Essence

Essence in general means the reality of things as disclosed to rational thought. The idea of science as an organized body of knowledge depends on the presupposition of a distinction between a world of appearance and an underlying universal reality of basic elements and forces.

The philosophical development of the idea in Plato and Aristotle added an irreducible normative dimension. For Aristotle, the essence of things was not simply the universal definition that stated the intrinsic nature of things; it equally expressed the unique set of possibilities that those things ought to realize. Hence, essence combines “is” (that which grounds the division of reality into classes of things) and “ought” (the content of the “good” for each class of things). The concept of essence is distinguished from all of the other categories of Western philosophy and science by this synthesis of the normative and the descriptive.

The revolution in physics in the work of Galileo, René Descartes, and Sir Isaac Newton eliminated this idea of essence from natural science. The concept of essence was subsequently reserved for judgments of human life. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx were crucial to keeping the concept of essence alive in social and historical philosophy. They rejected the static conception of a set of essential possibilities for all humans for a conception of the human essence as necessarily historical. Instead of the idea of a timeless universal form lying behind the apparent diversity of human cultural practices, the idea of the human essence that emerges from Hegel and Marx focuses on the ever-developing self-creative capabilities of humans.

The use of the concept of essence as an objective basis of social criticism itself became the object of criticism during the 1960s. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, drawing on the arguments of Friedrich Nietzsche, argued that the idea of essence is always linked to definite strategies of exclusion. In their account, the critical function of the concept of essence was charged with being another form of power whose aim was to legitimate itself by [Page 269]delegitimating other forms of understanding. There could be no essence, whether historical or not, lying behind appearances because everything, including what counts as appearance and what counts as essence, must be stated in language. The concept of essence tries to free theory from the plurality of meaning typical of language, but because it too is meaningful only in language, it must itself succumb to the pluralism it tries to control.

This so-called postmodern critique of the concept of essence has proven to be powerful into the contemporary period, so much so that “essentialism” is now almost universally regarded as a theoretical strategy that must be avoided. The concept remains an important methodological tool, however, whenever qualitative research needs to ask foundational questions, especially regarding different social interests. Unless the concept of essence (in some form) is employed, it is not clear how the legitimacy and relative value of competing social interests are to be established.