I was looking at some of my old notes the other day and came across my section on Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction and post-structuralism. If you ever wondered where the terms “essentialism” or “essentializing” comes from, it is, more or less, downstream from Derrida’s work in the 70’s and 80’s. For those who have not heard these terms, which are commonplace in the university, essentialism is the position that essences, the “is” of what a thing is, exist. To “essentialize” a thing is, for someone who does not believe in essences, to ascribe an essence to a given thing. Often in the university setting these terms are thrown around in the context of gender, sexuality, and social roles. According to the current orthodoxy there is no essence to manhood, womanhood, or sexuality, as these are simply social constructs that change according to time and place. There are clear political implications for the truth or falsehood of this position, with LGBT and gender role related issues being the most immediate.
It would be hasty to mark Derrida as the anti-essentialist; denying the existence of essences goes back to William of Ockham (13th-14th century) and many of the notable philosophers over the past 300 years have either asserted that essences, if they exist, are unknowable (John Locke, Immanuel Kant) or are entirely social constructs (Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze). Ockham denied the existence of essences because he thought that 1) plurality should not be asserted without necessity, and 2) essences are an unnecessary explanation of a thing, and thus should not be asserted. Locke and Kant were heavily influenced by the optical theories of Isaac Newton and thus came to believe, with Newton, that we cannot perceive a thing as it is, but only light reflected from that thing. If it is true that I am not actually perceiving the computer in front of me, but only light reflected from it, then how can I possibly know what this computer is?1 I might be able to know the qualities of the computer (the feel of the keyboard, the brightness of the screen, the sound of the fan, etc.), and I could compare these qualities to other computers, but I cannot what it is that possesses these qualities…I do not know what “computerness” is. Sartre and Deleuze argued that what a thing is, is how it acts in the world, the former asserting “existence precedes essence”, and the later using Darwin’s theory of evolution to attack the notion of stable categories.
There are reasons to be committed to the view that essences are real, one being a commitment to the knowability of things, another being a commitment to gender realism. Given that anti-essentialism is the current orthodoxy, the essentialist is expected to have some justification for his belief. While I am unable to offer a proof for essences, I want to make the case that it is reasonable to believe that essences exists. The format is as follows:
1) If it is reasonable to believe in God, then it is reasonable to believe in essences
2) It is reasonable to believe in God
3) Therefore, it is reasonable to believe in essences
1
If the world was created by a god, and for this argument then it is not necessary to specify which god, then this god, by nature of creating, willed that certain thing exists. By willing that certain things exist, and thus creating them, then this god willed things to be a certain way. For example, if god willed that humans exist, then god had some “blueprint” for what humans would be. These “blueprints” or “idea-wills” are equivalent to essences because by willing X to exist and having a blueprint or idea of what X should be, then the answer to the question “what is X?”, which is the same question as “what is the essence of X?”, is answered by reference to what god willed X to be. Whether we have access to the will of this god hinges on whether or not this god has revealed himself and his will to us. This question is beyond the scope of the argument though, as we are only making the case that it is reasonable to believe in essences, not whether or not we have access to these essences.
2
To answer the question of whether or not there is a god, we would ask ourselves “what would we expect if there is a god?” One thing we would expect if there is a god who created the world is an ordered and regular universe, just as we expect to see order and regularity, since we know it was made by an intelligence, in a machine. On the other hand, if there is no god and the universe happens to exist by chance then we would not expect to see order and regularity any more than we would expect to see paragraphs form by dropping Scrabble pieces from the top of a skyscraper. When we look at the universe, we see that all natural phenomena can be described by mathematical equations, are regulated by predicable cycles2, the physical laws that act on these phenomena act uniformly on all particles throughout the universe, and these particles are perfectly uniform according to type.3 Instead of random chaos, order and regularity are found throughout the universe and this is what we would expect if there was a god that created the world. This is by no means a proof of God’s existence, but it shows that it is at least reasonable to believe that a god exists and created the world.
3
Having shown that it is at least reasonable to believe in a god, even if it turns out that there is not a god, then it would follow that it is reasonable to believe in essences. If it is reasonable to believe in essences, then it also reasonable to believe that we can have knowledge of what things are, gender realism, and other targets of anti-essentialist philosophy. Giving this particular argument for the reasonability of essences, it should be no surprise that historically anti-essentialist thinkers have had negative attitudes towards religion—particularly institutional religion. Institutional religion, it is argued by these thinkers, are oppressive because they espouse essentialism and essentialism, if true, means that there are ways of acting and living properly and ways that are not; but if there are ways of acting and living both properly and improperly, then sexuality and gender roles would have a definite meaning and thus deviations from that meaning would properly be understood as unnatural (as in deviating from the nature, or essence, of that thing). Thus, connecting the existence of God to the existence of essences is not simply an argument for essentialism, but brings out why it is that anti-essentialist thinkers have identified institutional religion as a threat.
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Here is found the tacit assumption that knowledge of a thing requires ocular perception of that thing. Contrasted with this view are the positions that knowledge comes by hearing (in the case of listening to a person tell me who he is) or through intuition/mental seeing (when I figure out a math problem after many failed attempts I shout out “Ah! I see it now!)
The most well known are the water cycle and the carbon cycle.
All hydrogen particles, for example, have the same powers and liabilities, that is, they can all act and be acted upon in the same ways.