Sometimes people speak as if anti-essentialism is a relatively rare, or relatively recent, or exclusively postmodern, or exclusively leftist, idea. It’s not. Anti-essentialist views can be found throughout the history of Western philosophy.
It's been associated with the left because debates about essentialism often occur in the context of race, gender, nationality, etc. For example, is gender something a person essentially is, or is it something constructed/performed/imposed/subject to change?
But the essentialism debate can be a lot more general. On the one hand, there can be local anti-essentialism, for example, anti-essentialism about culinary culture. But there is also global anti-essentialism, the idea that essences do not exist at all, in any sphere.
Essentialism consists in the idea that the properties of some given thing can be divided into essential ones (properties that can’t change without fundamentally changing what that thing is) and accidental ones (properties that can change while the object remains what it is).
This goes along with the idea that we can distinguish between the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of a thing. Anti-essentialism is the rejection of the essence/accident distinction.
It rejects the idea that we can identify an essence - the necessary and sufficient conditions - that make something the thing that it is. Instead, anti-essentialists hold that how something must be defined is never something internal, self-enclosed, self-sufficient or stable.
F. ex., the modern philosopher David Hume could be called an anti-essentialist, as he believes that there are no substances inherent to things outside of the combination of properties that make them up, and that we group these properties into essences only as a matter of habit.
Nietzsche was also an anti-essentialist, not just about local matters, such as morality, but about the nature of reality itself. He believed that at the most fundamental level reality consists not of essences, but of relations.
Nietzsche wrote that “if everything we project onto reality to make it intelligible were eliminated, ― no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta”
It’s present also in analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein (not that he’s exclusive to the analytic tradition) always argued against the idea of essences, and replaced them with what he called “family resemblances”. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_re…
Quine is also an anti-essentialist, as he believes that what we consider essential to a thing is arbitrary insofar as it depends on the aspect under which we view something. Say that, for example, Kate is both a mathematician and a cyclist...
... If we see her under the aspect of a mathematician, her rationality will be an essential quality, while her having two legs will be an accidental one. But under the aspect of cyclist, it’ll be the other way around. What is essential in one sense can be accidental in another.
Richard Rorty identifies himself as an anti-essentialist and says that anti-essentialism could also be called “pan-relationism”, because in rejecting essences we affirm the idea that nothing can be understood outside of its relations with other things.
Echoing Nietzsche, Rorty says that “[t]here is nothing but relations, everywhere, all along your road and in all directions.”
