How does it operate?
The “authority of appearance” functions through three interrelated mechanisms:

1. Normalization: societal expectations flow into our interior so that we measure ourselves by their standards.

2. Classification: the self is reduced to a visible role (“ideal employee,” “devout,” “rebel”), freezing meaning in a label.

3. Surveillance: the gaze of the other—backed by society and institutions—makes us live as if on a permanent stage.

Result: appearance takes precedence over truth; the unseen is excluded, and what does not “trend” feels non-existent.

c) Liberation does not abolish appearance but reorders it
Existential liberation does not mean isolation or total stripping of symbols—it is humanly impossible—but it means:

• Reclaiming symbolic ownership: I choose why I assume a role and how I modify it, instead of having the role choose me.

• Deconstructing compulsive assimilation: realizing that value is not hostage to applause, and social acceptance is a means, not an end.

• Commitment through resoluteness: freedom is not escaping masks but committing to projects that give masks meaning: I adjust them to serve goals I consciously select.

Here, freedom becomes the art of “personalizing” appearance: writing my name on the role instead of bearing its preassigned name.

2) Authenticity and Alienation in Heidegger and Sartre

a) Heidegger: Authenticity Between “They” and the Call of Conscience
Heidegger sees Dasein as being-in-the-world, initially slipped into the everyday, into “chatter, curiosity, and clothing” (discourse emptied of resoluteness, distracted attention, ambiguous norms). This is inauthenticity, not as sin but as the dissolving of individual authorship in “the They.”

How is authenticity recovered? Through the call of conscience, awakening one from the captivity of roles and confronting the ultimate possibility: being-toward-death.

• Anxiety (not fear): reveals the emptiness of guarantees and frees us from the enchantment of appearances, because anxiety is not about a particular thing but that nothing assures us; here, we see ourselves responsible for what we will become.

• Resoluteness (authentic decision): engages with the “thrown” reality (what we did not choose) and undertakes design: selecting a possibility and assuming its consequences.

• Authenticity: is not pure withdrawal from society but a mode of presence within the everyday that reorganizes relation to “They”: I wear a role consciously, knowing it serves me.

b) Sartre: Freedom, Bad Faith, and the Look of the Other
For Sartre, humans are consciousness that projects toward nothingness; we are not “things” like stones but projects transcending what we are. Here arises bad faith: hiding behind a ready-made essence (job, temperament, “I was born this way”) to escape the burden of freedom. Example: a waiter fully “performing” the role of waiter as if that were his essence, denying he can redefine himself.

Then comes the Other: their gaze reifies me, making me a visible object, and shame emerges as the sense of being possessed from outside. The problem is not the presence of others, but being fixed within an image I did not author. Yet freedom remains: I can assign meaning to this gaze, using my appearance to build responsibility, not to negate myself.

• Authenticity in Sartre: not a pure essence, but an explicit recognition of self as composed of facts (body, history, relations) and freedom that transcends without denying them.

• Alienation: occurs when my project merely satisfies others’ images or when I turn my freedom into an excuse to deny reality. In both cases, I lose myself—either by dissolving into the role or by empty superiority.

c) Intersections and Differences

• Heidegger and Sartre agree: humans are projects, not “things,” and the everyday/social can absorb them.

• Difference in tone: Heidegger sees authenticity as recovered by listening to an inner call revealing “being-toward-death” and reorganizing engagement; Sartre views authenticity as a conscious stance embracing freedom and exposing bad faith and the dynamics of the look.

• Relation to the Other: Heidegger integrates it into “being-with” as an authentic condition; Sartre highlights tension: the Other is both necessary and revealing but also a source of reification.

Conclusion: the mask is not necessarily a curse; it is existential material: either harnessed within resoluteness and project or mocked as a mere façade.

3) The Tension Between “Who Am I Really?” and “How Do I Appear to Others?”

a) Reformulating the question
In the existential horizon, “Who am I really?” is not a search for a fixed metaphysical essence, but for a narrative consistency between what I choose, what I live, and what I bear. I am not a “core” behind appearances but a story written through actions, commitments, and pledges giving my appearance meaning. The question thus becomes: which appearance suits my project? Which project deserves to inscribe my face into the world?

b) The function of the gaze of others: mirror or cage?

• Mirror: the other provides feedback revealing what I cannot see; through criticism, recognition, and social responsibility, I perceive my limits and potential.

