In Essence

What does it mean to be a “real man”? What feeling am I “really” feeling? What does it mean to be alive? What’s the “right” decision to make?

These are among the many questions I hear clients asking themselves in sessions, or sometimes looking to me to answer for them.

But for me, these kinds of questions first call into question the philosophical approach they are all based on, an approach known as Essentialism.

Essentialism

To put it briefly, Essentialism is the belief in essences. 

What are essences? The exact definition may depend on just which philosopher you ask, but basically an essence is a deep underlying substance, property, or set of properties that gives something its function, purpose, or meaning.

This is a philosophical approach that goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, but has continued ever since in various forms.

For example, what is the essence of a circle? A circle can be defined mathematically by its essential core properties, without which you wouldn’t have a circle. (According to Euclid: “A circle is a plane figure bounded by one curved line, and such that all straight lines drawn from a certain point within it to the bounding line, are equal.”)

Maybe you can’t find an example of a mathematically perfect circle in real life that displays those essential properties, but the mind can still imagine this ideal essential circle. In other words, you can still define what a “real” circle is, even if it’s hard to find a good example of one.

Plato’s idea of an essence went on to influence Christianity, becoming the Christian idea that every person has some deep underlying essence (soul), which comes along with a God-given meaning and purpose. 

This allowed for such questions as: What is my real purpose? Who am I really? What am I here to do?

It also allowed for some guidance around these questions, by looking to religion or God for answers to questions about purpose, identity, or life direction. Being a good person meant discovering one’s essence, and adhering to that essence.

Everyday Essentialism

I see various versions of this same Essentialist view of life all the time, both in and out of the therapy session.

A common example, and one of ongoing intense debate, is around the question of gender. An essentialist approach to gender (known as gender essentialism) would assume that there is a masculine essence and a feminine essence.

Being a “real” man, or a “good” man, or a “superior” man then means adhering successfully to this masculine essence.

Another example is in the psychology of Carl Jung and his idea of archetypes, that there are these inherent essential archetypal energies or images that are part of everyone’s psychology and part of all cultures.

The words “real”, “true”, and “right” tend to come up when someone is speaking from an essentialist perspective, indicating a comparison to an imagined essence: a “true” American, a “real” family, the “right” job”, etc.

These comparisons all come with the assumption that there is an essence in all of those cases.

Existentialism

Essentialism finally came into question after the dehumanizing impact of the European Industrial Revolution and the hellish devastation of World War I led a number of thinkers to reexamine its assumptions.

What if there weren’t any essences? What if nothing had an essential substance, an inherent meaningful purpose and definition?

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre turned everything on its head with a simple three-word sentence: “Existence precedes essence.”

What if we are simply here, existing, first? And that it is only after finding ourselves here that we are left with the task of creating essences, defining them ourselves?

Thus, Existentialism was born.

To an Existentialist, there are no essences other than the ones we create with our own choices. We don’t find meaning, we create meaning. Our life doesn’t have a given purpose, we create our purpose through our actions.

There is no such thing as a “real man”, only how people create masculinity through their choices. There is no “right decision”, only the meaning we imbue our choices and life with. Every choice is a creative act, an expression of the endless creative freedom that comes with existing.

As inventor of Logotherapy Viktor Frankl pointed out, rather than asking life what it means, maybe life is asking us what it means.

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(Check out the video below for an entertaining comparison of Essentialism and Existentialism thanks to CrashCourse on Youtube.)