Contrary to the claims of modern evolutionists, Darwinism does not entail the kind of infinite variation required for a biological anti-essentialism. Darwinism does not postulate variation in mammalian species with respect to being warm-blooded and breathing air with lungs or with tigers with respect to being land-dwelling or in black rats with respect to not navigating by echolocation. The mistake, Oderberg claims, lies in thinking essences are nothing more than property clusters. Properties are indicators of essence, but even the simplest creature will have an incredibly long list of necessary characteristics, some of which may be unlistable in principle. But an essentialist does not have to list all of the (what may be) infinite characteristics of a creature to be able to enable at least a provisional judgment as to the substantial form of an organism.
Biologists do not postulate variation between mammals with regards to breathing air with lungs because no mammals breathing air with lungs have been observed. Were we to discover an example of a mammal (that is to say, a biological organism cladistically descended from the common ancestor that is arbitrarily identified as the source of the genus Mammalia) with gills tomorrow, biologists would not react not by declaring that this animal is an improper mammal and should not be classified as such, but by revising their notion of the category of "mammal" to include this new information.
Biology has by and large abandoned this concept of seperating biological categories by deliniating ostensible essential characteristics because it is untenable--the sheer number of times the "essential characteristics" of some category has had to be revised due to the discovery of new information rather reveals the absurdity of the entire project. Even
this very post demonstrates this--mammals are not, in fact, universally and unambiguiously warm-blooded--some mammals (such as the Arctic ground squirrel) do not exhibit all characteristics that are generally associated with warm-bloodedness, which has led biologists to reconsider the meaningfulness of "warm-blooded" as a designator in the first place. Any credible biologist would tell you today that what classifies an animal as a "mammal" is not some set of essential characteristics but cladistic descent from some arbitrary mammalian common ancestor, and that to insist that your provisional judgement based on such commonly-understood characteristics is correct if it contradicts with this cladistic classification understood by science is as laughable as insisting that Pluto is really a planet or that a meter is not the distance travelled by light in 1/299792458 of a second.
Insofar as you believe that any provisional judgement about the form of a mammal ought to adhere to modern science, such a judgement based on some set of characteristics today is just as likely to be wrong as the provisional judgements about the form of a mammal made by Aristotle when he defined mammals as giving live birth to young and being higher on the great chain of being for doing so. Insofar as you do
not believe this, all you have done is construct your own arbitrary, personal definition of "mammal" to include precisely all the characteristics that you have associated with them and precisely none of them that you do not. In which case any "provisional judgement" you make on such a basis has less to do with Darwin or biology and more to do with a lunatic rambling about the four-corned nature of time.
Riddle me this--what is the
telos of a Pachyderm?
One mistake this argument makes is confusing essences and essential properties. The essence of a thing explains why a thing has its essential properties. My capacity for humor is an essential property I possess which flows from my essence. But my essence, that of a rational animal, is not an essential property; it explains why I have such essential properties. In this case, rationality implies a capacity for abstract thinking, with which I could form a combination of concepts in my head that that shows the various kinds of dissonance with everyday life. And animality implies a capacity for passion, for finding things surprising. Taken together, these capacities allow me to judge various things or possible things as “humorous.” The capacity for humor is therefore an essential property because it flows from what it means to be a human, and no human could fail to have such a characteristic.
There are demonstrably humans who do not have a capacity for abstract thinking--some of those who are severely autistic lack the capacity for at least some components of what is generally referred to as "abstract thinking" (and indeed are sometimes unable to grasp humor), and yet are considered by all but the most deranged of eugenicists to be just as "human" as everyone else. Even further, anencephalic people also exist, occasionally survive well into early childhood, and have zero capacity for abstract thinking whatsoever. If there are indeed humans who fail to have such a characteristic, how can we designate it an "essential property"?
These sorts of frequent factual flaws illustrate the largest fundemtal problem here--your entire essay is built on a motte-and-bailey between things causally linked and things that merely generally co-occur. There is a fundemental difference between statements like this:
But is there such a thing as teleology? Are things in nature “directed” towards some other thing? Many of the moderns disagree, but their disagreement often comes from their misunderstanding of what teleology is. To them, teleology always involves either a process with stages (as in the development of an acorn into an oak tree) or a part working for the good of a whole (as with a human heart). But as we discussed before, the only thing essential to teleology is an inclination towards an end, such as the tendency of an ice cube to cause its surroundings to grow colder. The ice cube has this tendency as opposed to a tendency to warm its surroundings or cause them to become toxic or not affect anything at all.
Which express a direct and inevitable causal link grounded in scientific fact and in the definition of ice (that ice is the form taken by water when chilled below a certain temperature, and that by the law of thermodynamics, heat will transfer from hotter surfaces surrounding an ice cube to the ice cube itself), and a statement like this:
- Basic causal regularities: If cause A regularly generate some effect or range of effects B rather than C, D, or no effects at all, then we can say that the telos of A is the generation of B. So, if opioids regularly cause people to go to sleep, we can say that the telos of opioids is to induce sleep.
