What is an essential property?

(The following essay puts the essentialist’s case for essential properties within the context of an anti-essentialist critique.)

What is an essential property? Basically, if an object or person lacked a single essential property, then in actual fact it would no longer be the object or person it was before its essential property went missing, as it were. This is clearly not the same as saying that if an object came to loose an essential property then it would no longer exist. In this case the existence or non-existence of objects is not to the issue. What would happen is not a slide from existence into non-existence, but the change that occurs when a specific object becomes another object or simply ceases to be the same object it once was. It would be the loss of one or more essential property that would make this the case. The reference to an object ceasing to exist is not a reference to that object’s death, or its annihilation, or even of a slide from existence into non-existence. What happens is that the object described, known, individuated or simply referred to, ceases to exist because that known object no longer exists as the object as it was known as. Such an objectual change from existence to ceasing to exist could easily occur without any death or complete annihilation of the object concerned. For example, I could become another person by loosing one or all of my essential psychological properties. But I would not have actually died in the normal sense of that word. My body need not be completely erased, or even any part of it. What actually happens is that the person I was becomes a literally different person because, in this case, it does not continue to have my psychology and may indeed have its own. I literally cease to exist when my bodily and psychological person becomes that of a new person. I do not thereby die, but I do nonetheless cease to exist or, more exactly, I cease to exist as the person Paul Murphy. In fact, ‘I’ simply no longer exists if this word simply refers to my psychological essence. We can of course say that such a person-to-person transformation might well be seen as my death because of its extreme nature. This would show us that if my body itself remained but my psychological self did not, then this shows us that the notion of a person, if not of a self, is primarily psychological in nature. In this particular case, it is not in any way a bodily notion – at least not at first glance.

We can put some of the former argument in a slightly different way. One that uses the logical notion of possibility, without unnecessarily bringing in possible worlds. In modal terms there could not be a situation which involved that object but in which it lacked an essential property. So instead of talking of exotica like possible worlds, we can talk instead talks of possible situations. Any situation that I were in, or simply could be involved in, would not be a situation in which I still existed as Paul Murphy but had lost one or more of my essential properties. Let’s take the property being a person as being an essential property of Paul Murphy. It therefore could not possibly be the case that in any situation I could still be Paul Murphy but also be a non-person. This seems to be true at a prima facie level. My personhood does seem to be important to me being me, or Murphy being Murphy. It appears to be important, yes, but is it thereby also essential? What does the taking of personhood as essential bring - or add - to the same property simply taken as being important, or even very important? Clearly, whatever is essential is thought to be one step beyond a thing just taken as important. What is this extra something that essence brings to mere importance? I could, after all, say that I would not be me in this possible situation if I had lost one or more important property – in this case, my personhood. But in a more obvious sense, I could not be Murphy in these situations if I lost my heart or brain and had no substitutes. Such properties or body parts are certainly important to bodily existence and other things, but such things are rarely, if ever, seen as essential by any essentialist philosopher I have read. Why is personhood essential and brains merely important? Or, contrawise, why isn’t my personhood merely important and my brain essential? Reasons for these oppositions between the important and the essential certainly do not spring immediately to mind. Perhaps I wouldn’t exist at other possible worlds without my brain if I had no substitutions or proxies. I couldn’t be Murphy at these possible worlds at which my counterparts are deemed brainless because not even my counterparts could stay alive, and therefore be possible Murphys, if they had no brain or any such proxies for this important, but apparently unessential, organ. There could be a sense that my body still had ‘being’ but no ‘existence’. Therefore in that sense my counterpart could still be real at possible worlds. However, this in itself would be a tacit assumption that my body, or parts of it, is now deemed to be essential by the essentialist. So in order to save the essentialist from the threat of my important, but non-essential, brain being essentialised, as it were, he now posits that my body must now be essential, instead of the more common properties used by essentialists (like the previous personhood or, in the old sense, my rationality). Indeed bodily essence itself goes against much that has been said about the nature of ‘personal identity’, not just the essence of personal identity for a given or all humans before taken as persons.

We can now show the kind of essential property the essentialist falls back on when stuck to find another - or enough - essential properties for a given object or human being. That property is the one of self-identity. I call this not only a fake or bogus essential property, but a fake or bogus property of any kind – essential, contingent or simply indifferent. Alternatively we can say that the property is simply not very interesting, rather than bogus or even just logically problematic. The actual explanation of self-identity clearly shows us how ridiculous it actually is. We can say that Tony Blair could not exist in the actual or in a possible situation or world if he did not have the property of self-identity. Or, more precisely, the essential property that is Tony Blair being identical to himself - or Tony Blair being identical to Tony Blair! The very way this argument is put shows us its logical silliness. It is said that Tony Blair couldn’t exist while not being the same thing as himself. Of course he wouldn’t exist while not being the same thing as himself - he could not be Tony Blair in the first place. In that sense, we haven’t imagined a possible situation in which non-self-identity could hold. And if such a situation of non-identity can neither be imagined nor actualised then it is not a genuine possible - let alone an essential - property. It is not even the case in this supposedly possible situation of an object becoming another object, or a given object ceasing to exist, because there are no references to either an object-change or to an object ceasing to exist as the object it once was. Again, Tony Blair indeed could not exist while not being himself. He would therefore need to be taken as a possible person that is no longer ‘the same as’ Tony Blair. Perhaps, in that case, Tony Blair turned into a new person. And that new person is transformed, if you like, out of the ‘material’ but not the ‘substance’ or ‘form’ [to use Aquinas’s terms, see Kenny, 1980], could show us that he is clearly not identical to Tony Blair. But such possible scenarios are not even touched upon by the essentialist’s explanation and example of the pseudo-property self-identity. Not only is Tony Blair not placed in a possible scenario in this example, he is not even a transformed person or near-counterpart placed in a possible situation. The possible situation is not actually either imagined or expressed in order to show us that self-identity is essential. We are not, either, shown a picture or given an expression of a possible situation in which, again, there is a material but non-psychological Aquinian or Aristotelian transformation from one person into another. We are simply given a seemingly grammatical statement that is hopelessly illogical. It shows no semblance of an acceptable ‘logical form’ in a Wittgensteinian or any other sense. We are fooled by its correct grammar and also because it is not, admittedly, nonsensical in the surreal sense, but it is indeed ‘sense-less’ or ‘without sense’ in the Tractatus sense. If it has no empirical sense; no logical sense; no metaphysical sense; then what kind of sense does the example actually have? As we have said, it can be said to have an exclusively grammatical sense. But all that ultimately means is that the names, words, predicates, connectives, etc. contained within it are simply put in their correct grammatical place. The names, predicates, etc. within this example have none of the elements most ordinary or philosophical statements or expressions have. It doesn’t really have any meaning of any description, any references, any truth-conditions, any genuine extensions for the predicates, and it doesn’t have a recognised or acceptable logical nature of any kind. It doesn’t even manage to fulfil the basic minimum that we can say that logical tautologies manage to attain. Indeed the property self-identity, and therefore the statements which uses or refers to the pseudo-property, is far from being philosophically acceptable.

References and Further Reading

Chisholm, R. M – (1976) ‘Identity through Time’, in his Person and Object, Open Court

Kenny, A – (1980) Aquinas, Oxford

Plantinga, A – (1974) ‘Modalities: Basic Concepts and Distinctions’, in his The Nature of Necessity, Oxford University Press

Quine, W. V. O – (1963) From a Logical Point of View, 2^nd edition, New York: Harper and Row