Essentialism

Philosophers differ on whether humans can apprehend such constituting essences. While Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 B.C.E.) and Aristotle argue they can, others such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) deny the possibility of directly grasping the noumenal world (how things are in themselves). Thus, a belief in the intelligibility of essences requires supplementary assumptions concerning the nature of mind and language. The mind itself must have an essence, some essential faculty empowering it to directly and accurately register the essences of things. For Plato and Aristotle, this faculty is reason. The intelligibility of essences also requires positing language as a neutral, transparent medium. Language is a reporting device; it can neither enter into the constitution of the recorded essence nor distort it, for then our knowledge of essences could never attain eidetic accuracy.

Essentialism is a response to problems of recognition and meaning. Amid all the variety of empirical experience and the multiple forms that objects assume, how do we recognize many differently appearing things as instances of the same phenomenon? Where do the categories in and through which we organize empirical experience come from? As the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) and others argue, we do not have direct empirical experience of abstract, general categories. Unmediated empirical experience is a transitory flux of fleeting sense impressions and sensations. Chairs, for example, come in many colors, sizes, and shapes. Yet, we recognize many variations as instances of one species. How is this possible? Plato argues that such recognition is contingent on the prior existence of a form or an essence, chairness, or the idea of a chair. Such an idea is pure form, and all empirical chairs are simply approximations of this idea. While approximations are changeable and all empirical objects will eventually decay or disappear, the idea or pure form of a chair is eternal.