• Cage: when feedback becomes final judgment I accept or a stage on which I perform for endless applause.

• Existential balance: I use the mirror without inhabiting it: I receive the Other’s gaze as a normative statement for correction, not as an essential definition reducing me.

c) Practical techniques to preserve authenticity within appearance
These “techniques” are existential practices, not mere behavioral rules:

1. Conscious solitude: deliberate moments without screens or audience, returning to one’s breath and self-questioning, hearing the “call of conscience” away from interaction noise.

2. Accountable commitment: turning values into observable actions (promise, project, service), so appearance is supported by substance, not spectacle.

3. Precise language: naming roles as roles (“I am performing this role now”) rather than absorbing them (“This is all of me”), keeping room for reinterpretation.

4. Acceptance of limits: authenticity without absolute pretension; embracing facts (body, relations, history) as part of meaning created, not as constraints to deny or surrender to.

d) A final paradox: visible authenticity
Authenticity is not always hidden; if it is a coherent project, it manifests: in simplicity, weight of words, impact of deeds. The paradox: true essence generates its appearance—it does not treat image as an end, yet image remains connected to it. The tension is resolved not by eliminating “how I appear” but by making “how I appear” a consequence of “who I choose to be.”

Conclusion

Human existence is not reducible to a silent interior nor a noisy shell. We are projects navigated between given reality and interpretive freedom. Masks remain; they are crafted. Appearances persist; they are entrusted. Freedom is the ability to sign one’s name on the role, and authenticity is the art of dwelling in the world without dissolving into “the They” or succumbing to hollow pride. The question “Who am I really?” finds its answer in ongoing work: crafting a story my face can bear and the Other can witness without imprisoning it. Through this dual movement—reclaiming meaning from appearance, and giving appearance the meaning of meaning—the existential human can live between self and masks without losing either.

Chapter Eight: Contemporary Applications

1. Social media and the culture of display.

2. Politics: Formal democracy versus authoritarian essence.

3. Consumption and modern appearances: The market human.

When we leave the corridors of metaphysics, theology, and psychoanalysis and step into the streets of the contemporary world, we discover that the duality of essence/appearance is no longer merely a theoretical question; it has become a daily structure continuously reshaping our awareness, decisions, and relationships. We have entered an era in which screens intertwine with moods, algorithms with desires, elections with audiovisual spectacles, and the market with personal identity. In this context, appearance advances from being a surface or medium to a governing force: it measures value through visible indicators, turns meaning into “interaction,” and shapes taste through attention systems that capitalize on excitement, scarcity, and shock.

Yet essence is not erased; it hides, disguises, or is reformulated. Contemporary society does not merely tempt humans with appearances—it trains them to produce a constant façade of themselves, to delegate their ethical and political decisions to indicators, images, and numbers. Here, old questions gain new urgency: What remains of the human when their identity is managed as a “brand”? What is the use of democracy if its procedures become formal rituals concealing authoritarian essence? And what is freedom if our consumer choices are manufactured as prepackaged desires?

This chapter presents three contemporary applications that serve as living laboratories for the essence-appearance duality: (1) social media and the culture of display, (2) politics when democracy becomes a façade for authoritarian essence, and (3) the consumer economy that produces the “market human.” For each, we will deconstruct the structure, analyze its ethical and existential impact, and suggest practical forms of resistance reconnecting form with meaning.

1) Social Media and the Culture of Display

a) Engineering attention: From communication to performance
Modern platforms are designed around a single economy: attention. Everything is quantifiable and classifiable—likes, shares, views, reach. In this world, visibility becomes capital; value is measured by the engagement one earns. The result is that the self learns to live in front of an algorithmic mirror: adjusting behavior for higher scores, replacing experience with impression, depth with speed, and privacy with shareable publicness.

This transformation changes the function of appearance: the mask is no longer a mere façade, but a lifestyle. Individuals internalize platform metrics in self-assessment, blurring the line between who they truly are and who they must appear to be to earn visibility. An performative identity emerges: the self as continuous display, promoting itself, selling emotions, and turning relationships into content.

b) Ethical and psychological impact: From recognition to symbolic addiction

• Conditional recognition: Platform approval is rapid and contingent on algorithmic alignment, fostering a constant thirst for instant feedback, comparison anxiety, and “context collapse” (displaying fragmented life moments to the same audience).

