Essentialism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Essentialism is the view that every entity has a set of attributes that are
necessary to its identity and function.[1] In early Western thought, Plato's
idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In
Categories, Aristotle similarly proposed that all objects have a substance that,
as George Lakoff put it, "make the thing what it is, and without which it would
be not that kind of thing".[2] The contrary view—non-essentialism—denies the
need to posit such an "essence'".

Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning. Plato, in the

Parmenides Dialogue, depicts Socrates questioning the notion, suggesting that
if we accept the idea that every beautiful thing or just action partakes of an
essence to be beautiful or just, we must also accept the "existence of separate
essences for hair, mud, and dirt" .[3] In biology and other natural sciences,
essentialism provided the rationale for taxonomy at least until the time of
Charles Darwin;[4] the role and importance of essentialism in biology is still a
matter of debate.[5]

Contents
 1 In philosophy
o 1.1 Metaphysical essentialism
 2 In psychology
o 2.1 In developmental psychology
 3 In ethics
 4 In biology
 5 Gender essentialism
 6 In historiography

In philosophy
An essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the forms and
ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal, and is
present in every possible world. Classical humanism has an essentialist
conception of the human, in its endorsement of the notion of an eternal and
unchangeable human nature. This has been criticized by Kierkegaard, Marx,
Heidegger, Sartre, and many other existential and materialist thinkers.
In Plato's philosophy (in particular, the Timaeus and the Philebus), things were
said to come into being by the action of a demiurge who works to form chaos
into ordered entities. Many definitions of essence hark back to the ancient
Greek hylomorphic understanding of the formation of the things. According to
that account, the structure and real existence of any thing can be understood by
analogy to an artefact produced by a craftsperson. The craftsperson requires
hyle (timber or wood) and a model, plan or idea in her own mind, according to
which the wood is worked to give it the indicated contour or form (morphe).
Aristotle was the first to use the terms hyle and morphe. According to his
explanation, all entities have two aspects: "matter" and "form". It is the
particular form imposed that gives some matter its identity—its quiddity or
"whatness" (i.e., its "what it is").

Plato was one of the first essentialists, postulating the concept of ideal forms—
an abstract entity of which individual objects are mere facsimiles. To give an
example: the ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle, something that is
physically impossible to make manifest; yet the circles we draw and observe
clearly have some idea in common—the ideal form. Plato proposed that these
ideas are eternal and vastly superior to their manifestations, and that we
understand these manifestations in the material world by comparing and relating
them to their respective ideal form. Plato's forms are regarded as patriarchs to
essentialist dogma simply because they are a case of what is intrinsic and a-
contextual of objects—the abstract properties that makes them what they are.
(For more on forms, read Plato's parable of the cave.)

Karl Popper splits the ambiguous term realism into essentialism and realism. He
uses essentialism whenever he means the opposite of nominalism, and realism
only as opposed to idealism. Popper himself is a realist as opposed to an
idealist, but a methodological nominalist as opposed to an essentialist. For
example, statements like "a puppy is a young dog" should be read from right to
left, as an answer to "What shall we call a young dog"; never from left to right
as an answer to "What is a puppy?"[6]

Metaphysical essentialism

Essentialism, in its broadest sense, is any philosophy that acknowledges the

primacy of essence. Unlike existentialism, which posits "being" as the
fundamental reality, the essentialist ontology must be approached from a
metaphysical perspective. Empirical knowledge is developed from experience
of a relational universe whose components and attributes are defined and
measured in terms of intellectually constructed laws. Thus, for the scientist,
reality is explored as an evolutionary system of diverse entities, the order of
which is determined by the principle of causality.
Plato believed that the universe was perfect and that its observed imperfections
came from man's limited perception of it. For Plato, there were two realities: the
"essential" or ideal and the "perceived". Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) applied the
term essence to that which things in a category have in common and without
which they cannot be members of that category (for example, rationality is the
essence of man; without rationality a creature cannot be a man). In his critique
of Aristotle's philosophy, Bertrand Russell said that his concept of essence
transferred to metaphysics what was only a verbal convenience and that it
confused the properties of language with the properties of the world. In fact, a
thing's "essence" consisted in those defining properties without which we could
not use the name for it.[7] Although the concept of essence was "hopelessly
muddled" it became part of every philosophy until modern times.[7]

The Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus (204–270 A.D.) brought idealism to the

Roman Empire as Neoplatonism, and with it the concept that not only do all
existents emanate from a "primary essence" but that the mind plays an active
role in shaping or ordering the objects of perception, rather than passively
receiving empirical data.

