Is Dumbernmud refering to Essentialism as Obw has described it there, and could you, Obw, expand a bit on that?
I personally see no reason to posit an essence to anything. Why can’t there be infinite particulars? I suppose it was the use of mathematical systems, symbols, for representing things and quantities, that led the first thinkers to propose a “universal” or “essential” idea of something, in this case, the symbol and number. Since they used single variants several times over, the numbers became a priori to the quantities and things they represented.
I am reminded of Nietzsche saying that causal entities, that is subjects, are invented so the world can be calculated. I add-- these developments were not intentional or purposeful by man. The a prior structures of the world and experience, if there are any, must be a synthesis of stimulus and stimulation-- there need not be a medium, a “thing to be stimulated.” This process is honed through the act of sensibility. It is at its origins sensory…it isn’t “experience.”
Man did not invent mathematics-- but what he refers to as “mathematics” is the act of these a priori systems working.
If there is anything essential to these states of autopoiesis it would be in the dynamic created between a stimulus and a response. If this response is simply a kind of feedback, then there is no “essential” type of system save the concept of the cogito created in experience or in “having a perspective.”
A chair’s “being” is feeding back…it is as causally real as I am. Here the dilemma is this; where is consciousness happening in this organic system. If it isn’t anywhere, then it cannot effect anything…it would hover above the world without touching it. If it is somewhere…then its possible the chair is conscious like myself, since the beginning of my body and the beginning of the chair’s body is only a matter of space. But space, like consciousness, is nothing.
Anyway I say that the idea of “essence” is incompatible with the act of existing, since all events that have being are particular contingencies in the universe. They have no history or design, they are not teleological, and do not have being until they have been.
Recall Sartre’s analogy of the artisan and papercutter-- the finished shape of the paper would be the intention of the cutter, but would be independent of the cutter once it was created…it would be that shape with or without the cutter present. Man can be compared to the paper shape, yet since there is no God, no artisan to have an intention, a design in mind, the being of the paper shape would be determined by its surging into the future and would never become something determined. For to say one quality of man is determined is like saying one specific law of the universe is determined…which would in turn require another law to substantiate it, so on and so forth until to reach an intial cause, of which there cannot be.
Therefore nothing in the mind of man has or is capable of describing an “essence,” but his experience has an essential characteristic which can be considered a priori to his synthesis, his formualtion and signification of the event. The mathematics are happening because there is sensibility, but the symbols and entites which are represented are always particular events and things. Their genus is only due to their recurrance. The habitus, as Dunamis once called it I think.