Existentialism vs. Essentialism
ChastMastr
Shipmate
in Purgatory
In a thread in Epiphanies on trans issues, @pease and I said:
I don’t understand that concept at all. To me this is completely about things being true or false. If things do – if at least some things do – have intrinsic meaning or nature at all, then at least some essentialism is true. If nothing has intrinsic meaning or nature, then existentialism is true.
Thoughts?
Ah.ChastMastr wrote: »In my case, it’s connected to a belief in philosophical essentialism, rather than existentialism, certainly. If it is true, and Western or other groups of beliefs reflect this, then good. But to me the primary matter is whether or not something is true, not the region of the world that believes it.I see in the above a tendency towards conceiving the issue in binary terms - do you think this reflects the general extent to which our thinking is (predominantly) Western, or maybe that it emerges (more specifically) from an essentialist perspective?
In my understanding, essentialism is no more "true" or "false" than existentialism - they are both perspectives or systems for thinking about the world. It is possible to believe that one or other is better, according to some criteria, but not that one is truer.
I don’t understand that concept at all. To me this is completely about things being true or false. If things do – if at least some things do – have intrinsic meaning or nature at all, then at least some essentialism is true. If nothing has intrinsic meaning or nature, then existentialism is true.
Thoughts?
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Well, you see, that's precisely existentialism in a nutshell--the idea that any meaning anything has is only something humans stamp onto it, not something it has in itself.
That something has an intrinsic essence and nature, regardless of human notions thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
I should note that believing in essentialism of one kind or another does not require believing in every possible form of essentialism, particularly what some might consider a misuse of the concept, including at least approaches to social identities.
(Emphasis mine.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_precedes_essence
The universe existed for billions of years before any life (that we know of) existed to perceive it or give it a “meaning”.
I'm wondering about what I quoted and bolded below:
in contrast with what I bolded below:
@ChastMastr are you using "meaning" and "intrinsic essence" synonymously? I am assuming so, but I can read them as having quite different "meanings" as well.
Assuming you intend them synonymously, does the intrinsicality of meaning depend, then, on who does the stamping? Your examples sound as if that is the case.
If so, it seems meaning is extrinsic either way.
I've not thought of this question in quite this way before. Although, I think my own understanding has been that meaning is given by God to all humans., certainly not of humans themselves.
However, as humans we also have the power to give meaning to others, but also take it away.
If my view is right, I see two great differences between meaning given by God or by humans:
But not, in Christian theology, before the Creator of the universe.
Re "Assuming you intend them synonymously, does the intrinsicality of meaning depend, then, on who does the stamping? Your examples sound as if that is the case," possibly. We're not the Creator--we're what Tolkien called "sub-creators." But we're "stamping" stuff that's already there when we make a fork out of steel. In the case of the universe being created ex niliho by God, it's a different matter.
I don't think we as humans have the power to take meaning away. We can act as if it's not there, though.
Re "God is ever-existent and able to maintain that meaning, where any meaning any of us assigns to another dies with us," arguably He could maintain that meaning and give it new life in some way, say in the new Creation. (I've occasionally wondered about that. Will the Taj Mahal or the Mona Lisa or the worlds created by authors live on in Heaven/the world to come in a more transcendent way? Kind of like the way Aule made the Dwarves in the Silmarillion, but Eru gave them true life?)
Re "Those of us who see meaning as granted by God commit a grave sin by denying it of other people," amen. I'm reminded of "Xing" in A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle: "The Echthroi are powerful, evil creatures whose desire is to X (i.e. extinguish, unname) creation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wind_in_the_Door
Agreed and amen to all of that.
Being entirely boring about it, Kierkegaard was reacting against the ideas of Hegel, whilst remaining (at least in his own mind (kind of)) within Christianity. For Kierkegaard, the philosophy of Hegel seemed to have saturated western Christianity and his job was to release people from the straightjacket. Other later Existentialists went further, of course.
The Matrix films are deliberately existentialist, of course. The protagonist is stuck in the matrix which distorts reality and he has to choose the painful route to embrace the underlying truth.
Of course, this is also the basis of belief in conspiracies.
Amen to your amen.
I'm glad this thread hasn't wandered into the realm of quantum physics, which struggles with, 'What is real? and, 'What does this mean?'
I'll go away and stroke our emergency backup cat who just gets on with life!
There's a lesson there!
Do people mean "significance?" Or a necessary place in the scheme of things? Or what?
The problem is, I think, that the definition of "real" is absolutely core. What is real? How do you define something as being real without then some connection to human perception and knowledge?