Despite the metaphysical basis for the term, academics in science, aesthetics,
heuristics, psychology, and gender-based sociological studies have advanced
their causes under the banner of essentialism. Possibly the clearest definition for
this philosophy was offered by gay/lesbian rights advocate Diana Fuss, who
wrote: "Essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true
essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the
'whatness' of a given entity."[8] Metaphysical essentialism stands diametrically
opposed to existential realism in that finite existence is only differentiated
appearance, whereas "ultimate reality" is held to be absolute essence.

In psychology

Paul Bloom attempts to explain why people will pay more in an auction for the
clothing of celebrities if the clothing is unwashed. He believes the answer to this
and many other questions is that people cannot help but think of objects as
containing a sort of "essence" that can be influenced.[9]

There is a difference between metaphysical essentialism (see above) and

psychological essentialism, the latter referring not to an actual claim about the
world but a claim about a way of representing entities in cognitions [10] (Medin,
1989). Influential in this area is Susan Gelman, who has outlined many domains
in which children and adults construe classes of entities, particularly biological
entities, in essentialist terms—i.e., as if they had an immutable underlying
essence which can be used to predict unobserved similarities between members
of that class.[11][12] (Toosi & Ambady, 2011). This causal relationship is
unidirectional; an observable feature of an entity does not define the underlying
essence[13] (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011).

In developmental psychology

Essentialism has emerged as an important concept in psychology, particularly

developmental psychology.[11][14] Gelman and Kremer (1991) studied the extent
to which children from 4–7 years old demonstrate essentialism. Children were
able to identify the cause of behaviour in living and non-living objects. Children
understood that underlying essences predicted observable behaviours.
Participants could correctly describe living objects' behaviour as self-
perpetuated and non-living objects as a result of an adult influencing the object's
actions. This is a biological way of representing essential features in cognitions.
Understanding the underlying causal mechanism for behaviour suggests
essentialist thinking[15] (Rangel and Keller, 2011). Younger children were
unable to identify causal mechanisms of behaviour whereas older children were
able to. This suggests that essentialism is rooted in cognitive development. It
can be argued that there is a shift in the way that children represent entities,
from not understanding the causal mechanism of the underlying essence to
showing sufficient understanding[16] (Demoulin, Leyens & Yzerbyt, 2006).

There are four key criteria which constitute essentialist thinking. The first facet
is the aforementioned individual causal mechanisms (del Rio & Strasser, 2011).
The second is innate potential: the assumption that an object will fulfill its
predetermined course of development[17] (Kanovsky, 2007). According to this
criterion, essences predict developments in entities that will occur throughout its
lifespan. The third is immutability[18] (Holtz & Wagner, 2009). Despite altering
the superficial appearance of an object it does not remove its essence.
Observable changes in features of an entity are not salient enough to alter its
essential characteristics. The fourth is inductive potential[19] (Birnbaum, Deeb,
Segall, Ben-Aliyahu & Diesendruck, 2010). This suggests that entities may
share common features but are essentially different. However similar two
beings may be, their characteristics will be at most analogous, differing most
importantly in essences.

The implications of psychological essentialism are numerous. Prejudiced

individuals have been found to endorse exceptionally essential ways of
thinking, suggesting that essentialism may perpetuate exclusion among social
groups[20] (Morton, Hornsey & Postmes, 2009). For example, essentialism of
nationality has been linked to anti-immigration attitudes[21](Rad & Ginges,
2018). In multiple studies in India and the United States, Rad & Ginges (2018)
showed that in lay view, a person's nationality is considerably fixed at birth,
even if that person is adopted and raised by a family of another nationality at
day one and never told about their origin. This may be due to an over-extension
of an essential-biological mode of thinking stemming from cognitive
development.[22] Paul Bloom of Yale University has stated that "one of the most
exciting ideas in cognitive science is the theory that people have a default
assumption that things, people and events have invisible essences that make
them what they are. Experimental psychologists have argued that essentialism
underlies our understanding of the physical and social worlds, and
developmental and cross-cultural psychologists have proposed that it is
instinctive and universal. We are natural-born essentialists." [23] Scholars suggest
that the categorical nature of essentialist thinking predicts the use of stereotypes
and can be targeted in the application of stereotype prevention [24] (Bastian &
Haslam, 2006).

