Essentialism helped me to see that my increasing stress was due to the fact that I was straddling two different career paths simultaneously instead of prioritizing one over the other.
I take inspiration from the remarkable management thinker Peter Drucker's response (quoted in
Essentialism) to the very accomplished psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who had asked him to be interviewed for his book on creativity.
Locke's
essentialism leads to reductionism, the ontology of contemporary science: 'What constitutes a thing is an inner constitution of parts that is independent of any other thing, and from which the properties (qualities and powers) that we experience empirically flow' (p.
Essentialism and organicism also serve as clumsy categories for classifying contemporary scholars.
This stance includes both feminist
essentialism and feminist care ethics.
Psychological
essentialism is the belief that natural kinds and social categories possess (often unseen) defining qualities.
They explore the history of the concept, that concept's relationship to Western imperialism, theory in the context of science and technology studies, social science theory, theory as hope for something beyond
essentialism, the crises of theory and dilemmas of sociology, political theory vs.
Charlotte Witt's treatise, The Metaphysics of Gender, argues that gender
essentialism is true, given specific definitions of "gender" and "
essentialism".