Once you have defined what you understand to be real, that will tell you whether existence or essence is primary ini that definition.
But only within that definition. And FWIW, I actually think reality is an illusion, allbeit one that is critical to our continued functioning. But you relaly don't want to go down that rabbit hole with me.
So the answer is nothing? No some things? Have any meaning or essence, whatever they could be? The only positable entity with essence is Love where essence - Love - is being - Love. Love would include all infinite nature and transcendence from eternity, all would have meaning, all would be expression, substance of Love.
That would be nice.
Metaphysical essence, substance otherwise has no meaning in nature, reality. In our narratives of nature. Despite emerging in them even to the point of being... essential to a minority of sociologists, according to Wiki and therefore not... substantial, not scholarly enough? Therefore we must ignore what it apparently superficially says about essentialism being a hard wired developmental cognitive bias?
In nature essence is (physical) substance. Matter. What is the essence of essence? Nature, always nature, ultimately, rapidly, utterly ineffable nature. Physics. Quantum noise in what would be otherwise absolutely nothing, a dimensionless vacuum, oblivion. From that we apparently get universes emerging from colliding five dimensional structures in hyperspace. Essentially.
I am very wary indeed of it.
I’m not sure how easily I can, other than to suggest that it might be like Christianity or such—good and true in itself, but twisted into things like inquisitions and holy wars.
That it has an essential nature that makes it what it is.
I would say that that which is real is that which is. I’d also say that human (or other sapient, or even sentient) perception or knowledge of the thing doesn’t make it real—we perceive a reality that is already there, rather than just making it up.
As your second link (“it”) says, “There is a difference between metaphysical essentialism and psychological essentialism…” —yes, I’m talking about the metaphysical kind here. And whether or not it is hard-wired tells us nothing about whether or not essentialism is true. Perhaps, like our eyes perceive light (which is also real), it is there to help us understand that kind of reality.
I'm there with you. Couldn't agree more. Reality as an extra concept to being, like all metaphysics, and all theology, is meaningless, illusory, fallacious. Metaphor at best. And essential, inseparable from being human. Like psychological essentialism.
Yes, I think we’ll disagree on this matter, especially including metaphysics and theology being “meaningless, illusory, fallacious.”
Quantum physics is a picnic compared with making sense of this philosophy stuff.
It's not true in any (epistemo)logical sense. It's true for you, subjectively; a matter of belief. It has meaning for you. It is not objective, detached, disinterested, consilient knowledge.
Do you mean the narratives where you get hungry, need sleep and love your family? That narrative? Or is Li Po’s poem really a about a butterfly who just thinks he is Chuang Tzu.
Chuang Tzu And The Butterfly
Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,
And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.
Which was the real—the butterfly or the man ?
Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?
The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea
Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream.
The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city,
Was once the Prince of the East Hill.
So must rank and riches vanish.
You know it, still you toil and toil,—what for
…remember not to use up one’s lives
Whatever meaning has been given can be ignored, mangled, reinterpreted, devalued, countered -- in practice: taken away.
We see countless examples all the time all around us. We are so used to it, we don't even notice.
Meaning (flying with no real definition around which there would be no consensus anyway) is subjective and therefore alterable.
Possibly. Which points again to the subjective and extrinsic nature of meaning.
One of my favorites.
Good comparison -- x-ing.
It happens all around us by humans all the time. We have and exercise the power constantly. Pull out the "Glossary of the Culture Wars" and you'll find lots of examples of x-ing terms.
No. I mean our consilient, objective narratives of nature. Which is, of course, ultimately, objectively indeterminate; ultimately, absolutely, objectively, really, there is no such thing as ultimate, absolute, objective reality.
My being hungry and tired and conditionally loving can't affect the laws of physics.
The man. As a placeholder for the ultimate transient emergent entity within walls of bone.
My life is being used at 1s/s.
As I said before, the universe existed for billions of years without any kind of connection to human perception and knowledge. If every single human disappeared tomorrow, the universe would still exist. The universe is not just some emergent property of human perspicacity. It's real.
And yes, if a tree falls in the woods then it makes a sound (an acoustic wave that propagates through the atmosphere) even if there's nobody there to hear it.
I dunno; it seems so barmy I'm just wondering if I'm misunderstanding it.
"Acoustic" in this sense means something that can be heard, usually in relation to most human beings' ability to hear (to a greater or lesser extent). If there's no-one around to hear it, how do you know if it can be heard?
Because when trees fall in the forest, and they always make acoustic waves doing that, those that have ears to hear, would hear, if they were there? How can one not know that?