In ethics
Classical essentialists claim that some things are wrong in an absolute sense.
For example, murder breaks a universal, objective and natural moral law and
not merely an advantageous, socially or ethically constructed one.

Many modern essentialists claim that right and wrong are moral boundaries that
are individually constructed; in other words, things that are ethically right or
wrong are actions that the individual deems to be beneficial or harmful,
respectively.

In biology
One possibility is that before evolution was developed as a scientific theory,
there existed an essentialist view of biology that posited all species to be
unchanging throughout time. The historian Mary P. Winsor has argued that
biologists such as Louis Agassiz in the 19th century believed that taxa such as
species and genus were fixed, reflecting the mind of the creator.[25] Some
religious opponents of evolution continue to maintain this view of biology.
Recent work by historians of systematic biology has, however, cast doubt upon
this view of pre-Darwinian thinkers. Winsor, Ron Amundson and Staffan
Müller-Wille have each argued that in fact the usual suspects (such as Linnaeus
and the Ideal Morphologists) were very far from being essentialists, and it
appears that the so-called "essentialism story" (or "myth") in biology is a result
of conflating the views expressed by philosophers from Aristotle onwards
through to John Stuart Mill and William Whewell in the immediately pre-
Darwinian period, using biological examples, with the use of terms in biology
like species.[26][27][28]

Gender essentialism
In feminist theory and gender studies, gender essentialism is the attribution of
fixed essences to men and women – this idea that men and women are
fundamentally different continues to be a matter of contention. [29][30] Women's
essence is assumed to be universal and is generally identified with those
characteristics viewed as being specifically feminine.[31] These ideas of
femininity are usually biologized and are often preoccupied with psychological
characteristics, such as nurturance, empathy, support, and non-competitiveness,
etc. Feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz states in her 1995 publication Space, time
and perversion: essays on the politics of bodies that essentialism "entails the
belief that those characteristics defined as women's essence are shared in
common by all women at all times. It implies a limit of the variations and
possibilities of change—it is not possible for a subject to act in a manner
contrary to her essence. Her essence underlies all the apparent variations
differentiating women from each other. Essentialism thus refers to the existence
of fixed characteristic, given attributes, and ahistorical functions that limit the
possibilities of change and thus of social reorganization."[31]

Gender essentialism is pervasive in popular culture, as illustrated by the #1 New

York Times best seller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,[32] but this
essentialism is routinely critiqued in introductory women studies textbooks such
as Women: Images & Realities.[30]

Starting in the 1980s, some feminist writers have put forward essentialist
theories about gender and science. Evelyn Fox Keller,[33] Sandra Harding, [34]
and Nancy Tuana [35] argued that the modern scientific enterprise is inherently
patriarchal and incompatible with women's nature. Other feminist scholars, such
as Ann Hibner Koblitz,[36] Lenore Blum,[37] Mary Gray,[38] Mary Beth Ruskai,[39]
and Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram[40] have criticized those theories for
ignoring the diverse nature of scientific research and the tremendous variation
in women's experiences in different cultures and historical periods.
In historiography
Essentialism in history as a field of study entails discerning and listing essential
cultural characteristics of a particular nation or culture, in the belief that a
people or culture can be understood in this way. Sometimes such essentialism
leads to claims of a praiseworthy national or cultural identity, or to its opposite,
the condemnation of a culture based on presumed essential characteristics.
Herodotus, for example, claims that Egyptian culture is essentially feminized
and possesses a "softness" which has made Egypt easy to conquer. [41] To what
extent Herodotus was an essentialist is a matter of debate; he is also credited
with not essentializing the concept of the Athenian identity, [42] or differences
between the Greeks and the Persians that are the subject of his Histories.

Essentialism had been operative in colonialism as well as in critiques of

colonialism.

Post-colonial theorists such as Edward Said insisted that essentialism was the
"defining mode" of "Western" historiography and ethnography until the
nineteenth century and even after, according to Touraj Atabaki, manifesting
itself in the historiography of the Middle East and Central Asia as Eurocentrism,
over-generalization, and reductionism.[44]

Most historians reject essentialism because it "dehistoricizes the process of

social and cultural changes" and tends to see non-Western societies as
historically unchanging; in India this led to the anti-essentialist (even anti-
historiographical) school of Subaltern Studies.