#AntiEssentialism
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rortyquotes.bsky.social
I have also portrayed pragmatism as a generalized form of antiessentialism—as an attempt to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic features of things.
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
I have also portrayed pragmatism as a generalized form of antiessentialism—as an attempt to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic features of things. By thinking of everything as relational through and through, pragmatists attempt to get rid of the contrast between reality and appearance—between the way things are in themselves and the way they appear to us, or the way we represent them, or the way we talk about them. In particular, they insist that we can only talk about things under more or less optional descriptions of them, descriptions dictated by our own human needs, and that this is not a spiritual or epistemological disaster…They substitute for this traditional question the practical question: are our ways of describing things, or relating them to other things so as to cope with them better by making them fulfill our needs more adequately, as good as possible? Or can we do better? Can our future be made better than our present?
June 24, 2026 at 2:00 PM
meshugenist.bsky.social
it's been like this for ages unfortunately. cafab 4chan is pretty accurate. it makes me sad given the transfeminist/transfeminist-adjacent communist theorists on tumblr have been absolutely absolutely top tier for ages as well. one of the few places where hardcore antiessentialism and an
January 17, 2025 at 11:17 AM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
By thinking of everything as relational through and through, pragmatists attempt to get rid of the contrast between reality and appearance.
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
I have also portrayed pragmatism as a generalized form of antiessentialism—as an attempt to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic features of things. By thinking of everything as relational through and through, pragmatists attempt to get rid of the contrast between reality and appearance—between the way things are in themselves and the way they appear to us, or the way we represent them, or the way we talk about them. In particular, they insist that we can only talk about things under more or less optional descriptions of them, descriptions dictated by our own human needs, and that this is not a spiritual or epistemological disaster…They substitute for this traditional question the practical question: are our ways of describing things, or relating them to other things so as to cope with them better by making them fulfill our needs more adequately, as good as possible? Or can we do better? Can our future be made better than our present?
June 25, 2026 at 2:01 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Pragmatists insist that we can only talk about things under more or less optional descriptions of them, descriptions dictated by our own human needs, and that this is not a spiritual or epistemological disaster.
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
I have also portrayed pragmatism as a generalized form of antiessentialism—as an attempt to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic features of things. By thinking of everything as relational through and through, pragmatists attempt to get rid of the contrast between reality and appearance—between the way things are in themselves and the way they appear to us, or the way we represent them, or the way we talk about them. In particular, they insist that we can only talk about things under more or less optional descriptions of them, descriptions dictated by our own human needs, and that this is not a spiritual or epistemological disaster…They substitute for this traditional question the practical question: are our ways of describing things, or relating them to other things so as to cope with them better by making them fulfill our needs more adequately, as good as possible? Or can we do better? Can our future be made better than our present?
June 26, 2026 at 2:06 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
The project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project.
PasAA p.95
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
For us anti-essentialists this temptation to think that we have eluded our human finitude by seeing ourselves under the aspect of elementary particles is just one more attempt to create a divinity—a god of power—and then to claim a share in the divine life. The trouble with all such attempts is that the need to be God is just one more human need. Or, to put the point less invidiously, the project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project. Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian Gelassenheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, from this angle, just so many variations on a single project—the project of escaping from time and chance.
May 4, 2026 at 2:04 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Convinced that there is no subtle human essence which philosophy might grasp, we do not try to replace superficiality with depth, nor to rise above the particular in order to grasp the universal.
PasAA p.141
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
Pragmatists suggest that we simply give up the philosophical search for commonality. They think that moral progress might be accelerated if we focused instead on our ability to make the particular little things that divide us seem unimportant—not by comparing them with the one big thing that unites us but by comparing them with other little things. We pragmatists think of moral progress as more like sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt, than like getting a clearer vision of something true and deep. Here as elsewhere, we prefer metaphors of breadth and extent to metaphors of height and depth. Convinced that there is no subtle human essence which philosophy might grasp, we do not try to replace superficiality with depth, nor to rise above the particular in order to grasp the universal.
August 1, 2026 at 2:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian Gelassenheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, from this angle, just so many variations on a single project—the project of escaping from time and chance.
PasAA p.95
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
For us anti-essentialists this temptation to think that we have eluded our human finitude by seeing ourselves under the aspect of elementary particles is just one more attempt to create a divinity—a god of power—and then to claim a share in the divine life. The trouble with all such attempts is that the need to be God is just one more human need. Or, to put the point less invidiously, the project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project. Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian Gelassenheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, from this angle, just so many variations on a single project—the project of escaping from time and chance.