On the other hand, psychologically, we are greatly dependent on the understanding that others perceive us, recognize that we are there. Give us meaning.
Cold
Annie Lennox
I know.
We've been describing it archaeologically, culturally for ten thousand years. Accurately starting four hundred. I mean really well for a hundred. As good
So it keeps telling us what it was like hundreds and thousands and billions of years ago all the time.
You can know too.
@Kendel. Blood Music! Utterly f...lamin' brilliant! Poor Annie.
@pease. Ever cut a tree down?
Well of course - I am human, and must perforce consider and express things in human terms.
The point is that the physical reality of the universe, of (what we humans call) matter and energy and forces and stars and planets, exists whether we are here to perceive it or not.
A pressure wave then. Or a vibration, if you prefer. I’m not sure why you’re being so semantically and obfuscatorily smart-alecky when the underlying concept is perfectly understandable and ready to be discussed.
Reminds me of the Zen koan, what was your face like, before your parents were born?
Yeah, obviously we don’t agree about this.
Generally speaking, in discussion where people might not agree, it’s often better to use what are called “I statements” (I believe X, etc.), because otherwise you can just have someone say that it’s not true and the other one says it is true and the other one says it’s not true and the other one says it is true and it goes on forever.
I believe Essentialism is true. You do not. I think this has been established now.
Re “ Except two, humans are the product of procreation” —yes, but in Christian theology, God created us and everything else. And in procreation, humans are begetting humans, not creating ex nihilo.
Re “ Meaning (flying with no real definition around which there would be no consensus anyway) is subjective and therefore alterable,” — Unless Essentialism is true, and that meaning remains true regardless of human subjectivity and how much of it we know or don’t know or misunderstand.
Re Aule and the dwarves, and “Which points again to the subjective and extrinsic nature of meaning,” I don’t know that that’s true in the first place regarding human artistic creations and how they might be caught up into the New Creation by God. I hope so. But that wouldn’t mean that meaning in itself can’t be objectively true.
“ Pull out the "Glossary of the Culture Wars" and you'll find lots of examples of x-ing terms.” Sadly, yes.
What Do We Mean When We Talk about Meaning? I've tried to have that discussion on another board. The question always morphed to "What is the meaning of life?" But that's a different question, and the way we answer it depends on what the question means in the first place. Which nobody seems to agree on or care about.
The sample of the book on Amazon was an interesting introduction to the challenge of defining "meaning" so we can talk about it, as well as to the different ways that people in different cultures understand and understood the concept of "meaning."
It gets vastly more complicated when we include concepts of "intrinsicity" or "extrinsicity" or "eccentricity" or "essence."
2) @Martin54, I think Annie had recovered by the end of the song.
1.5) Blood Music or Annie? Or both in sort of a Venn kind of way?
1) As the last living thing joins the Noosphere, Greg Bear imagines an ambiguous, dramatic separation of conscious life from unconscious materials of nature.
Blood Music by Greg Bear, 98%-99%.
Rather different from silently falling trees.
In my dotage I can't see any analogy, resonance. But that's beholders' shares for you. Light cones don't have the rich, epicyclic paradoxes of the koan, which is deliberately meaningless I realise.
I don't, can not, believe. Period. So I cannot believe that essentialism is true in any epistemological sense, which cannot be advanced as that too would be a matter of belief, in infinite regress: I would have to believe things about epistemology that aren't true.
That you believe aren’t true. Or that you don’t believe are true.
I have no basis to believe, in the sense you mean. Period. I obviously never have. Since childhood's end, when we cannot not believe. I've always known. Wrongly, faultily, ignorantly; still. But with increasing awareness, in my eighth decade. Which won't last long. So I know, i.e. I have coherent justified belief. You would say the same of course, but we have no overlap in what we mean; only separation by a common language. Fascinating isn't it?
No, not really. We obviously disagree, and I wish you well. Take care.
You see, you say this:
If every single human disappeared tomorrow, the universe would still exist. The universe is not just some emergent property of human perspicacity. It's real.
in response to me asking what reality it. And are not answering. What does being real mean? Is there another universe that does not have humans in it, and is that also real? How do you know (either way)?
This is not purely trivial. There is an argument that the passage of time - the time that the universe has existed - is only as a result of our perception (that is based on Carlo Rimini).
What does "real" mean, in a way that is not simply "We experience it". We experience now a universe that is billions of years old. The age and the presence now are both fundamentally our experiences.
I am not saying they are not true. Just that we are dealing with reality here.