I am something of an essentialist these days, a most unfashionable metaphysical position, on a par with smoking I suppose, explicable only by mental and/or moral defect.

Whether you’ve encountered that term before or not, the truth is that it lies at the heart of many of the debates we are having today.

“What’s that?” you ask. “Some esoteric bit of speculative metaphysics has direct practical implications for ‘the real world?”

As an academic philosopher, I get that a lot. But hear me out.

Plato believed that the application of any concept to an object would necessarily involve comparing the object to the perfect form of which the object is but a mere approximation. Particular cats imitate, but do not fully replicate, perfect cat form.

So to recognize a thing as a cat means recognizing it as cat form, more or less. The more closely it approximates cat form, the more perfect (better) a cat it is.

Aristotle is only slightly less spooky, yet we won’t get into his deviations from Plato since it’s their similarities I’d like to explore here. He too believed that cats (and other natural kinds) have distinctive natures which the particular only approximates to one degree or another. The more fully the cat realizes its nature, the better (read: healthier) it is — and not in some generalized sense, but better (healthier) as a cat. (Note: being an excellent cat does not automatically translate into being an excellent pet. One of my most disagreeable pets was an excellent pure bread Siamese.)

Why bring up any of the above?

Hovering in the background of a lot of debates is a widespread belief that one cannot go from a fact to a value, or that there exists an is/ought divide.

Arc’s Berny Belvedere brought this up in his piece on cultural relativism a while back. According to this view, no amount of information about how the world is can tell us how the world ought to be, or vice versa.

“What a thing is” Aristotle referred to as the thing’s formal cause. “What a thing ought to be,” that is, the natural end toward which it tended Aristotle referred to as the thing’s final cause. But here’s the crucial part: For natural objects a thing’s formal cause is the thing’s final cause.

So, going back to cats: what it is essentially (i.e., cat nature) is what it ought to be, that is, what it will be if it develops properly (i.e., again, cat nature). This is why kittens grow up to be cats and not, say, rosebushes. The view that things have ends towards which they naturally tend is a view call teleology. Plato and Aristotle offered teleological worldviews the primary elements of which are that things have essences (formal causes) and ends, goals, or functions toward which they naturally tend (final causes).

Both of their views — on this point, they are rather inseparable, really — have enjoyed wide support from their own day until the advent of the Modern Era. What characterized the Modern Era is largely the rejection of formal and final causality as modes of explanation in favor of an exclusively mechanistic one.

To be sure, some vestiges of teleology and essentialism hung around for quite a while, and some can even be seen today, especially in biology. (“The purpose of chlorophyll is to allow the plant to convert sunlight into usable energy”; “the purpose of the heart is to pump blood.”— that sort of thing.) Knowing the essence and function of these items is very useful, or so it would seem, especially if we are to diagnose malfunctioning organisms.

This way of talking is also common within medicine, as well. For that matter, teleological description is also evident in publications such as Car and Driver or Consumer Reports. The articles evaluate particular items relative to the kind of items that they are (e.g., “Best in Class”). Because they know what the thing is, they likewise know what it ought to be or do. And an empirical examination will reveal how well or poorly it achieves its end.

One might even point to dog shows, of the American Kennel Club variety, as another example. Here the is/ought divide disappears, but only because of some remaining use of formal and final causality, lingering essentialism and teleology.

Even within mainstream philosophy, attempts are sometimes made to rehabilitate teleological conceptions. Famously, Thomas Nagel played up its importance in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos, suggesting that any comprehensive picture of the world moving forward will likely require some kind of teleological story, “showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.”

Some deride essentialism and teleology by noting the apparent uselessness of conceiving of bunnies as striving towards bunny perfection, for example. That’s fine. I come not to praise essentialism — but neither have I come to bury it. Rather, I am merely pointing out an often overlooked relation.

The is/ought divide seems quite real within the framework of a non-teleological/anti-essentialism mechanistic worldview. But it is nonsense from within a teleological or essentialist worldview.

Ironically, many of essentialism’s foes clearly see the normative implications of this view. They point out that many individuals and groups of individuals have been marginalized and have suffered serious injuries because they were deemed abnormal, defective, or unnatural relative to supposed standards of “human nature.” This provides them with moral and political motivation to vanquish essentialism and teleology once and for all.

Now there may well be good philosophical reasons for thinking both essentialism and teleology are false. Some suggest that teleological explanations are of little value and, at best, are really mechanistic explanations in disguise. Others suggest that with the advent of Darwinian evolution and now transhumanism the idea of fixed natures, human or otherwise, is untenable.

Examining the merits of these and other criticisms I leave for another day and another venue (and more likely another writer). My aim here is only to show that it is not axiomatic to accept an unbridgeable gap between is and ought; that, once upon a time, philosophy got along quite well, and furnished its practitioners with a sufficiently respectable worldview, all without having to postulate the existence of a deep division between descriptive and normative judgments.

The very need to find a place for meaning, purpose, value, and ethics in a mechanistic universe is itself a consequence of adopting the modern worldview. It not, in a manner of speaking, necessarily the natural mode of thinking.