• Exhibitionist virtue: Ethics reduce to shareable, appealing slogans; symbolic gestures override genuine commitment, and hypocrisy flourishes in the name of grand causes.

• Erosion of memory and depth: Continuous stimulation shortens attention spans, replacing long narratives with glittering fragments; over time, the moral imagination needed for empathy and reflection weakens.

c) Resistance strategies: Linking appearance to essence
Total withdrawal from the digital world is not the solution; instead, existential management can restore appearance’s expressive function:

1. Intentional slowness: Times free from endless scrolling; long readings to retrain attention.

2. Impact standard: Before posting, ask: what truth does this appearance serve, and what consequence will I responsibly bear offline?

3. Transparency of craft: Disclose editing, sponsorships, and boundaries, so the image does not replace its reference.

4. Small accountable communities: Shift some ethical and cognitive interactions to smaller circles that allow constructive critique and action-based commitment rather than trend-chasing.

With these tools, appearance is not eliminated but reclaimed and connected to a meaning beyond engagement metrics.

2) Politics: Formal Democracy versus Authoritarian Essence

a) Democracy without soul: When procedure becomes mask
A political system may maintain electoral rituals and formal pluralism while emptying them of substance through precise mechanisms: monopolizing platforms, restricting civil society, controlling judiciary and media, and tailoring laws to serve the elite. Democracy is performed as a periodic scene, while the essence of governance—real power rotation, separation of powers, and protection of rights—is replaced by loyalty mechanisms and surveillance. It is a façade projecting responsiveness to the people while politics is run as an administrative device preserving authority.

b) Signs of emptiness: How to distinguish essence from display

• Elections without real choice: Formal pluralism engineered to exclude serious competitors.

• Law without spirit: Texts are correct in form but selectively enforced to punish opponents and protect allies (“law as weapon”).

• Institutions independent in name only: Courts, oversight bodies, and electoral commissions maintain formal appearance but remain neutral only superficially.

• Constant mobilization rhetoric: Permanent creation of enemies, turning politics into an emergency theater where accountability is suspended in the name of security or stability.

c) Ethics of citizenship and institutional resistance
Restoring the essence of democracy requires reinfusing procedures with content:

1. Constitutionalizing rights, not tactics: Freedoms of expression, assembly, and privacy safeguarded from temporary majorities.

2. Fortified independence: Appointment and accountability systems make judiciary and regulatory bodies less prone to capture.

3. Structural transparency: Open access to public data and tracking political/media funding to expose conflicts of interest.

4. Grassroots accountability culture: Associations, unions, and citizen initiatives link promises to measurable outcomes; politics becomes a contract, not a performance.

5. Education for public reasoning: Curricula that nurture questioning rather than rote learning, and civil discussion forums giving argument weight over noise.

The goal is to reunite form and essence: procedures reflecting will and rights rather than serving as a mask for power continuity.

3) Consumption and Modern Appearances: The Market Human

a) Engineering desire: From need to signal
The contemporary consumer economy does more than meet needs; it creates desires and invests in symbolic scarcity. Goods are purchased not only for function but for their signaling value—what they declare about status, taste, and identity. Appearance shifts from cover to the very substance of value (brand/image), producing the “market human”: a self marketed as a bundle of properties—appearance, style, a condensed story of “who I am.”

This system operates through familiar mechanisms: desire emulation (we want what others want), class-based taste differentiation (appearance as membership), and artificial scarcity (limited editions, special releases). Accompanied by consumer finance, time becomes collateral for debt: instant purchase, deferred payment, long-term commitments reshaping life around consumption.

b) Ethical and existential consequences

• Objectification of the self: Identity becomes an exhibition of traits; humans are measured by what they own and display, not by what they do or master.

• Erosion of meaning: Accumulation of things erodes fulfillment; value depends on the signal, which loses shine once generalized.

• Time enslavement: Individuals work to consume what keeps them working; authentic experience diminishes in favor of constant appearance updates.

• Greenwashing: Sustainability appearances beautify practices without altering core environmental or social impact.

c) Ethics of sufficiency and the “economy of meaning”
Confronting the market human requires more than ascetic exhortation; an alternative structure aligns pleasure with responsibility:

1. Priority of use over signal: Purchases judged by utility and experience added to life, not image enhancement.

2. Culture of maintenance and circularity: Extend product life, ensure repair rights, encourage fair value chains to reconnect consumption with its consequences.

