I'm "guilty" of essentialism on a regular basis. I have a favorite pen for writing. I collect bird feathers, such as owl, road runner, raven, crow, and recently a cardinal. In my magical-mythic brain (whichever "module" that might be), the feathers hold some essence of the bird they cam from, some "power." And maybe strangest of all, I have a ratty old pair of denim shorts that are my "writing shorts."
It's easy to see things like essentialism in other cultures, a little harder to see them in ourselves or our own cultures.
Selection of Dalai Lama reveals psychological essentialism in non-western cultureHere is a bit of the Wikipedia entry on essentialism:
If you believe that there's something inherently doggy about all dogs, or fishy about fish then you're really indulging in a spot of psychological essentialism - the idea that entities are imbued with some kind of innate characteristic that marks them out as distinct. In one form this thinking can become mystical. Is there something special about Michael Jackson's sequined glove or is it just a hand-shaped piece of material like any other glove? If you think it's special then you're seeing the history of the item as part of its essence.
The sentimentality we feel towards heirlooms or holiday souvenirs shows that even the more materialist among us can be prone to the occassional essentialist flutter. Now in a short letter to the journal Trends in Cognitive Science (TICS) the psychologists Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman have argued that the way the current Dalai Lama was selected demonstrates that essentialist belief is also apparent in non-Western cultures.
Referring to eye-witness accounts of the search for the 14th (current) Dalai Lama, Bloom and Gelman write:"The relevant section concerns the testing of a particular two-year-old boy in his remote home village. A group of bureaucrats brought with them the belongings of the late 13th Dalai Lama, along with a set of inauthentic items that were similar or identical to these belongings. When presented with an authentic black rosary and a copy of one, the boy grabbed the real one and put it around his neck. When presented with two yellow rosaries, he again grasped the authentic one. When offered two canes, he at first picked up the wrong one, then after closer inspection he put it back and selected the one that had belonged to the Dalai Lama. He then correctly identified the authentic one of three quilts."The psychologists say their point isn't that these objects were imbued with some mystical essence, but rather that the Tibetan bureaucrats believed they were. "We take this as evidence of the ubiquity, naturalness and importance of psychological essentialism," they concluded.
Link to full-text of letter to TICS (via Paul Bloom's lab website).
Link to Wikipedia entry on essentialism.
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. This view is contrasted with non-essentialism which states that for any given kind of entity there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must possess.
A member of a specific kind of entity may possess other characteristics that are neither needed to establish its membership nor preclude its membership. It should be noted that essences do not simply reflect ways of grouping objects; essences must result in properties of the object.
An essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal; and present in every possible world. Classical humanism has an essentialist conception of the human being, which means that it believes in an eternal and unchangeable human nature. This viewpoint has been criticized by Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and many modern and existential thinkers.
In simple terms, essentialism is a generalisation stating that certain properties possessed by a group (e.g. people, things, ideas) are universal, and not dependent on context, such as stating 'all human beings compete with each other for success'.
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