Real Essentialism

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

by David S. Oderberg

Real Essentialism presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many if not most philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. Real Essentialism reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person.

Genres: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Nonfiction

332 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Professor David Simon Oderberg (born 1963) is an Australian philosopher of metaphysics and ethics based in Britain since 1987. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading.

Reviews

[Tuomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book, as the title suggests, is a study and defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism — a topic which overlaps with my own research interests. David is also one of the contributors in my Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume. More news about the volume will follow soon…

Anyway, on to the book. Real Essentialism is a rich book and I cannot hope to do justice to it in a short review, so I will focus on one or two issues which are of specific interest to me. These are covered mostly in the first half of the book, where the role of essentialism in contemporary metaphysics is analysed, different anti-essentialist views are discussed, and the epistemology and structure of essence are examined. Oderberg goes on to discuss applications of essence concerning identity and existence, which are fairly straight-forward, but also life, species and the person. The latter form a topic of their own and I found the discussion of the species concept especially interesting, but the conclusions drawn about the essence of life and personhood are certainly among the more controversial ones. I will however omit a detailed discussion of them and focus especially on the epistemology of essence, which is a topic that I’ve been thinking about recently.

An important clarification concerning the epistemology of essence, which Oderberg makes in the very beginning of the book, concerns the baggage from the work of Kripke and Putnam and especially the reductionism that it would seem to entail: essences concern the ‘internal structure’ of, say, chemical substances, and they can only be discovered a posteriori, typically by empirical research conducted by scientists, i.e. ‘experts’. Oderberg notes, correctly in my opinion, that:

Scientists play an indispensable role in helping to explain the real essences of things — and for some kinds of entity, the ones proper to those fields of science requiring more or less elaborate technical devices or measurement and experiment, their role may be exclusive. But it is incorrect to hold that the job of the real essentialist just is the job of the scientist. It is also, and primarily, the job of the metaphysician informed by science, and additionally, for many kinds of entity, the job of everyone, expert or not. (p. 13)

This passage emphasizes a point which I’ve also made repeatedly: while metaphysicians need to be scientifically informed, expert knowledge of science is not necessary to be able to grasp essences. Similarly, while training in metaphysics may help to acquire more detailed knowledge about essences, everyone who is capable of rational thought is also capable of grasping essences. Indeed, this is a precondition for rational thought. Oderberg discusses the implications of this in some length, especially in the case of chemical substances. I agree with the general line that he takes, but the details require more work. The case of chemical substances in particular is problematic, and I believe that the traditional examples (water, gold etc.) familiar from the work of Kripke and Putnam are still often taken at face value, despite the devastating criticism already familiar from van Brakel’s 1986 paper, ‘The Chemistry of Substances and the Philosophy of Mass Terms’ (Synthese 69: 291–324).

Later on, Oderberg makes another specification in passing, which I also support: our epistemological access to essence does not rely on any ‘special insight’ or ‘intellectual intuition’, but is rather a combination of perceptual information and intellectual abstraction from that information (via a consideration of form, according to Oderberg) (p. 31). On related note, this makes essentialism a fallibilist position — something that is often overlooked in anti-essentialist accounts.

Regarding the structure of essence, Oderberg defends the view according to which essences are ‘not mere bundles of essential features’, that is to say that we cannot reduce the essence of an entity to a bunch of essential properties of that entity. I understand that this line comes from Aristotle and I can see why one might want to avoid reducing essences to bundles of properties, however, I would still like to be able to list the essential properties of an entity with the intention that, although the list may be incomplete, it will be sufficient to explicate the essence of the entity in question. Now, this does not have to mean that the essence itself is just a bundle of such essential properties, but my worry is that if more is required to explicate essence, then it will start to look as if the essence is an entity of some sort. That essence is an entity itself is a result to be avoided, as E. J. Lowe has pointed out time and time again: it leads to an infinite regress. In any case, Oderberg does offer an argument in support of his view:

"Having a capacity for humour is an essential property [...] of human beings, and in this sense we can say it flows from the essence of human beings to have a capacity for humour. But the essence of being human is to be a rational animal, and humans have a capacity for humour only because they are rational animals." (p. 49)

This seems correct insofar as we need to distinguish between the essence of an entity and what that essence may entail. But the term ‘flows’ is unfortunate. It is a historical notion which is being adopted into contemporary discussion for want of a better notion; I’ve heard Lowe use it as well. But it sounds very mysterious. Does it simply suggest that the essential properties of an entity are entailed by the essence of that entity? What exactly is the relationship between essence and essential properties? My concern is that it will be impossible for us to distinguish, epistemically, between the essence itself and an essential property that ‘flows’ from the essence. For instance, if we are looking for the essence of water, we will presumably be able to point out a number of essential properties of the H20 molecule, perhaps, say, its molecular weight, but which essence, exactly, will these properties be related to? The essence of the natural kind ‘water’, if it indeed is a natural kind? Or the combination of the essences of hydrogen and oxygen atoms? The distinction between essence and property is further discussed in chapter 7 of Oderberg’s book, and I will return to this shortly.

