fail to have being, not what each object essentially is.^90 If a property characterizes an
object only if it instantiates that property, then we must disallow existence as one of
the properties that can appear in the essences of objects.^91 (Otherwise the existent
round square would exist, necessarily!) So in this framework, a distinction between
extra-nuclear and nuclear properties might be motivated.^92
9.6 Can Strict Essence Be Reduced in Some
Way to Being?The notion of reduction is a particularly slippery one, and I certainly don’t intend
here to spend a lot of time trying to clarify the different things that philosophers have
or could mean by“reduction.”One notion of reduction is very strong: to successfully
reduce, e.g., strict essence to something else is to provide a recipe for systematically
replacing any sentence in which any essentialist notion, such as“it is part ofx’s strict
essence thatP,”occurs with a necessarily equivalent sentence in which no such
essentialist notion occurs. The latter sentences must be antecedently better under-
stood than the former sentences in order for the reduction to result in clarification of
the notion of strict essence. And if one is motivated by a worry that the notion of
strict essence is in some way metaphysically suspicious, then the latter sentences
must also not invoke any notions that are at least equally as metaphysically suspi-
cious as the notion of strict essence. However, one mightfind the notion of strict
essence to be neither unclear nor metaphysically suspicious, and yet be interested in
whether there is a reduction in this sense simply because one’s theory would be tidier
if there were.
In the previous section, we examined the question of whether the essence of a
being could consist simply in its mode of being. Here’s an interesting connection
between that question and the question we are considering now. If the essence of
everybeing were simply its mode of being, there’d really be no need to have a separate
notion of essence in addition to the notion of a mode of being, since the former
would be straightforwardly reducible to the latter.^93 In fact, rather than say that the
strict essence of a thing is its mode of existence, we could define the constitutive
essence of a thing as the articulation of its mode of being. Those who are inclined to
(^90) See Perszyk (1993: 98–100) for discussion of how Meinong might make sense of an object’s seemingly
possessing properties merely contingently. 91
See Berto (2013: 14–16, 116–19) for discussion. Many Meinongians deny that the round square
instantiatesroundness, but hold rather that it stands in some other relation to roundness. Zalta (1983), for
example, claims that the round square encodes but does not instantiate roundness; see also Berto (2013:
12892 – 32).
93 See Parsons (1980) for a development of a theory making use of this distinction.
Perhaps we can also allow a being by courtesy to have an essence, provided that the most natural
mode of being it enjoys has a privilegedarticulationin the sense of section 9.5.