The Essence of Whiteness
Daniel Boscaljon
I: The Nature of Essence
The term essence contains the essence of the term essential, or, at the very least, it provides an essential example of the difficulties that the term illuminates.[1] Essence enters English from the French, based on a “fictitious present participle” created out of the Latin esse (meaning “to be”) as a way to create a cognate of the Greek “οὐσία,” which means being. The present participle is added to a verb in order to suggest progressive or continuous action and thus creates a sense of its temporality; in English, this is generally generated by adding -ing. The omnipresent activity “To Make” became something more individually determinable: Making. The addition of the present participle facilitated a movement away from thinking of presence in an expansive or deep way, toward presence as discontinuous. The movement from essence to essential allowed for a sense of individuation to emerge out from a sense of mass participation and togetherness.
The original search for what is essential was undertaken with ambivalence charged by larger issues surrounding individuation. The European movement from the Middle Ages into the modern period occurred with a change in the spiritual, political, and economic world. The world was, to use Charles Taylor’s term, disembedded from its anchoring context in a Christian God embodied in a King, an authority that trickled down into fiefdoms where people were more or less identical to their family and occupation. Erich Fromm provides an in-depth analysis of Europe during this period, in which each of the forms of assumed belonging were thrown into question. Rather than being born and baptized into a Catholic world where the goodness and beauty of God pervaded all—controlled by an all too human church—the shift to Protestantism ushered in a world in which individuals worked out their salvation with fear and trembling. Rather than a political world dominated overall by an authority figure who was largely indifferent and unknowable, leaving smaller communities to manage for themselves, the movement into democracy created an opportunity for individuals to wield political power. The shift to a market economy—eventually capitalism—gave a chance for individuals to seek their fortune, but in an abstract way that lacked guarantees.
The first sense of the term essential remains anchored in the primary sense of unity and belonging, the notion of being as a participation in the greater whole.
1: What is essential is that which is connected to Being itself—this is the sense of essential that is most closely aligned to Esse. What is essential from this direction is the quality of existing at all, the option to “be,” rather than “not to be.”[2]
The joy of this definition is that it points toward the truth of vitality—the sense of being at all. But this definition seems oddly ill-fitting in a world bent on individuation, where understanding oneself through difference becomes more important than sensing one’s self through similarities. This sense of essence, related to esse and vitality, is impersonal and thus unhelpful. It doesn’t actually provide any information about what makes one thing (that exists) different than another thing (that exists).
A second anxiety connected with the shift from essence to essential is its gesture to the problem of death. Traditional Christian consolations held that the soul—one’s essence—was immortal and would thus be united with god even after the material anchor disappeared. Nonetheless, the shifting worldview in the Middle Ages—especially its three-part removal from assumed belonging into ways that individuals needed to be responsible for themselves—opened the space of one’s essential self for contemplation in a new way. This also made important a notion of a singular essence that inhered within a thing (either individual or group/class) then became a special property that was other than vitality as essential in itself:
2: Some spoke of the possibility of a “fifth essence,” or quintessential element that would contribute to each thing a sense of singularity—this would provide an anchor point of singular identity that participated in this fixed universe of being (the spiritual or immaterial entity), that would allow for less essential qualities to change without violating the integrity of a given thing.
This definition provided a sense of essential that differed from basic essence. Vitality and the connectedness to life became a given that could be forgotten. This also centralized and focused the question of essential into the self (or the group one primarily identified with), rather than allowing the essential to reflect one’s relationship to the whole.
The emphasis on a more personal essence was so impactful that the original term, which related to esse and vitality, became discussed in terms of “substance,” allowing only an archaic term of essence as “the reality underlying phenomena; absolute being,” or “the foundation of being.” This sense of essence was not part of what was believed to be essential. The question of what was essential inspired theologians and other scientists to search for a thing’s “intrinsic nature” to explore “that internal constitution, on which all sensible properties depend.” This relation of the visible to an underlying structure made “internal constitution” a determinable quality within a thing. This was more useful than the notion of essence as general vitality because it inhered within the material property, rather than in an abstracted supernatural realm of “being” in general. This made for more of a “personal” kind of substance, or essence, than Esse itself.
Importantly, this new sense of what was essential could work within the context of Christianity, and capitalism—but in a problematic way. Christianity was concerned about the preservation of one’s essential soul instead of the participation in substance of reality, and thus focused on questions of predestination and damnation. This led to an increased awareness of guilt and shame and an amplification of the need to live a “pure” life that would serve as external signs (to a community) of one’s potential toward a heavenly afterlife. Capitalism took the joy out of a sense of labor, increasing a sense of competition with those who were like you, and encouraging you to live an ascetic life where the rewards for your work were converted into capital for future upgrades. At the same time, successful workers could enjoy access to increasing amounts of luxury goods as consolation for long hours. This set up a system designed to create desires for what was not present—more goods, an easier life, more distractions, a space in heaven.
These shared, in outlook and in practice, a divorce from a sense of common participation. It discounted the shared substance of resources and opportunities and focused only on one’s aims as essential to one’s success. Problematically, both market forces and the Protestant God were not necessarily forces working toward your success. The threat of economic failure in this life and hell in the next life created an intense sense of personal anxiety. This was compounded by the fact that one was no longer “with” one’s fellows nearby, who had become competitors. Without an appreciation for esse, vitality, and substance reality became experienced as zero sum, such that one person’s triumph seemed to come at everyone else’s expense. European men—those who had the freedom to pursue work outside of the home—became increasingly isolated. The more isolated they became by severing relations, becoming disconnected and disengaged, allowed a greater sense of success: those who were unmarried were free to work longer hours, to put more money toward future business expansion rather than toward children, and to enjoy more “casual comforts” in private as consolation for loneliness and anxiety. The basic underlying sense of connection and vitality, the substance for success, was disregarded.
The intensification of male European isolation led to a new understanding of what was essential—a property that remained when all else was eliminated. Essential differs from essence by being an intensification of the reality it suggests: it is an adjective that describes a thing or a property of a thing. The OED thus lists it as referencing “that is such by essence, or in the absolute or highest sense,” but still tied to “having existence, real actual. Also, identical with what now exists.” The process of intensification gives way to an emphasis on division, the specific difference that makes a thing what it is, rather than it being something else. The essential is something relational: “belonging to a thing by virtue of its essence…indispensably enter into its composition,” but contributes something to the whole by the process of its being, making it “absolutely necessary, indispensably requisite.” Musicians once spoke of “essential chords” as part of the essential harmony proper most proper to a musical key, containing “essential sharps and flats.” This question of participation still allowed for a sense of the essential to carry in it a sense of its vitality and relationships—it was something discernable element that remained ingredient and valuable due to its connection to a larger whole.
This intensified sense of the essential, however, led to its most commercially viable form. If substance was a sense of the essential that was deemed inessential, then extract became the kind of essential that was most essential. This definition of essential looked at an “extract obtained by distillation…and containing its characteristic properties in a concentrated form.” The extract looked at what was essential as a property that could be taken out of the context in which it developed, and could become a commodity to be exchanged. The notion of the extract allowed for the properties of the substance to become disembedded from the whole that had allowed it to flourish initially.
[1] All definitions discussed in this section are extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary.
[2] During the late sixteenth century, English users thought of essence in a now obsolete way: “viewed as a fact or as a property possessed by something,” It was also thought of in terms of is, “an existence, entity” in a way that is currently “restricted to spiritual or immaterial entities,” the sort of backdrop for which “essential” functions as a contrasting term. An essence is omnipresent or beyond time.