Thread by @EveKeneinan

Obvious really, but should be said:

Essence is prior to personal identity.

Whatness is prior to whoness.

Who you are isn’t reducible to what you are, but what you are is the foundation of who you are.

Similarly everything which is socially constructed is built on the foundation of the natural. You cannot ‘deconstruct’ nature away anymore than you can construct a building in air or a perpetual motion machine.

Those who reject Platonism, that is, who reject realism about essences, fall automatically into nominalism, the thesis that what things are is merely how we talk about them. This view rejects truth and knowledge, since to grasp “S is P,” there must be something stable to grasp.

Cratylus the Heracleitean stopped speaking altogether—because to utter a λόγος is to say something about something. But there are no stable somethings without essence.

Essence, by the way, is just Latin for whatness, that is, the what-it-is of anything that is—and everything that is, is something. There is no entity, no existing being, of which one cannot ask “What is it?”

Every general question has a generic answer:

Where is it? Somewhere; at some location

How did it happen? Somehow; in some way

What is it? “Somewhat”; it is some thing

Essence is the name for the generic what you are asking when you ask “What is it?” as location is to Where?

To be is to be something. A little reflection will reveal it is incoherent to claim that X exists, but deny that X is anything specific.

If something exists it does indeed exist as some thing.

You’ll notice that self-proclaimed essence-skeptics never seem to deny locations or ways of happening. If something happened there must be a way it happened. And if something is at all, it is something definite.

Kant tried the halfway-house of conceptualism, but this isn’t coherent.

Kant slides into Hegel and Hegel collapses into Nietzsche.

Which is how we get “we are autonomous selves with ultimate moral authority (Kant) who can create our own reality by pure will, e.g. our biological sex (Nietzsche) except where History enslaves us, e.g. our race (Hegel).”

Science is ultimately Platonic, to the extent it rejects the idea that nature is created by how we talk about it.

To be sure, science often falls into the trap of holding that science is grounded by reality, but nothing else is. This is incoherent because such a claim about science isn’t scientific.

Science, by refusing nonscientific speech, disqualifies itself from talk about science—and so self-disarmed, will be conquered. Scientists also think the moral totalitarians will leave them alone—because that’s what moralistic totalitarians do …