Title: Defending Person-Level Rationality: A Brief Metaphysical Jurisprudence Response to Existentialist and Phenomenological Critiques of Essentialism

 

Introduction

In the philosophical search for legal foundations, few questions are as fundamental as this: What is the human being? Metaphysical Jurisprudence (MJ) answers that question by rooting legal meaning in the ontological reality of person-level rationality (PLR). This commitment to a realist, essentialist view of the human person places MJ in close alignment with classical ontology and the empirical sciences. Together, they form a common front against various forms of legal positivism, postmodern skepticism, and anthropological reductionism. However, MJ faces an array of criticisms from 20th-century existentialist and phenomenological thinkers, who reject essentialism in the name of freedom, historicity, and lived experience. This essay argues that these critiques do not dismantle, rather reinforce, a properly formulated account of PLR. By engaging the major objections to essentialism, MJ demonstrates its superior coherence, its fidelity to lived reality, and its indispensability for grounding law and moral dignity in reality of what exists. 

The Role of Essentialism in Metaphysical Jurisprudence

Essentialism, in the MJ framework, refers to the claim that the human person possesses a stable, intelligible nature defined primarily by the capacity for rational thought, moral deliberation, and volitional freedom. These capacities comprise the structure of person-level rationality (PLR), which grounds legal responsibility, dignity, and normativity. This view draws on the classical ontology of Aristotle and Aquinas, particularly their hylomorphic account of the human being as a unified composite of body and rational soul.

This essentialist view is not threatened but strengthened by contemporary empirical science. Neuroscience confirms the centrality of reason and language to human function; developmental psychology affirms moral cognition and intersubjective awareness; biology and anthropology underscore the uniqueness of homo sapiens in tool use, abstraction, and norm generation. Properly construed, these findings confirm rather than refute that humans are not merely organisms but rational substances. 

The Vacuity of Existentialist and Phenomenological Anthropology

The existentialist and phenomenological approaches to understanding what it means to be human are, at their core, metaphysically incoherent, methodologically untethered, and empirically vacuous. (I make modest claims).  Their foundational claim, that the human being cannot be described by any essential structure, but only through freedom, historicity, and “lived experience” has no grounding in observable reality, much less an intelligible metaphysical frame. These schools of thought routinely confuse ambiguity with insight. 

Heidegger’s Dasein, Sartre’s disembodied freedom, and Merleau-Ponty’s body-as-subject, all rest on assertion without demonstration or evidence. Their rejection of essentialism is not the fruit of discovery but the product of ideological rebellion: a post-Christian, post-metaphysical fever that mistakes the refusal to define man for profundity. They elevate freedom over reason, contingency over form, and flux over being, not because these are truer, but because they are fashionable within late-modern alienation. 

These thinkers are grossly overrated. Heidegger’s convoluted jargon cloaks vacuity in pseudo-etymology. Sartre’s moralism contradicts his own metaphysics. De Beauvoir’s existential feminism rests on a simplistic and polemical caricature of nature. Their works are immune to empirical correction because they were never empirical to begin with. Unlike biology, cognitive science, or developmental psychology, which converge on a recognizably rational, relational, and purposive animal, these thinkers offer a romanticized fiction of man as self-creating abyss.

In short: their anthropology is not science, not metaphysics, and not even coherent philosophy. It is ideology masquerading as insight, constructed to liberate the human subject from any nature, essence, or telos, in order to make the person pliable to will, power, and desire. Metaphysical Jurisprudence, in alliance with classical ontology and the empirical sciences, restores the truth that freedom without form is nihilism, and law without essence is tyranny. These thinkers should not be refuted they should be retired.

Existentialist and Phenomenological Critiques of Essentialism

A. Sartre: "Existence Precedes Essence" In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre famously declares that for human beings, “existence precedes essence.” He argues that there is no given human nature; each person must define themselves through their choices. Any claim to an essence, he suggests, reduces the person to a thing and violates their radical freedom.

B. Heidegger: "The Who is Not the What" In Being and Time, Heidegger denies that Dasein (human being) is a substance with a fixed nature. Dasein is a being for whom its own being is a question a dynamic unfolding structured by care, time, and death. Traditional metaphysics, Heidegger claims, turns the person into a "what" rather than allowing for the existential openness of the "who."