Which is merely something that is
often true, but not inevitably guaranteed by causation. Opioids regularly cause people to go to sleep, but they also sometimes have no effect, or cause death. This sort of relationship does not have the same nature as, say, gravity causing masses to attract each other or thermodynamics causing the transfer of heat between bodies. You set out on this essay to defend the latter, and yet when challenged retreat to the former, presenting an banal, unobjectionable truth everyone accepts to try and trick people into acccepting a much more controversial statement.
What percentage of people need to go to sleep after taking opioids for us to say that the
telos of opioids is to induce sleep? 50%? 66%? 99?
Opioids cause people to be numb to pain just as often as they cause people to go to sleep. So why do we say that the
telos of opioids is to induce sleep and not to relieve pain?
In fact, opioids cause
some people to go to sleep and
some people to simply be less responsive to pain in ways that differ between people, but generally predictably. Why is the
telos of opioids not to cause people who are above a BMI of X and who have not eaten in Y hours to go to sleep, to cause people who do not fit those categories but do not have genetic mutation Z to simply be numb to pain, and to cause those who do have genetic mutation Z to have an allergic reaction and die? This is a much more accurate illustration of how opioids affect people then merely "induce sleep" and true for a much larger percentage of situations as well--is it not an even more accurate
telos as a result? All
telos can be subject to stricter individuation at the whims of whoever it is that is arguing for it--is the
telos of an acorn to produce a tree? An oak tree? An oak tree or squirrel feces? An oak tree if not subject to serious genetic deformities that inhibit its ability to sprout and not discovered by an animal and eaten before it has the opportunity to do so, but animal feces otherwise? Which is it?
(For that matter, the reverse of individuation is possible too--why is the
telos of an acorn not to produce a plant? A living thing? An object on earth? Matter made of atoms?)
The great flaw of essentialism and of teleologically thinking is not that things have causal links to other things, nor that there exists categories which are definitionally seperate from other categories. Both of these statements are so obvious as to be totally banal, and are accepted by every single person who lives on this earth save the greatest of imbeciles and lunatics. The great flaw of your teleo-essentialist worldview is that the causal links that you identify are not, in fact, actual causal links, and that the categories which you identify as essential are in fact arbitrarily defined. This little nugget here is your original sin:
We learn of the essences of things a posteriori supplemented where necessary by a priori metaphysical reflection concerning such things as classification, structure, explanation, causation, unity, specificity and generality, and so on.
Classification, structure, explanation, causation, unity, specificity and generality. That's a lot of different concepts. Concepts which each would require their own, seperate, justification as to why they ought to form some grounding of our concept of the fundamental nature of all things. Concepts which, rather notably,
you do not justify at all. That we can learn characteristics of things
a posteriori is knowledge that can be divined by a three year old. It is the
a priori metaphysical reflection that is the bankrupcy of the teleo-essentialist position--and yet you've spent this entire essay doing little more than misunderstanding science and repeating banal platitudes of simple observation, at worst wrong and at beast utterly meaningless. It leads me to believe that either you do not understand teleology and essentiallism (and its critics) nearly as well as you seem to claim, or that you have some dishonest motive as to why you would so carefully hide the most important and controversial part of your position away behind an endless gallop of platitudes.
As a worldview in of itself, this teleo-essentialism of yours is annoying and idiotic but essentially harmless. What is truly intolerable is when you go on to construct your shambling, simplstic brand of reactionary politics from it--one which I strongly suspect would have you laughed out of the room by the likes of Moldbug or any other reactionary with two brain cells to rub together, based on when I spoke to the man. Here is where you make your last fundamental break from science--your jump from
"essence" to
normative value.
Let us suppose that scientists really did believe that the definition of "mammals" was warm-blooded animals that breath through their lungs. Were scientists to encounter a mammal that does not fit this categorization, it would be cause for them to rethink the validity of their definition of "mammal" in the first place--which was indeed exactly what actually happened historically, when similar such criticisms were raised, leading to the cladistic model that is used today. This is the essense of a proper, scientific category--a category is useful to deliniate a set of things that share common properties and a similar nature. If another thing is discovered that is provably part of that category but does not share those common properties, the response of a scientist is not to reject the new thing but to revise the existing category--as with mammals, with Pluto, and so forth.
And yet your "essentialist" politics does the opposite--it comes across things which do not fit the category to which you have assigned them, and concludes that it is the
things rather than the categories that are wrong. A woman is generally submissive, but there are women who are dominant. And therefore, the rational person comes to the conclusion that certain aspects of what is traditionally referred to as "womanness" may not in fact be inherent to the category of "woman", and it is not rational or useful to categorize men in such a way because it it is not descriptive. You, on the other hand, do the opposite--conclude that these things are incorrect because they do not fit the category into which they are sorted, even though those characteristics of the category into which they are sorted were defined purely on the basis of the characteristics of the category's members in the first place.
When most people read a map and see dry land, but arrive and find a river, they shrug and begin to swim. Most people do
not angrily grab a bucket and a shovel and try to fill the riverbed with dirt to force it to conform to the map. Then again, I suppose you're far too special to adhere to such modern sensibilities, are you?
