Literary Musings ...

Essentialism | Peter Brooker

A term describing the assumption that human beings, objects or texts possess underlying essences that define their 'true nature'.

This illustration from Amy Hayes Stellhorn and her team, i guess, sums it up quite elegantly!

An 'essence' is fixed and unchanging, but has a double existence: as both the inherent or innate property of an individual object or being, and the abstract, external essence governing the type to which all examples conform.

From Aristotle onwards there has been a long debate in European philosophy on the very existence of essences, their relation to appearances or natural forms, and the accessibility of this essence to human knowledge or perception. A common recourse - to a secular age, a last resort - has been the idea of the creator in whom the essence and knowledge of all things are seen to reside.

The most thorough-going critique of this tradition has been made by Jacques Derrida who argues that western philosophy as a whole is founded on a 'metaphysics of presence' - that is to say, upon a belief in a transcendent first cause or point of pure origin. All such thought, he argues, is 'centred' upon 'an invariable presence ... (essence, existence, substance, subject)... transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so forth'.

Derrida's method of Deconstruction has inspired a wide critique of the binary oppositions that invest a first term in a series - such as speech/writing, nature/culture, man/woman, God/human, the real/representation – with the authority of a governing fixed point.

In another, at some points connected, direction, essentialist versus social constructionist arguments have characterized debates in Feminism, and discussions of gender and sexuality. Feminists have appealed to an essential 'female' nature or experience in the analysis of literary and cultural texts in arguments about pornography and violence against women.

Men in such arguments are presented as essentially impersonal, abstract, aggressive, power-seeking and competitive. Women, conversely, as Lynne Segal puts it, are seen as 'more nurturant, maternal, co-operative and peaceful'. Segal sees this as a strong tendency in feminism of the 1980s, and responds from an alternative socialist-feminist perspective that emphasizes difference, change and a necessary alertness, from men and women, to the 'dangers of such essentialist thinking'.

Generally, it would seem that the social constructionist arguments (by way of alignments with materialist or historicizing thought, debates with psychoanalysis, deconstruction or postmodernism) have held sway: that indeed the body itself, so often invoked in forms of biological essentialism as the unqualified determinant of man or woman's nature, is understood as materially shaped by social ideologies and personal histories. Postmodernism, in particular, has impressed upon us that there is 'only culture' and that what counts as 'nature' is a variable perception from within culture.

However, if essentialist arguments are thought to have little credibility in current academic life, they have a strong and vocal presence outside it: in popular notions of what is natural in boys and girls as well as men and women, in stereotypes of ethnic and racial types.

The popular appeal to family values is driven by an attempt to return men, women and children to their true 'natural' state, which is then deemed good for 'society'. Conservative 'men's groups', of the 1990s, meanwhile, renewed essentialist arguments in the invocation of a lost masculine essence: as, for example, in the idea of the natural but now repressed 'wild man' of Robert Ely's influential Iron John: A Book About Men.