Ever since Plato, who was pretty much the beginning of it in the West, philosophy has been concerned with two basic ideas in one form or another: dualism, which is sometimes expressed as appearance vs reality or the spiritual vs the material, and essentialism, which comes from the word “essence,” which in turn comes from Latin esse “to be.” So, essentialism means what things are in essence, what their inherent nature is. As you can see, there’s some overlap in the two terms because if the aspect of dualism in which you’re interested is the dualism of appearance vs reality, you’re essentially looking at essence vs appearance—what things are versus what they seem to be.
Sometimes the idea of essence gets expressed (for people) in terms of “what does it mean to be human?” which often gets turned into a quest for “how should we, as humans, best live our lives?” Sometimes a combination of dualism and essence gets expressed as a conflict, or at least an opposition, between the world in which we live and the timeless world of God or the gods. Christianity explicitly makes the dualism of “this world” versus “the next world” a foundation of its dogma. Sometimes the ideas are expressed as “How do we know what we think we know?” or “What’s the correspondence between what we perceive through our senses—what we see, hear, and feel—and the real world”—that part of life that seems inherently outside and beyond us. That conundrum gets expressed, among other ways, in the old story about the Chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly, and when he woke wondered how he could be sure he was not really a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
During the Enlightenment, dualism was often expressed as a contest between religious answers to human questions—that is, answers by definition revealed to us by non-human agency from completely outside the world of humanity—and scientific answers to human questions—that is, answers developed by people living, thinking, and working in the world of people. Ever since that time, there’s been a tendency in Western society to push back the frontiers of the area susceptible to scientific—that is, human—investigation and to limit correspondingly the areas that can only be explained by religious—that is, non-human—revelations.
To this increased secularization of the world, there have been periodic push-backs by religion, especially fundamentalist sects of religions, which see their traditional values threatened by new ways of doing things or of looking at the world.
Up until about 1900 in science and the second world war in politics and society at large, this “Enlightenment project” to rationalize and explain the world in human terms made broad progress in Western Europe and the United States. But then the development of so-called “modern physics” by Einstein and others with its principles of uncertainty in the way fundamental aspects of the universe work started undercutting the great certainties proposed by Galileo and Newton. As science and medicine accomplished more and more and thus raised higher expectations, their shortcomings (their inability to produce safe nuclear energy, for instance, or a cure for cancer) started becoming more apparent.
By the years after the second world war, many people in war-ravaged Europe started turning to individual philosophies like existentialism in an effort to salvage a sense of control for individuals that societies and governments seemed to have lost during and after the war. That skepticism about others was later coming to America and came in a rather different form; but ultimately, as technology proliferated and broke down many traditional social groups even while it emphasized other, more fluid ones, a great deal of the West entered what has come to be called the postmodern era. It’s a time when old certainties seem to be breaking down under the impact of the internet, the globalized interdependence of economies. and increased immigration—all of which challenge traditional and isolated ways of looking at things. Some people embrace the changes as empowering; many fight against them as threatening traditional ways of doing things.
Does philosophy have anything to say about these changes? Many people think not, stating that the flux from a “globalized” world and a 24/7 web existence for the affluent young is inherently chaotic and that if we reject the traditional certainties of our grandparents’ way of living and thinking, the alternative is inherently chaos or anarchy.
Richard Rorty, a contemporary philosopher, looks at things differently, however. Working in the American tradition of John Dewey, C. S. Peirce, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rorty says that we need to stop looking at old dualisms like appearance vs reality, or religious vs secular and see the only “dualism” that matters: the one between the present and the future. To Rorty, as to Dewey, there is no essence of human nature that we have to try to define and limit in order to mark off what it means to be human, to separate us both from the animal and the divine. Instead, he believes, as do I, that humanity is an open-ended project (a view similar to that of some of the existentialists’ ), a project that our choices and our lives help shape and develop. The only inherent tension then is not the one between animals and human or the “real” world and the timeless world outside of humanity, but the one between the present and the future. And that project–the future–is in our power to shape.
Instead of looking at language and words as a veil that hides the “real world” from the world we talk about, Rorty says that language is simply a set of tools that helps us make relationships between things (including each other). From this perspective, we don’t have to ask a lot of unanswerable questions such as, what is a person “really” like, which we can’t know because we can’t get inside someone else’s thoughts. Instead, we can ask pragmatic questions such as, what’s the best way to deal with other people? And most important, how can we make the future better than the present? We don’t need to worry about whether some theory or explanation or way of viewing the world or human behavior is “true” or not—we merely need to ask whether it is useful.
One big question pondered by both religion and philosophy at various times is the question of free will. Rorty would say that it doesn’t make sense to ask whether free will really exists—what matters is whether we are better often acting as if it does or as if it doesn’t. Since believing that we can make free choices gives us incentive to make the world a better place, that’s what we should believe.
Rather than going back to the Greeks’ idea that there is an otherworldly or divine truth hidden from us by the “apparent” world in which we find ourselves (think “Allegory of the Cave”), the pragmatic postmodernist can spend time trying to discover the best sorts of relationships (with things, with nature, and with other people) for dealing with what we perceive to be around us.
The function of philosophy according to Dewey and Rorty, then, is to mediate between old ways of speaking/thinking and new ways of speaking and thinking. Its job is to clarify our ideas about social and moral strife, not to try to rediscover “absolute” or “eternal” principles behind the mutability of everyday life.
Probably the seismic shift in our view of the world and ourselves started with Darwin—who showed us how the natural world changes—and Freud—who showed us how little we actually know about ourselves. Each of these ideas caused those familiar with them to replace static and hence comforting ideas of “the natural world” and “ourselves” with changing, unknown—and perhaps unknowable—ones. The increasing ubiquity of the internet has simply confirmed our sense—perhaps our fear—that things are changing in ways we do not understand and in ways completely outside our control.
In the hundred fifty odd years since Darwin of learning about the changing world and our unseen selves, we have spent progressively less time philosophically trying to see ourselves from outside time and history—that is, from a divine or non-human perspective—and spent more time trying to work within a human context to create a better world for ourselves, a more tolerant, democratic society.
Indeed, some of us have started seeing philosophy as an aid to creating ourselves rather than “knowing” ourselves. And as Carol Dweck has pointed out in her book “Mindsets,” when you see yourself as an improvable work in progress, you are generally happier and more successful than when you see yourself as a fixed individual of a specific character and nature.