C. Merleau-Ponty: Embodiment vs. Abstraction In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty attacks the dualist and abstract conceptions of the human person. The body is not an object owned by a subject but is the subject itself. Classical essentialism, in his view, cannot accommodate the full richness of embodied experience.

D. Heidegger: Thrownness and Facticity Heidegger also emphasizes that human beings are "thrown" into a world they did not choose, defined by history, language, and cultural context. Essentialist views are criticized for treating humans as isolated essences, ignoring this radical embeddedness.

E. de Beauvoir: The Self as Becoming In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir extends existentialist ideas to gender, arguing that woman “is not born, but becomes.” Identity, she insists, is a project, not a static nature. Essentialist claims about gender or personhood are seen as oppressive.

F. Husserl and Heidegger: Against the View from Nowhere Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger argue that traditional metaphysics adopts a detached, objectivist view—what Thomas Nagel later called “the view from nowhere.” Essentialism allegedly ignores the lifeworld: the lived, first-person structures of experience.

MJ Responses: Reconstructing Essentialism from the Ground Up

A. Sartre Refuted: Essence Grounds Freedom Sartre’s fear that essence negates freedom is unfounded. A properly articulated essence defined by rationality, deliberation, and moral responsibility grounds freedom. Without PLRs, there is no coherent concept of free agency. Freedom requires a nature capable of choice.

B. Heidegger and the Substance of Dasein Heidegger’s insights into care, temporality, and being-toward-death are more derivative than perceptive relative to the concept of personhood. His “being-toward-death” does not eliminate essence; it presuppose it. Only a unified, rational agent can confront its mortality, care about its projects, and understand its own historicity.

C. Embodiment Within Hylomorphism Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize embodiment, but classical ontology already affirms this. Aristotle and Aquinas insist that the rational soul is the form of the body. There is no “ghost in the machine” in hylomorphic realism, there is one unified substance.

D. Contextuality and Rational Structure Heidegger’s notion of thrownness rightly points to the embeddedness of human life. But MJ agrees: rational beings always exist within contexts. What it rejects is the idea that contextuality negates ontological structure. Only PLR-beings can interpret and respond to their thrown conditions.

E. Becoming Within Being: Identity and Normativity De Beauvoir’s critique reveals the danger of confusing essence with social stereotype. MJ insists on a clear distinction: essence refers to natural capacities (e.g., rationality), not contingent roles. Essence protects, rather than undermines, moral dignity and equality.

F. Against the Objectivist Fallacy Phenomenology’s critique of abstraction is often valid—but not decisive. MJ does not impose an external view on the person; it explicates what is intrinsically present in the structure of human existence. The first-person perspective only makes sense if grounded in a being capable of intentionality and normativity.

The Payoff: Why MJ Outperforms Its Critics

Metaphysical Jurisprudence outperforms its existentialist, phenomenological, positivist, and constructivist critics not because it is more fashionable, more flexible, or more therapeutic, but because it is true. It offers a metaphysically accurate, ontologically grounded, and empirically confirmed account of what the human person is. MJ does not depend on ideological improvisation or speculative abstraction; it begins from the reality of person-level rationality (PLR) as an objective structure of being. 

This fidelity to reality, uniting classical ontology with contemporary empirical insight, gives MJ its salubrious and enduring strength. It affirms:

• That moral agency and responsibility are not projections or constructions, but features of a rational nature.
• That human rights and legal dignity rest on something deeper than custom or consensus: the irreducible fact of rational personhood.
• That freedom is not an illusion, nor a mere negation, but a structured capacity grounded in essence.
• That law, if it is to be just, must conform to the truth of the beings over whom it claims authority.

In a world disoriented by nominalism, relativism, and anthropological confusion, MJ restores what is most needed: a jurisprudence in accord with reality.

The existential and phenomenological critiques sharpen, but ultimately fail to overturn, the metaphysical realism at the core of MJ. Rather than discarding essentialism, they invite its renewal in light of lived experience.

Conclusion

The rejection of essentialism by existentialist and phenomenological thinkers was often a response to crude or static views of human nature. But Metaphysical Jurisprudence does not rely on such caricatures. It articulates a nuanced and normatively powerful conception of person-level rationality, one that integrates freedom, embodiment, historicity, and moral worth. In defending essentialism rightly understood, MJ establishes a deeper framework. Law, if it is to serve justice, must be grounded in the truth about persons. And that truth begins with essence.