THE SINGLE REAL ESSENCE
by James Danaher
Of course this fallacy does not apply only to diseases. Diseases do, however, provide effective examples of this fallacious tendency to suppose that a concept (like a disease) which human beings construct out of their own judgment would have a single cause, rather than multiple ones. Indeed, we find it very natural to believe that although a cold may be identified because of observable symptoms, those symptoms are the result of an unobserved cause which is singularly responsible for those observable symptoms. The same is true of all maladies from cancer to bipolar disorders. This supposition of a single cause behind our labelled symptoms is quite clearly a fallacy. It is very reasonable to suppose that the symptoms we group and label a cold could be caused by several different internal conditions. Perhaps we have never isolated the cause of cancer because there is no cause . That is, there is no single cause, but a multitude of causes.
The same is true of bipolar disorders or schizophrenia. We make the assumption that a single internal condition or cause lies behind such disorders, but why do we think the responsible internal condition is singular? The symptoms that we combine to make up schizophrenia or "mid-life crisis" could very easily be produced by a variety of causes, yet we somehow find ourselves always seeking out a single cause and essence.
I recently heard a cancer doctor on TV claim that just what we label 'breast cancer' is, in truth, probably well more than a hundred different diseases. What he was implying was that there could be an enormous amount of causes for something that we have traditionally thought to have a single cause. Yet our tendency is to imagine wrongly that there must be a single cause for the symptoms we label as a specific disease.
This fallacy, perhaps like all fallacies, originates in our desire to make quick sense of the world and provide an understanding to our experience. Still, I believe the mechanical philosophy that became so dominant with the Enlightenment has reinforced and encouraged this fallacy. With the corpuscular philosophy and its mechanical model for understanding the world, the essence of a thing was thought to be its cause. This idea was not new and had been around since the time of Plato and Aristotle, but with the corpuscular philosophy, and its mechanical view of the universe, it took on a new form.
For Plato and Aristotle an essence had been both what causes a thing to be, and what causes a thing to be of a specific kind or species. For Plato the essence of a tree was the other-worldly form or eidos. This other-worldly form was the cause of the tree in that the trees of this world were mere shadows of that essential tree in the other world, but that essence or eidos was also what all trees shared and thus made them all members of the same species. Similarly, with Aristotle the essential form of a thing was what caused it both to be, and to be of the specific kind that it was.
The modern era, however, and the advent of a mechanical philosophy of nature, began to change the way we thought about 'essence'. According to corpuscularians, like Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and John Locke (just to mention a few), what we observe as the sense qualities of material objects are the product of tiny insensible corpuscles. Since the arrangement and motion of these insensible corpuscles produced what we observe on the level of everyday experience, such corpuscular structures were thought to be the real essence or cause of a thing.
Since, however, these corpuscles were insensible and unknown to the seventeenth century, they could not serve to denominate species. They may be what causes a thing to be, and even to be the kind of thing it is, but from the perspective of our denomination of species such unknown corpuscular structures were of no use. So in spite of this new belief in the corpuscular structures that underlie and cause the material world to be as it is, our understanding of the world still had to be denominated according to ideas of kinds or species that were very much like those of Plato and Aristotle . That is, they were ideas or concepts based upon what we see on the level of everyday experience rather than what exists on the microscopic level .
Thus, with this new corpuscular philosophy, which would eventually evolve into modern atomic chemistry, we are presented with the new idea that what causes a thing to be and what causes it to be of a specific kind (at least from our perspective) are two different things. According to John Locke, since these microscopic structures, which are the real essence of a thing, are unknown, the essences that we use to group things into species are quite different from those internal microscopic structures that are the cause of a thing. In Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke explains these two distinctive notions of the idea of essence:
Firstly, Essence may be taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is, what it is. And thus the real internal , but generally in Substances, unknown Constitution of Things, whereon their discoverable Qualities depend, may be called their Essence. This is the proper original signification of the Word, as is evident from the formation of it; Essentia: in its primary notation signifying properly Being. And in this sense it is still used, when we speak of the Essence of particular things, without giving them any Name.
