If you’re going to get rid of essentialism, you’re going to have take on bigger fish than creationists. Because the problem of essentialism is not that it objectifies everything, it’s that it refuses to understand the difference between language and ideas.
The worst essentialists are called structuralists or logocentrics. This kind of thinking is dominant in Western Philosophy and it infects the minds of people you probably respect, progressives like Noam Chomsky and reactionaries like Christopher Hitchens.
Essentialism is like capitalism. It’s in the air we breath and the water we drink. It’s so accepted and conventional that people will assume your a fool for describing or criticizing it.
And Plato would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling kids and their cladistics. Essentialism has been hugely damaging and is the foundation of most types of Creationism. https://newdiscourses.com/2021/02/essentialism-logical-fallacy-plaguing-us-since-plato/
So, I gave this a cursory read.
The discussion of essentialism mostly makes sense, if a few weird red flags scattered throughout. But I was curious at what point it would be turned into, as promised in the intro, that essentialism is a fundamental flaw of “wokeism”, and apparently specifically Critical Race Theory.
And uh. That connection was poorly made, in my humble opinion. It’s a lot of philosophical history and bluster to then just sort of… miss the point and mischaracterize the quotes being put on the table.
My apologies, I would be more specific and pointed in my critique here, but I’m on mobile and I usually need a better setup (e.g. on PC) to lay out these thoughts with more precision.
Ah that what happens when you Google an article which explanes some historical connection to Plato etc but it then uses that to make a completely unrelated point ie woke is bad. I should have read the whole thing before linking it. Looking at the other articles on the site it is indeed mostly right wing propaganda.
Your link isn’t working properly.
It’s a cool read though - I’m still reading it, but so far it did a great job showing that concepts are fuzzy and inside our heads, not those well-defined abstractions in some external realm.