The problem that I envisage is that we must already have grasped the essence that we are looking for before we can identify the essential properties that ‘flow’ from it. But it seems to me that our epistemic access to essences is often piecemeal: we wonder if a certain kind of entity, say, the Higgs boson, is possible, and we determine this by considering the essential properties that the Higgs boson would have, its mass and so on. But since we acquire knowledge of real essences by a combination of intellectual abstraction and empirical information, it would appear that we can grasp a real essence only after we have acquired sufficient knowledge about the essential properties associated with that essence. This is an epistemic rather than ontological worry, since it may still be the case that real essences are something over and above the essential properties associated with them (although they better not be entities in their own right, as noted above), but it seems like a difficult problem to overcome without relying on some more or less mysterious cognitive capacity which enables epistemic access to real essences. Oderberg does not appear to be committed to anything of the sort, so I’m not sure if I see how the epistemic story is supposed to go in his account.

Something related to this is discussed in section 3.4 of the book, ‘Coming to know essence’. Oderberg for instance notes that knowing the essence of something does not require knowing all of it, or knowing it in detail, rather, knowing a part of the essence may be sufficient, and indeed often this is enough for the purposes of distinguishing one entity from another. However, it seems to me that this is precisely the story we might tell about the essential properties of an entity — knowing some of the essential properties of an entity is sufficient for identifying it, while the full essence which encompasses all the essential properties of the entity may remain elusive. In fact, on p. 56 Oderberg says that ‘In general, it is true to say that we mostly identify and come to know the essences of material objects indirectly via their properties and accidents’. The case of abstract objects such as mathematical entities may be somewhat different, but all this seems to concern our knowledge of the essential properties of entities rather than the elusive essences themselves.

Well, my reading of the matter may not do full justice to Oderberg, as he does go on to explain, in considerable detail, how this view of essence fits in with the Aristotelian theory of hylemorphism, according to which essences are a mixture of form (actuality) and matter (potentiality) (p. 65). These notions are part of a long Aristotelian tradition and they certainly add considerable depth to the story about the structure of essence, but I’m not entirely sure that they help to address the epistemological worry which I raised above. Oderberg is quite aware of this issue and there are some good passages where he defends the importance of the distinction between essence and property, such as the following, using mammals as an example:

"To be sure, there are mammalian properties — having fur, lactating, and so on — but being a mammal and having mammalian properties are not the same thing. A mammal has mammalian properties because it is a mammal; these properties point to its essence. But isn’t it a mammal because it has these properties? Isn’t the real essentialist order of explanation upside down? To reverse the order of explanation, however, is ultimately to do away with essence, not to explain it. More accurately, it does away with real essence and replaces it with a surrogate bundle theory of essence as a collection of properties. And the problems with such a conception resurface."

Now, like I said, I’m inclined to accept the idea that we need to avoid such a bundle theory of essence; the ontology seems sound to me, if in need of some further work (such as an explication of the notion of ‘flow’). But if the epistemological story is driven by how we come to know essential properties, then I’m concerned that an epistemic gap remains between essential properties and the essence itself.

There are a number of details concerning the structure of essence and its applications that I found extremely interesting in Oderberg’s book, but this little review is already getting rather long, so I will not discuss these here. I will just conclude by noting that Real Essentialim is essential reading for anyone interested in essence, which should include all metaphysicians, and it serves both as an interesting survey of the notion as well as an original account of some its applications.

[David Haines · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is excellent. It provides a very clear and well argued defense of Real Essentialism (in dialogue with those who would reject it), articulating the claims and consequences of realism in many different areas of thought (including philosophy of mind, biology, and so on). A must read for anyone intetested in questions related to metaphysics and the real existence of essences. Not for the faint of heart, this is a more advanced work in metaphysics (and may be difficult reading for those not used to the domain).

[Joseph Yue · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this well-argued and poorly-written book, Oderberg presents his thesis that essence is indispensable for any reliable knowledge of the actual world. Despite the excruciatingly tedious writing style, I admire this work for being perhaps one of the first attempts to conduct inquiries in the context of contemporary philosophy but following the Aristotelian spirit: that we can, and should, be confident about our human rationality in cognising things in the real world, since things do exist in categories by their own right, and their existence do not depend on our invention. In this sense, the Aristotelian one is probably the most sanguine philosophical spirit, precisely because in it there is no such task as inventing reality in our mind. When this unbearable burden of lightness, or rather, of nothingness is taken off our shoulders, the philosophising mind is then free to roar, further up and further in...