Secondly, the Learning and Disputes of the Schools
having been much busied about Genus and Species, the Word Essence has almost
lost its primary signification; and instead of the real Constitution of
Things, has been almost wholly applied to the artificial Constitution of
Genus and Species. Tis true, there is ordinarily supposed a real Constitution
of the sorts of Things; and tis past doubt, there must be some real Constitution,
on which any Collection of simple Ideas co-existing, must depend. But it
being evident, that Things are ranked under Names into sorts or Species,
only as they agree to certain abstract Ideas, to which we have annexed
those Names, the Essence of each Genus, or Sort, comes to be nothing but
that abstract Idea.... And this we shall find to be that, which the Word
Essence imports, in its most familiar use. These two sorts of Essences,
I suppose, may not unfitly be termed, the one the Real, the other the Nominal
Essence. (III. iii. 15)
Thus, with material substances, the 'nominal essence' which gives us a basis for our idea of species is not only different from the real essence, or internal constitution of a thing, but is, as Locke says above, a mere 'abstract idea'. Of course, Locke believed that the real essence or internal structure did create the sense qualities that we observe and from which we form our abstract idea of the nominal essence.
Today we have inherited an evolved version of this philosophy and maintain that the real essence and ultimate constitution of things, like gold or water, is its internal atomic or molecular structure. We believe that the sense qualities we observe and make up the abstract ideas of gold (i.e., it being malleable, metallic, and gold in colour) are the product of an internal structure . Thus what is truly essential about gold is not a certain composite of sense qualities, but the internal or atomic structure that is the cause of those sense qualities.
This modern atomic philosophy gives us a model for understanding our world. Such a philosophy gives substance to the fallacy and brings us to believe that since the 'nominal essence' is singular, and the real essence or microscopic internal structure is the cause of the sense qualities that make up the 'nominal essence', it must be singular as well.
Of course, we do suppose a single real essence rather than a plurality of internal structures which alternatively, and in no regular order, cause the qualities that make up the nominal essence. One reason we do so is the supposed mechanical nature of the physical universe. If the way we think about the universe follows the model of the machine, such a model does suggest a single cause. With machines the movement of a gear is not sometimes caused by one thing and other times by another thing unless that is the regular pattern built into the machine. A machine's movements are regular and fixed. So if the world is mechanical it is quite natural to suppose a regular and fixed essence as the cause of what we observe on the 'nominal' level.
Another reason to suppose a single essence rather than multiple essences is the analogies that came out of the mechanical view of the Enlightenment. Because in the modern view things like water and gold have an established single real essence or cause, we suppose that all things must have a single real essence and cause. But the only reason gold or water have a single essence is because we have attached the name 'gold' or 'water' to that essence or internal atomic or molecular structure, and not because our experience tells us that any concept we create must have a single essence or cause. Once we have established and agreed upon the real essence or internal structure of things like gold or water, and attached the name to it, there obviously can be only one real essence in such cases. Similarly when we do know the internal cause of a disease, we most often attach the name to that cause, and we do not give the label 'X' to a disease unless we detect its known cause to be present. The label gold is only attached to an internal atomic structure and not to the outward appearance of the thing being metallic, malleable, and gold in colour.
In cases where the real essence or cause is not known, the situation is quite different. Obviously, in such cases, since we cannot attach the name to the unknown real essence or cause, we need to attach the name of the disease to the outward symptoms. There is nothing wrong with this, but the fallacy occurs when we reason that even when the causes of the symptoms are unknown, we falsely suppose that there is a single cause or essence behind the phenomenon.
