Excellent and very subtle follow-up — and you’re right to catch the tension here.

At first glance, the way Spinoza talks about “essence” (essentia) and degrees of being might sound essentialist, as if each thing had a fixed, predetermined nature. But Spinoza’s metaphysics actually redefines essence in a way that undoes classical essentialism.

Let’s unpack that carefully.

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1. What “Essence” Means for Spinoza

In Ethics II, Def. 2 and Ethics III, Prop. 7, Spinoza defines essence not as a static “whatness,” but as a dynamic power to act — a conatus:

“Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” (E3P6)

So, the essence of a thing = its power of self-maintenance and activity.
It’s not a form imposed by God or nature; it’s a tendency, a vector of self-expression within the whole of substance.

That means essence is immanent, not transcendent. It doesn’t exist apart from the being’s actual power.

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2. Essentialism vs. Spinoza’s Immanentism

Classical Essentialism	Spinoza’s View
Essence is a fixed form determining what a thing is	Essence is the degree and mode of a thing’s power to act
Distinction between essence and existence	Essence = existence expressed as a power
Hierarchical ontology (some beings are “higher”)	Flat ontology — all beings are modes of one substance
Individual natures are fixed	Individuals are dynamic, relational, changing expressions

So, Spinoza isn’t an essentialist in the Aristotelian or Cartesian sense.
He preserves the word “essence” but empties it of transcendence, making it a measure of immanent activity.

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3. Why He Still Speaks of “Weaker” and “Stronger” Essences

When Spinoza says that some beings have a weaker essence or a greater perfection, he isn’t invoking fixed natures — he’s describing differences in the degree of activity.

• A stone has less power of acting than a human.

• A joyful, rational person has more power (and thus a “fuller essence”) than one dominated by passive affects.

These are quantitative and dynamic distinctions, not qualitative essences.
They express a continuum of the same reality — God/Nature’s infinite power.

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4. What This Implies

So:

• Spinoza rejects essentialism in the classical metaphysical sense.

• But he retains the language of essence to describe the immanent power of being — how much reality a thing embodies.

• The difference between “weak” and “strong” essences is not about kind, but about degree of activity, autonomy, and self-expression.

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Summary

Spinoza is not an essentialist, but an immanent realist about essence:
essence = the living intensity of a being’s existence, not a timeless definition of what it is.

In short, he transforms essence from a form into a force.

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Would you like me to show how Spinoza’s anti-essentialism contrasts with Aristotle’s and Descartes’ essentialism in a comparative chart (with text quotes from the Ethics, Metaphysics, and Meditations)?

In place of forced conversion to Christianity or to Islam, Cusa imagined a conversation among representatives of many faiths who, with help from the Logos, might come to agree that though there are many religious or cultural rites the world over (among them Christianity and Islam), there is only one infinite and thus ineffable God. Cusa articulates what could be Christendom’s earliest doctrine of inclusivism. To the Logos, he says: “rivalry [among faiths] exists for the sake of You, whom alone they revere in everything that all seem to worship.”24 While Cusa’s mystical inclusivism may fall short of the radical pluralism I’d prefer, in its time and place at the sunrise of Modernity, it, too, was radical. Perhaps even today, the two biggest religions Christianity and Islam still have much to learn from an inclusivist theology like Cusa’s, since both remain for the most part dead set on exclusivist interpretations of the truth of their own doctrines. Keller’s hope is that a relational pluralism might help exclusivists begin to feel what they share with other faiths: namely, a love of God—Cusa’s “Infinite Complication”—which enfolds all the world’s religious expressions.

