What the thing is
Essentialism is the view that objects have attributes necessary to their identity.
Aristotle applied the term essence to what things in a category have in common and cannot lack while remaining members of it. His example is that rationality is the essence of man: without it, a creature cannot be a man. The contrary view, non-essentialism, denies the need to posit any such essence.
Where it came from
It originated in early Western thought—with Plato’s forms and Aristotle’s substance—in the Parmenides dialogue and Categories.
For Plato, the ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle, which cannot physically be made, though the circles we draw clearly share an idea in common. He held that such ideas are eternal and that we understand material things by relating them to their forms. Plato also has Socrates question the notion in the Parmenides: if every beautiful thing partakes of an essence of beauty, the same logic requires separate essences for hair, mud and dirt.
What it gets right
It captures real cognitive patterns: humans do group things by perceived core features. It grounded pre-Darwinian biology and formal logic.
Psychological essentialism is a claim about how cognition represents things, not about the world. In a 1991 study, Kathryn Kremer and Susan Gelman found that children aged four to seven believed underlying essences predicted observable behaviour.
What it gets wrong
It reifies social identities as natural kinds. It treats contingent historical categories—like race or gender—as fixed, intrinsic, and necessary.
Bertrand Russell called Aristotle’s concept of essence “hopelessly muddled”, arguing that it confused the properties of language with the properties of the world. The biological story is also contested. Historians including Mary P. Winsor, Ron Amundson and Staffan Müller-Wille have argued that Linnaeus and the Ideal Morphologists were far from essentialists, and that the “essentialism story” in biology comes from conflating what philosophers wrote with how biologists used the word species.
On race, many early twentieth-century anthropologists taught that race was an entirely biological phenomenon core to a person’s behaviour and identity, which, coupled with a belief that cultural groups existed along racial lines, formed the basis of what is now called scientific racism. After the Nazi eugenics program and the rise of anti-colonial movements, racial essentialism lost widespread popularity.
Why it matters now
It underpins contested claims in machine learning, gender theory, and race science—where ‘essences’ are still invoked without scrutiny.
Pelillo argues that pattern recognition, which tries to extract essential attributes from data, presupposes that objects have stable, identifiable essences. Pelillo and Scantamburlo note that when data is highly dimensional or features are poorly defined, the essentialist framework strains, and they advocate approaches that use relational and contextual information instead.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you care how categories shape power, identity, and classification in science, law, or AI.
