Existence Precedes Essence

To be is not, as Bishop Berkeley thought, to be perceived; to be is to do the perceiving.

People are animals by nature; there is no getting around that fact. Humans are mammals. Humans need to eat, breathe, defecate and reproduce, like other animals do. The traits and needs of animal existence, however, do not determine our essence. Aristotle thought that our essence as humans was to be rational creatures, to reason. Nice as it is to think so, there is too much evidence that there are many people who are anything but rational.

The attempt to give us an essence has plagued history. Religion is perhaps the greatest inventor of essences, creating classes of people, castes, racist and ethnic ideas about identity,  and inborn traits of various people. Nationalism, greed, economics, and pseudo-science have complicated the ideas of essence. From religious texts like the Bible, proclaiming that some people are chosen by god, to eugenics and genetic studies of ethnicity, those in positions of authority have attempted to define those who were not. 

The creating of essences also includes gender as well as race. Patriarchal societies have defined women as inferior and dependent on men. Similarly, heterosexuals in power have degraded men who desire men. In all cases the people in power have defined those not in power with some sort of inferior essence that suited their needs and perpetuated their power.

Such misguided concepts of essence have made the lives of many of us not only painful in our attempts to conform, but also have made us despise ourselves for our negative traits. Shame, self disgust, our own sense of self and worth are all diminished by the dominant paragon of humanity the rulers hand to us.  By our very nature, we are told, we are inferior and our essence, therefore, includes the need to submit and serve the more perfect humans above us. 

Never have we needed to resist, to overthrow, to eliminate essence theory more than now. The existentialists have shown us the way. Simone de Beauvoir's profound study of what it means to be a woman in The Second Sex is a brilliant repudiation of the essentialist dogma. Her life-long lover and philosophical partner, Jean Paul Sartre,  spelled out clearly how freedom to become the essence we choose, rather than some essence another gives us, is the basis of the value of our lives, the meaning of ethics and humanism. 

Contemporary evolutionary biology confirms the existentialist insight. Our DNA and the historical make-up of our brains (as well as our minds) are self directed by our experience. We are the agents of our evolutionary development rather than passive to some ancestral need for aggression or past relationships of sex and ethnicity. The essence of womanhood is not motherhood. Each woman chooses this path or not freely. The essence of manhood is not to be aggressive or warlike, to be a father, to be a hunter or a farmer, to have and to hold, whether women or property. There is no essence of manhood. There are no genetic chains of molecules binding us. We choose what we become; for our actions, there is no one else to blame. 

Personally, I feel no allegiance to my race, to my country, to any religious point of view, and certainly not to any ancestors I have. As I said at the start of this short essay, I see myself as an animal with the needs of an animal that are based on survival. As an intelligent animal, reason, education, contemplation and sharing ideas are important to my existence. So, likewise, is my sense of harmony with nature and others. When it comes to ethics, I agree with both Kant and Mill. I think all people could live with the ethical life I have chosen to lead: limited possessions, love, population control, respect for nature, empathy for fellow humans. I agree that the greatest pleasure for the greatest number is a worthy goal of society. That includes respect for diversity of many sorts-- racial, sexual, religious, artistic, and so on. With population control and environmental care, there is no need for aggression, much less war. Reason and freedom lead in that direction. Sadly, however, the essence of humans does not exist, we are not beings who reason. We are condemned to be free, as Sartre put it, free to destroy the planet and ourselves out of ignorance, superstition, and self-absortion. 

--Jameson

Simone de Beauvoir