May 5, 2026 at 2:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
The anti-essentialist has no doubt that there were trees & stars long before there were statements about trees & stars. But the fact of antecedent existence is of no use in giving sense to the question “What are trees and stars apart from our statements about them?”
PasAA p.93
#Antiessentialism
The anti-essentialist has no doubt that there were trees and stars long before there were statements about trees and stars. But the fact of antecedent existence is of no use in giving sense to the question “What are trees and stars apart from their relations to other things—apart from our statements about them?” Nor is it of any help in giving sense to the skeptic’s claim that trees and stars have non-relational, intrinsic essences which may, alas, be beyond our ken. If that claim is to have a clear meaning, we have to be able to say something more about what is beyond our ken, what we are deprived of. Otherwise, we are stuck with Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself. From the pan-relationalist’s point of view the Kantian lament that we are forever trapped behind the veil of subjectivity is merely the pointless, because tautologous, claim that something we defined as being beyond our knowledge is, alas, beyond our knowledge.
April 28, 2026 at 2:04 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
The trouble with all such attempts to create a divinity and then to claim a share in the divine life is that the need to be God is just one more human need.
PasAA p.94
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
For us anti-essentialists this temptation to think that we have eluded our human finitude by seeing ourselves under the aspect of elementary particles is just one more attempt to create a divinity—a god of power—and then to claim a share in the divine life. The trouble with all such attempts is that the need to be God is just one more human need. Or, to put the point less invidiously, the project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project. Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian Gelassenheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, from this angle, just so many variations on a single project—the project of escaping from time and chance.
May 3, 2026 at 2:01 PM
rekmarks.com
In any event, I find the pamphlet exciting because I believe its conclusions inescapably follow from a rejection of Platonic idealism or, more generally, the recognition that our ideas are merely modeling reality, and usually poorly at that. Call this "antiessentialism" (ignoring its baggage).
December 1, 2024 at 6:59 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature— one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed—is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.21
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
These historians have made the point I mentioned earlier: The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature—one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed—is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project. Only if we have some such picture in mind, some picture of the universe as either itself a person or as created by a person, can we make sense of the idea that the world has an "intrinsic nature."
October 25, 2025 at 2:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
To the essentialist philosophers, and to many natural scientists who otherwise do not concern themselves with philosophy, this pragmatic view of physics as the handmaiden of technology and of the poetic imagination is offensive.
PasAA p.94
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
To us anti-essentialists, descriptions of objects in terms of elementary particles are useful in many different ways—as many ways as particle physics can contribute either to technological advances or imaginative astrophysical redescriptions of the universe as a whole. But that sort of utility is their only virtue. To the essentialist philosophers, and to many natural scientists who otherwise do not concern themselves with philosophy, this pragmatic view of physics as the handmaiden of technology and of the poetic imagination is offensive. These people share a sense that particle physics…is an example of a kind of truth which pragmatism does not recognize. This kind of truth is not a matter of the utility of a description for a human purpose, but rather of a transcendence of the merely human. Particle physics has, so to speak, become the last refuge of the Greek sense of wonder—the sense of an encounter with the almost Wholly Other.
May 1, 2026 at 2:01 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
The last line of defense for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our language and our needs and our purposes to something splendidly non-human and non-relational.
PasAA p.93
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
Confronted with this impasse, the essentialist is tempted to turn for help to natural science. He is tempted to say that a sentence like “It is made up of the following sorts of elementary particles arranged in the following ways” gets us inside the object as it truly is. The last line of defense for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our language and our needs and our purposes to something splendidly non-human and non-relational.
April 30, 2026 at 2:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
After reading Freud we shall see neither Bloom's strong poet nor Kant's dutiful fulfiller of universal obligations as paradigmatic. For Freud himself eschewed the very idea of a paradigm human being.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.35
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
But Freud gives us a way of looking at human beings which helps us evade the choice. After reading Freud we shall see neither Bloom's strong poet nor Kant's dutiful fulfiller of universal obligations as paradigmatic. For Freud himself eschewed the very idea of a paradigm human being. He does not see humanity as a natural kind with an intrinsic nature, an intrinsic set of powers to be developed or left undeveloped. By breaking with both Kant's residual Platonism and Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, he lets us see both Nietzsche's superman and Kant's common moral consciousness as exemplifying two out of many forms of adaptation, two out of many strategies for coping with the contingencies of one's upbringing, of coming to terms with a blind impress. There is much to be said for both. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Decent people are often rather dull. Great wits are sure to madness near allied.