At first it might seem that there is nothing wrong with such reasoning. Indeed, David Hume sets forth something that looks very much like this as one of his general rules by which we can know when one thing is in fact the cause of something. He says:
The same cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause. This principle we derive from experience, and is the source of most of our philosophical reasonings . (A Treatise on Human Nature)
The problem with this general rule is that when it is applied to an effect that is a man-made concept (such as our ideas of diseases), and the cause is unknown, we are not experiencing the same effect arising from the same cause, but imagining that what is going on here is similar to what we have experienced with cause and effect in other places. But what we are calling experience is no more than the habit that we formed out of our desire to make sense of experience. We imagine a one-to-one relationship between cause and effect for the sake of our understanding and then we conceptualise the world that way.
Even if we did have some sort of assurance that there was a one-to-one relationship within nature between cause and effect, when we begin with an effect, of our own creation, like a disease, how do we know that the name of the disease is any more than a concept that we form as a manmade social convention, passed on by a language community?
It would seem that what ultimately lies behind this fallacy is the quickness of the mind to form analogies and follow models in order to form habits. This is what is behind all reasoning, both sound and fallacious, and the difference is not always obvious. In the past it was particularly difficult to see that it was fallacious to reason backward from a concept to a single real essence because of the many analogies that the mechanical view of the Enlightenment provided.
Of course, there have been those who have resisted this tendency. In the seventeenth century, Leibniz stood in opposition to the 'mechanical view' and its idea of singular causes.
There is an infinity of figures and movements, past and present, which contribute to the efficient cause of my presently writing this. And there is an infinity of minute inclinations and dispositions of my soul, which contribute to the final cause of my writing. (Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays)
Thus, according to Leibniz, it is in vain that we seek a single cause. But the views of Leibniz and others who opposed the views of the mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment did not prevail. The mechanical view won the day, and with it the idea of a single real essence became a somewhat legitimate part of our thinking.
Today, however, we see that many of the foundations of Enlightenment thinking were ill-conceived. As we stand poised to enter a post-modern age, we understand that the world is not so simply understood as the mechanical philosophy of the Enlightenment imagined. Clearly there is need for a model other than that of the machine and its idea of singular causes.
One possible model is that of genealogy which Michel Foucault has brought to our attention in his celebrated article, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. Unlike the model of the machine, genealogy points to a multitude of causes in so far as my physical characteristics can be attributed to a host of different ancestors rather than a single cause. If genealogy, rather than the machine, was our model for our thinking about causes, we would not be so quick to suppose a single essence or cause behind the concepts to which we attach words but would anticipate a multiplicity of ancestors or causes.
Consider the concept of race. Once we form the abstract idea of a race, and attach the name 'Negro' or 'Caucasian' to it, we suppose a single cause just as we had done in the case of diseases. We imagine that there must be some phenotypical or genotypical characteristic that establishes or causes someone to be of one race rather than another. We imagine that because we are under the sway of the mechanical model. Yet a genealogical model is much more appropriate for the explanation of the physical characteristics from which we form our abstract idea of a race. Of course, if the cause of us being of one race or another does not have a single cause but is as numerous as our ancestors, it would be impossible to say exactly what one's race was and the concept of race would be lost.
The same seems to be the case with medicine and the identification of diseases. If we suppose that a disease was genealogical and had multiple causes rather than a single cause after the mechanical model, it would make it very difficult to preserve the concept of a particular disease. Imagine that mid-life crisis had multiple causes. Would the concept retain any meaning? If you choose to solve the problem by subdividing the concept according to the different causes as they are discovered, we fall ever deeper into the fallacy of the single essence.
If we attempt to avoid the fallacy, however, it is difficult to see how concepts like those of race or disease would retain meaning amid such multiple causes. It would seem that our concept of meaning is somehow linked to the idea of a single cause. But it is an error to think that what seems necessary to our understanding is a condition of the world itself.
If we are truly to enter into a postmodern age one of the primary challenges will be to discover models that will allow us to retain meaningful concepts and at the same time avoid both the mechanical view and its central fallacy of the single real essence.