AIN'T ESSENTIALIZIN'

A week or so back I came across a mention of this blog, with the note that the poster couldn't agree with my positions because of what he termed my "essentialism." This raised some interesting questions with me inasmuch as I don't think I've ever given anyone reason to deem me an essentialist, though there are those who would think that the slightest positive mention of, say, Carl Jung instantly puts the mentioner on the fast train to Platoville.

Here's Encarta's definition of essentialism:

"the doctrine that things have an essence or ideal nature that is independent of and prior to their existence"

This doesn't seem to have much relevance to any critique that I've written here or elsewhere. I suppose it would be true if I ever had said something along the lines of, "Jack Kirby is a mythic artist because he made copious reference to myth-figures in his comics." But what I said here clearly shows that the mere mention of a given myth-figure doesn't automatically confer some mysterious "essence" upon the work in question. I did a quick scan of my blog-articles and didn't find any essay in which I had taken such an essentializing posture, or one that someone might credibly mistake for such a posture.

Merriam-Webster's definition of the word might put one a little closer to the source of the error:

"the practice of regarding something (as a presumed human trait) as having innate existence or universal validity rather than as being a social, ideological, or intellectual construct"

Now, that hits a little closer to the mark, for I have taken issue with reductionists and naive positivists on many occasions. However, in pointing out how this or that creation has mythic qualities scorned by the reductionists, I haven't claimed that said qualities are either "innate" or "universal." The simplest way to describe this difference of opinion is that where a reductionist like Steven Grant wants to regard, say, "the Incredible Hulk" as a purely synchronic product, while I'm more likely to emphasize its status as part of a diachronic process.

To emphasize diachronic factors, of course, is not to speak of essence, but only the fact of repeated usages of a given motif, as Jung does here:

"Myth is not fiction; it consists of facts that are continually repeated and observed over and over again."

Jung, of course, is rarely given credit for the more phenomenological sides of his system. To naive positivists, all that matters is that he made a shaky claim for the existence of racial memories-- his version of Freud's Oedipal "smoking gun"-- and that said claim has never been scientifically validated. Therefore Jung is a flawed empiricist, or even a Platonist, rather than being (as this essay shows in detail) a good Kantian.

Both Jung and Campbell have been of great help to me in making my own attempt to reunite the Kantian dichotomies, as stated by this earlier-quoted summarization of Cassirer:

"In the end, it is only such a never to be fully completed process of historical-philosophical interpretation of symbolic meanings that confers objectivity on both the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften — and thereby reunites the two distinct sides of Kant's original synthesis."

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cassirer/

I've also recently encountered one messboard-poster who fervently believed that if you didn't agree with his Empiricist screed, then you must be (horrors) a Rationalist. This naturally overlooks the fact that thinkers like Kant, Schopenhauer and Cassirer were (albeit in different ways) trying to forge a bridge that might join the best aspects of Rationalist (i.e. Plato) and Empiricist thought into a coherent system. None of them tried to assert the fundamental existence of a "mysterious essence" or an "unmoved mover" with which to support their systems.

And neither do I.