The Essentialism

[Brandi Wendelberger]

Oldersocial theories were often conceptually essentialist.[4] In biology and other natural sciences, essentialism provided the rationale for taxonomy at least until the time of Charles Darwin.[5] The role and importance of essentialism in modern biology is still a matter of debate.[6] Beliefs which posit that social identities such as race, ethnicity, nationality, or gender are essential characteristics have been central to many discriminatory or extremist ideologies.[7] For instance, psychological essentialism is correlated with racial prejudice.[8][9] Essentialist views about race have also been shown to diminish empathy when dealing with members of another racial group.[10] In medical sciences, essentialism can lead to a reified view of identities, leading to fallacious conclusions and potentially unequal treatment.[11]

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, Badiou and many other existential, materialist and anti-humanist thinkers. 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.[citation needed]

Dating back to the 18th century, naturalism is a form of essentialism in which social matters are explained through the logic of natural dispositions.[13] The invoked nature can be biological, ontological or theological.[14] Its opponent is culturalism.[15]

In the case of Homo sapiens, the divergent conceptions of human nature may be partitioned into essentialist versus non-essentialist (or even anti-essentialist) positions.[17][18] Another established dichotomy is that of monism versus pluralism about the matter.[19]

Before evolution was developed as a scientific theory, the essentialist view of biology posited that all species are 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.[20] Some religious opponents of evolution continue to maintain this view of biology.

Work by historians of systematic biology in the 21st century has cast doubt upon this view of pre-Darwinian thinkers. Winsor, Ron Amundson and Staffan Mller-Wille have each argued that in fact the usual suspects (such as Linnaeus and the Ideal Morphologists) were very far from being essentialists, and that the so-called "essentialism story" (or "myth") in biology is a result of conflating the views expressed and biological examples used by philosophers going back to Aristotle and continuing through to John Stuart Mill and William Whewell in the immediately pre-Darwinian period, with the way that biologists used such terms as species.[21][22][23]

Anti-essentialists contend that an essentialist typological categorization has been rendered obsolete and untenable by evolutionary theory for several reasons.[24][25] First, they argue that biological species are dynamic entities, emerging and disappearing as distinct populations are molded by natural selection. This view contrasts with the static essences that essentialists say characterize natural categories. Second, the opponents of essentialism argue that our current understanding of biological species emphasizes genealogical relationships rather than intrinsic traits. Lastly, non-essentialists assert that every organism has a mutational load, and the variability and diversity within species contradict the notion of fixed biological natures.

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,[30] but this essentialism is routinely critiqued in introductory women's studies textbooks such as Women: Images & Realities.[27] Starting in the 1980s, some feminist writers have put forward essentialist theories about gender and science. Evelyn Fox Keller,[31] Sandra Harding,[32] and Nancy Tuana[33] argued that the modern scientific enterprise is inherently patriarchal and incompatible with women's nature. Other feminist scholars, such as Ann Hibner Koblitz,[34] Lenore Blum,[35] Mary Gray,[36] Mary Beth Ruskai,[37] and Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram[38] 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.

Strategic essentialism, a major concept in postcolonial theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.[50] It refers to a political tactic in which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of shared gendered, cultural, or political identity. While strong differences may exist between members of these groups, and among themselves they engage in continuous debates, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily "essentialize" themselves, despite it being based on erroneous logic,[51] and to bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals, such as equal rights or antiglobalization.[52]

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.[53] 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,[54] or differences between the Greeks and the Persians that are the subject of his Histories.[55]

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.[56] Into the 21st century, most historians, social scientists, and humanists reject methodologies associated with essentialism,[57][58] although some have argued that certain varieties of essentialism may be useful or even necessary.[57][59] 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?"[60]

There are four key criteria that constitute essentialist thinking. The first facet is the aforementioned individual causal mechanisms.[69] The second is innate potential: the assumption that an object will fulfill its predetermined course of development.[70] According to this criterion, essences predict developments in entities that will occur throughout its lifespan. The third is immutability.[71] 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.[72] 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.[73] For example, essentialism of nationality has been linked to anti-immigration attitudes.[74] In multiple studies in India and the United States, it was shown 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.[75] This may be due to an over-extension of an essential-biological mode of thinking stemming from cognitive development.[76] 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."[77] Scholars suggest that the categorical nature of essentialist thinking predicts the use of stereotypes and can be targeted in the application of stereotype prevention.[78]

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