Liquid Essence

May 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Category, Essence, Liquid |

The human tendency to allocate all experience to classical (non-prototypical) categories results in an essentialism in which the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a category are metaphorically (or metanymically) applied to an intangible essences.

An extended property of the urge to categorise is that we also tend to group categories into larger categories whose members possess more general properties, the ultimate category being the category of everything under which all other categories are subsumed, a summum genus which subsumes all other categories. An implication of this is that this ultimate category must itself have an essential condition for its own membership. This condition has been variously named as being, dasein, Tao, etc. However, such an abstract concept as being is outside the grasp of embodied cognition and can only be understood by the application of a metaphor. It will be demonstrated here that the dominant metaphor which is used in the understanding of the ultimate essence is that of the liquid. Thales was right, in its essence, all is water.