A couple more sundry bits of stupidity I felt the need to address:
Nevertheless, we do know of essences by general observation and reasoning. We ask questions like “if I took away this or that quality of the thing in question, would its nature remain the same? Would it continue to display the same characteristic properties, functions, operations, and behavior that it does when it possesses the quality that I remove in thought?” It is through this method that we come to understand whether a quality is either an essential quality or an accidental one.
This is obvious circular reasoning. You define an "essential" quality as one that one which would cause a thing to not display the same characteristic properties, etc. were it taken away. But of course, taking away any quality from a thing will cause it to lose
some property, function, operation, behavior, etc. So what distinguishes characteristic properties from non-characteristic ones?
Additionally, while an essentialist can acknowledge the existence of some universal accidental property, it must be admitted that such a thing is an exception, not the rule. In nearly every case, universal characteristics – those found in kinds of a thing everywhere and all times – are nearly always essential. Methodologically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with assuming a universal characteristic is also an essential one.
Ah, yes, right, whether they are essential qualities. So an essential quality is one which... if taken away, will not alter the essential qualities of a thing. Very solid reasoning.
- Distinctly animal life: Unlike other types of organisms, animals are capable of sensation, appetite, and locomotion. These activities entail a kind of conscious goal-seeking different in kind than the basic biological phenomena.
- Human thought and action: Human thought has a conceptual structure foreign to other animals; rational thought has intentionality and purpose in the fullest sense.
Neither of these are true--animals are not categorically capable of sensation, appetite, and locomotion, and it's unclear as to whether or not the structure of human thought has a structure totally foreign to otehr animals. Intelligent animals such as chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, corvids, etc. exhibit many characteristics of rational thought (problem-solving, abstract reasoning, memory, etc.) that humans do--to say nothing of previous members of the genus
homo which have since gone extinct, each of which had some intermediate capacity for rational thought between that of humans and animals. Our understanding of thought is not nearly solid enough to make such confident statements as to its fundamental nature
Finally, as mentioned above, when it comes to the true essence of a thing, not just its essential properties, the essentialist is able to make the leap from universality to essentialness without holding either there must be some empirical test for essence or holding all essentialist judgments to be certain on all occasions. Consider the following example:
Though the essence of a thing can only be known through observation, there needn’t be some sort of repeatable empirical test for essence, just as there needn’t be a single, codified empirical test for the real essence of a thing. So, essentialism is definitely true.
One often encounters strawmen, but rarely does one encounter a strawman that is
literally about strawmen. Excuse me, I need to savor this moment for a second.
Yes, if you walk into a field and see a scarecrow, you can easily and obviously determine that a scarecrow is not a human, and the conclusions that are presented here would seem rather self-evident. It's certainly easy to distinguish a scarecrow from a human being when the common stereotype of a scarecrow does indeed distinguish them accurately from human beings. But stereotypes (in the Putnamian sense) do not always accurately adhere to the underlying reference term to which they refer. If you walk into a field and see a field of brocolli, can you determine that they are cabbage? If you argue that no, they are not essentially cabbage, because cabbage is a vegetable that comes in large balls whereas brocolli is a vegetable that comes in small stalks, and a farmer retorts that both are strains of the wild cabbage and thus of the same essense, who is correct? Does the font of essentiality spring from genetic origin or from use and/or common understanding? Does it identify with the reference term defined by subject experts or with the stereotype of common use? For philosophy among crows, I imagine that the dinstinction between humans and scarecrows presents a real challenge to their formulation of essentialism. For us, however, it is ambiguities such as these that underly the main problems with essentialism--the scarecrow example tells us nothing.
Furthermore, everything in the world can be classified into an infinite number of taxonomic schemes that classify items according to an infinite number of characteristics. By stereotype, a human is a being that is alive, that is shaped like a hominid, and that sweats. A human is essentially an animal, but it is also essentially a hominid-shaped-thing in the taxonomy of shaped-things that ascends to circular objects and descends to infinitely more complex shapes (a category that it shares with scarecrows), a thing-that-sometimes-gathers-water-on-its-exterior-surface-due-to-some-physical-property-of-its-interior in the taxonomy of things-which-exhude-water, from things that do not exhude water to things which exhude water from every concievable portion of its surface (a category that it shares with neither animals nor scarecrows, but it does share with cold glasses of water), a thing-which-washes-itself-by-standing-upright-and-scrubbing-soap-over-its-body in the taxonomy of things that wash themselves, from things that do not wash at all to things that wash extensively for most of their lives (a category it shares with a certain kind of rat from South America, but not any other living things), a thing-which-knows-of-the-classical-novel-jane-eyre (a category it shares with all other humans who have recieved a middle school education but not the scarecrow or you) in the taxonomy from nonliving things to things with a basic American education, and a-thing-which-properly-does-not-enjoy-isekai-shit (a category it shares with most other human beings but not you) in the taxonomy from things with great taste to things with shit taste. Does this mean that the human shape is an essential characteristic of being a human (a stipulation which may be put to test by quadruple amputees)? Sweating? The ability to shower?