3. Transparency of impact: Environmental/social footprint on product/service linking marketing appearance to actual essence.

4. Slowing desire: Temporal pauses before purchase, conscious waiting lists reinforcing meaning and resisting impulsivity.

5. Alternative status experiences: Shift differentiation from ownership to skill mastery and participation in the common good (education, arts, volunteering), so appearance reflects lived essence.

This approach avoids punitive austerity, crafting deeper pleasure grounded in quality of life rather than intensity of display.

Synthetic Conclusion: From the Politics of Image to the Ethics of Appearance
Contemporary applications show that appearance has become a normative force that cannot be bypassed: on platforms, in politics, and in the market. The danger lies not in the image itself, but in its separation from truth until it replaces it. The task is not to eliminate the image but to re-harness it: visibility measured by the truth it serves, procedures designed to protect rights, consumption evaluated by its impact and meaning.

When this balance is restored, appearance becomes a mirror, not a mask, and essence regains its capacity to manifest in the world without being swallowed. Only then can the contemporary human live technology, democracy, and market as tools for a good life, not as theaters where existence is performed endlessly.

Conclusion

We began this inquiry with a question as old as philosophy and religion alike: What is the relationship between essence and appearance in human existence? A question that seems simple, yet once opened, it branches into metaphysical, theological, psychological, ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions, revealing that the whole of human life is built upon this tension: between what is hidden and what is manifest, between what we live inwardly and what we enact outwardly, between the truth of the self and the masks and roles it is compelled to wear.

We have seen how the great philosophers, from Descartes to Heidegger, made the essence–appearance question central to understanding the human and existence itself. For Descartes, essence is thought while appearance is external extension; for Kant, appearance is mere representation while essence is the “thing-in-itself.” Hegel opened the door to dialectic between the two, only for Sartre to declare that man possesses no fixed essence but forges it through free existence. In theology, we explored the distinction between intention and outward display, between spirit and body, to find that true faith is not measured by appearances but by purity of heart and sincerity of intent.

We then turned to the psychological dimension, where Freud revealed the unconscious as a hidden essence reflected in symptoms and outward behaviors, while Jung posited the social mask (Persona) in contrast to a deeper Self—reframing the question of the duality between inner and outer. In society, politics, and art, it became clear that appearance is not a neutral surface: it may be a means of integration or concealment, and it may turn into an instrument of deception or domination when forms detach from their meanings. Here lies the ethical danger: to measure human worth by wealth or image rather than by intention or deeds.

In later chapters, we touched on the most contemporary face of the question: in social media, where the self is reduced to a continuous display; in politics, where democracy is sometimes practiced as a ritual mask concealing authoritarian essence; and in the market economy, where man fashions himself into a commodity marketed through consumer appearances. These applications reveal that appearance has become a normative power, shaping our perceptions and values until it nearly supplants essence itself.

Yet the central conclusion is neither to condemn nor to glorify one pole over the other, but to recognize that essence and appearance are not separable adversaries but an inseparable duality. Appearance is necessary for expression, communication, and embodiment, yet it loses meaning if it is not transparent to an essence that gives it truth. Essence, for its part, does not come to completion in hidden isolation; it requires appearance in order to achieve presence in the world. The philosophical and ethical challenge, then, is to safeguard this balance: that appearance remain a pathway to meaning, not a mask that conceals or falsifies it.

From this, it becomes clear that the human project, in every age, is a project of rejoining essence with appearance—in the self, in religion, in society, in art, and in relation to others. If successful, existence becomes authentic; if it fails, the result is alienation, falsity, and emptiness.

Thus our study concludes: the question of essence and appearance is not a mere abstract speculation, but an existential question about the meaning of being human—about how we live in a world that surrounds us with images without losing the truth that alone grants those images legitimacy.

In this sense, essence and appearance are not merely a theoretical issue for philosophy books; they are a daily experience lived by every person in the smallest of details: in how one regards oneself, in dealings with others, in moral choices, even in silence or in speech. They dwell in how one dresses as much as in how one thinks, in one’s reflection in the mirror as much as in one’s reflection before conscience. The more a person becomes aware of this tension, the more he realizes that existence is an open project, reducible neither to a surface nor to a mute depth, but nourished by the ongoing dialogue between what is hidden and what is revealed, between secrecy and manifestation, between truth and expression.

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