November 1, 2025 at 2:01 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
For us anti-essentialists this temptation to think that we have eluded our human finitude by seeing ourselves under the aspect of elementary particles is just one more attempt to create a divinity—a god of power—and then to claim a share in the divine life.
PasAA p.94
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
For us anti-essentialists this temptation to think that we have eluded our human finitude by seeing ourselves under the aspect of elementary particles is just one more attempt to create a divinity—a god of power—and then to claim a share in the divine life. The trouble with all such attempts is that the need to be God is just one more human need. Or, to put the point less invidiously, the project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project. Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian Gelassenheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, from this angle, just so many variations on a single project—the project of escaping from time and chance.
May 2, 2026 at 2:01 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Pragmatists suggest that we simply give up the philosophical search for commonality.
PasAA p.141
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
Pragmatists suggest that we simply give up the philosophical search for commonality. They think that moral progress might be accelerated if we focused instead on our ability to make the particular little things that divide us seem unimportant—not by comparing them with the one big thing that unites us but by comparing them with other little things. We pragmatists think of moral progress as more like sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt, than like getting a clearer vision of something true and deep. Here as elsewhere, we prefer metaphors of breadth and extent to metaphors of height and depth. Convinced that there is no subtle human essence which philosophy might grasp, we do not try to replace superficiality with depth, nor to rise above the particular in order to grasp the universal.
July 30, 2026 at 2:03 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
We pragmatists think of moral progress as more like sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt, than like getting a clearer vision of something true and deep.
PasAA p.141
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
Pragmatists suggest that we simply give up the philosophical search for commonality. They think that moral progress might be accelerated if we focused instead on our ability to make the particular little things that divide us seem unimportant—not by comparing them with the one big thing that unites us but by comparing them with other little things. We pragmatists think of moral progress as more like sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt, than like getting a clearer vision of something true and deep. Here as elsewhere, we prefer metaphors of breadth and extent to metaphors of height and depth. Convinced that there is no subtle human essence which philosophy might grasp, we do not try to replace superficiality with depth, nor to rise above the particular in order to grasp the universal.
July 31, 2026 at 2:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called "humanity."
CIS p.20
#Antiessentialism
But in a Nietzschean view, one which drops the reality-appearance distinction, to change how we talk is to change what, for our own purposes, we are. To say, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, is to say that we serve no higher purposes. The Nietzschean substitution of self-creation for discovery substitutes a picture of the hungry generations treading each other down for a picture of humanity approaching closer and closer to the light. A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called "humanity." A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.
October 22, 2025 at 2:07 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Pragmatists ask the practical question: are our ways of describing things, or relating them to other things so as to cope with them better by making them fulfill our needs more adequately, as good as possible? Or can we do better?
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
I have also portrayed pragmatism as a generalized form of antiessentialism—as an attempt to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic features of things. By thinking of everything as relational through and through, pragmatists attempt to get rid of the contrast between reality and appearance—between the way things are in themselves and the way they appear to us, or the way we represent them, or the way we talk about them. In particular, they insist that we can only talk about things under more or less optional descriptions of them, descriptions dictated by our own human needs, and that this is not a spiritual or epistemological disaster…They substitute for this traditional question the practical question: are our ways of describing things, or relating them to other things so as to cope with them better by making them fulfill our needs more adequately, as good as possible? Or can we do better? Can our future be made better than our present?
June 27, 2026 at 2:01 PM
philosop-her.bsky.social
#CriticalRaceTheory #CRT #SocialJusticeEducation #Intersectionality #AntiEssentialism #RaceAndPower #EducationalResource #TeachersPayTeachers #InclusiveEducation #EquityInEducation #UnderstandingRacism #ClassroomResource #TeachingTools #Educators #SocialStudies #HistoryTeachers
April 3, 2025 at 12:38 AM
rekmarks.com
In my reading, Bonnardel's antinaturalism (as represented by the earlier quote) follows from antiessentialism. I believe this idea is extremely important, and that it is a precondition for our total liberation. It does not deny an objective reality nor its real constraints...
December 1, 2024 at 6:59 PM
cyberpragma.bsky.social
My first characterization of pragmatism is that it is simply antiessentialism applied to notions like "truth," "knowledge," "language," "morality," and similar objects of philosophical theorizing. (1/3)

— Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 163
May 17, 2026 at 1:11 PM