William T. Vollmann by Christopher K. Coffman

Author:Christopher K. Coffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2012-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

He is not, I maintain, making a call for a return to the old essentialism, but rather a call for movement toward a new universalism.

Essentialism and Universalism

Reading Rising Up and Rising Down, one gets the sense that Vollmann treads dangerously close to essentialist claims, given his penchant for crossing cultures and millennia to formulate his examples and ethical maxims, yet he likewise makes many claims that sound relativist in nature, despite his explicit dismissal of moral relativism. What Vollmann is after in many instances where he seems to contradict himself, I would argue, is the distinction between essentialism and universalism. (In the next section of this essay, I will discuss Vollmann’s relationship with this theoretical terminology. For now, I will limit myself to discussing the terms themselves.) The terms essentialism and universalism are often conflated to mean the same thing and used interchangeably, but it is more than mere philosophical hairsplitting to insist on separating these two terms and their attendant conceptual bundles.

I would like to distinguish between group essentialism and global essentialism. Group essentialism claims that the members of some subcategory of humanity, such as women or Chinese and so on, share certain essential traits common to the entire group. Global essentialism claims that there are certain traits common to all of humanity, regardless of race, gender, class, education, etc. Put most simply, essentialism of either sort maintains that certain immutable traits obtain among the portion of the human species for which it makes its claims—whether that be a single group within the human species or the entire human species. And for both sorts of essentialism, these traits obtain immutably across time. Essentialist notions of, for example, Europeans do not allow for change across generations, and essentialist notions of what it means to be a human likewise do not allow for change across generations. For global essentialism, this means that human traits across all cultures and all centuries remain—at their fundament, in their essence—the same; whereas for group essentialism, this means that all members of a certain nationality or ethnicity have always and will always have the same traits. So how does the new universalism differ from essentialism?

The old Enlightenment conceptualization of universalism is largely co-extensive with essentialism, so much so that one rarely bothers to distinguish between the terms. And the new universalism (hereafter merely “universalism”) certainly bears similarities to the old universalism. It claims that certain facts of human behavior and certain rules of morality cross national borders, cultural distinctions, and language differences. There are various differences between essentialism and universalism one could point to, but the category I suggest we put pressure on is that of temporality. Essentialism insists that whatever normative standard of behavior or fact about humanity (or some group within humanity) is from its very essence true and therefore cannot change. Universalism today attempts to delineate facts that obtain for the entire population of humanity (or across an entire society) but only at a given time or during a limited window of time;

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