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intro to modern Aristotelianism that Aristotle wouldn't necessarily recognize in all its parts. Best chapter is 9, reconciling metaphysical realism with evolutionary variation, one of the few ontics that I've ever considered realism defeasible in regards to (or a possible stage for nominalism).

[Rory Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentialism is the view that things have essences. Versions of that view have a long pedigree, going back into ancient Greek philosophy. It has represented mainstream philosophical (and scientific) orthodoxy until relatively recently. However, modern science has generally taken a more nominalistic view of reality, rejecting or abandoning ‘things’ like essences, that cannot be unambiguously observed in some way.

This book argues that that (modern scientific) approach is mistaken, as essences do in fact have a continuing role to play in philosophy and they can in fact be (sort of) observed in the observation of their instances. In any case, the author states, essences are answering a very different set of questions than a modern (materialistic) science are dealing with. So, it is unsurprising that modern sciences neither needs nor wants to engage with them. The question of essences (and by extension, metaphysics) is, to some extent, a question about whether there is more to reality than what is observable and measurable (by humans). The author thinks there is, and this is an account of what it is, and why it needs to be taken into account.

In the author’s opinion, essences provide better explanations of observable similarities in things. Modern science effectively side-steps the question of why things resemble each other, but the idea that there is an essence provides an attempt to explain precisely that point. There are complexities and issues raised by essences, but whether those issues are enough to warrant abandoning the idea is partially a question about what we think is an appropriate answer to questions about what we observe and why the world behaves as it does.

Part of what makes essentialism a controversial philosophy is that it claims that the ‘essences’ within things are a reality. They are not just ideas. And yet (as argued in this book) they are not platonic forms either, existing out there in their own realm, waiting to be discovered.

Those ideas lead inexorably to the problem of what we are to make of the existence of abstract entities like numbers (such as two or root -1). Do numbers have an essence, and does that essence have a real existence out there somewhere, independently of humans? Asking those kinds of questions is a good way of getting to grips with the core implications of theories like the essentialism argued in the book.

This book takes a broadly Aristotelian approach to those kinds of questions. It insists that abstract entities like numbers are ‘abstracted’ from concrete particulars, so numbers can only exist if there is stuff out there to thus ground the quantification which is numbering, or an eternal mind to carry the abstractions as potentialities for stuff.

Yes. But what does that mean, especially when it comes to abstractions like imaginary numbers? Unfortunately, the book does not press those kinds of questions. Indeed, it becomes worryingly vague at some of the most complex points. The author was surprisingly content to simply stop explanations while telling the reader that he did not have time or space to pursue matters further. For example he tells us that, ‘there is no space to examine this proposal…’ (p.126) and ‘…without having space for the details I contend that…’ (p.129).

One of the issues in philosophy is that the devil is all too often in the detail, so it is really not good enough to keep telling the reader that there is not time to pursue the devils in the details. If it really cannot be fitted into the book, then surely those kinds of issue can be dealt with in an article and referred to from the book. (Or perhaps the book could have had a narrower scope, with greater detail).

Overall, the book contains a lot of detail with a lot of argumentation, so it is a book that will be enjoyed most by professional philosophers. The book does well to take ancient and medieval ideas, and to explain them in terms of modern philosophers and modern terminology. So it is a useful summation and explanation of some important issues in philosophy. But the author sometimes assumes significant knowledge in the reader. For example, he tells us of Kripke and Putnam’s ideas that ‘the basic ideas are too well known to require restating here…’ (p.4). They may be well known to professional philosophers, but that kind of approach makes the book harder to access by readers approaching the issues from different disciplines.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It required slow going from me, but it was well worth it. Oderberg is a very good thinker and a very good writer.

He argues very capably for essentialism in our metaphysics, which can perhaps be summed up by saying that every substance (not illegal substance, but something he defines carefully) has at least one thing that marks it off from all other substances and by virtue of which it is what it is. Essence is not, as we might be tempted to think these days, some mysterious inner reality or code that is hidden from us but must be taken on faith; rather, it's just what makes a dog a dog, or a person a person.

He has many finely crafted arguments hitting around this bullseye, and tackles some closely related topics, like biological classification.

[Jared Mindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read it before, but I reread it because of how good it is. Very solid defense of Aristotelian/Scholastic realism as opposed to conventionalism, modalist essentialism, and Platonism. Pretty much required reading for any Scholastic.

[Adam Omelianchuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best overview of hylemorphic metaphysics I've read. Some bizarre conclusions, to be sure, but that's just the way metaphysics goes.