Keller goes on to enter into dialogue with Enrique Dussel’s thesis on the origins of Modernity, not in northern Germany with Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation (as Hegel argued), but in the Spanish conquest of the Americas. From Dussel’s perspective, Descartes’ ego cogito was preceded and sustained by an ego conquiro: “if the ego cogito doubts the world around him, the ego conquiro doubts the very humanity of conquered others.”25

In our hypermodern age, the crusader complex has taken the form of global capitalism, “in which oil —and therefore Islam—figures prominently.”26 Keller quotes political analyst Thomas Frank, who in his book One Market Under God argued that sometime in the 90s people came to believe that “there is something natural, something divine, something inherently democratic about markets.”27 What a strange litany of adjectives! The global capitalist market is entirely natural, a consequence of biological evolution, and yet at the same time it is also divine, the only source of human salvation? And “democratic”? Keller admits that capitalism’s “flexible interactivity captures something of the ontological process of entanglement,” and that attempted solutions to our planetary problems via top-down State imposition are doomed to failure.28 And yet, contemporary neoliberal capitalism does not advertise the pluriverse’s participatory matrix of “each-in-each”; rather, it asserts an ontology of isolable individuals counted “ego-by-ego,” pushing a new ruse of separability that stays ‘connected.’”29

Segall (Excepted from: 'Catherine Keller: The Cosmopolitical Entanglements of Process-Relational Theology')

 

 https://gsnv.substack.com/p/gsnv-considers-the-ontogenetic-alternative

1) Key claims/topics in Jackson’s talk (timestamp-anchored)

• Metaphysics is unavoidable in science; the job is to surface it and critique it rather than pretend it isn’t there. (0:10–0:28)

• Core proposal: an “ontogenetic method” (via Simondon) as an alternative to mathematical Platonism, substantialism, and hylomorphism—aimed at making genesis/individuation the primary explanatory target. (1:00–1:40; 6:35–10:34; 57:04–58:14)

• Anti-substantialist starting point: the “first principle” can’t be a determinate being-with-properties; the primal must be indefinite/boundaryless (apeiron) and operational. (2:46–3:54)

• Peircean twist: even “Platonic forms” (and time/logic) are evolutionary in origin; chance/spontaneity is fundamental. Also, “law as postulate” is not self-justifying. (4:00–5:12)

• Whitehead/Deleuze line: universals don’t explain—they must be explained (the abstract must be derived from the concrete). (5:12–6:12)

• Simondon’s critique: both substantialism (stuff-first) and hylomorphism (form imposed on matter) secretly assume a principle of individuation prior to individuation, which is question-begging. Individuation is an event/operation in a reality “richer than the individual.” (6:35–10:34)

• Platonism needs careful definition; don’t “end up in the math department” when solving morphogenesis. Math is a powerful mediator/diagrammatic method, but it can conceal as much as it reveals. (10:39–12:20)

• Reclaim Plato’s khōra: beyond “forms,” Plato had the receptacle/matrix (devoid of character) with wandering causes, non-equilibrium motion, and endogenous coarse-graining—i.e., not pure form-first. Jackson calls this “choric materialism.” (20:17–24:06)

• Hylomorphism as technical (artisanal) paradigm: good for bricks/computers, not for life. The mold “limits and stabilizes” rather than imposes; prepared matter + materialized form + energy + technique are missing from the simplistic form/matter split. (24:18–28:52)

• Critique of physicalism via “effective theory”: effective theories coarse-grain reality into predefined state spaces; they explain variation via invariants but externalize the genesis of form into initial conditions/laws chosen by a theorizer. Laplace’s demon is the apotheosis of this artisanal, closure-hungry picture. (29:49–37:31)

• Alterity is ineliminable: any “closed” model of total evolution must assume external parameters it cannot generate; there is no unitary, complete effective theory of the cosmos or creative evolution. (41:47–43:55)

• Why platonism keeps returning: formal systems always point beyond themselves (Gödel/incompleteness); nesting systems yields infinite regress; “the outside” remains. So we should treat underdetermination as generativity, not failure. (44:07–47:36)

• Darwin reframed: Darwin’s deep move is variation-first (overproduction of difference) prior to form/species/selection; modern genetic determinism is portrayed as a regression to hylomorphism (genes as form; bodies as matter). (50:32–53:26)

• Vital vs physical individuation (Simondon): physical individuation “resolves” quickly; living systems defer completion (neoteny), maintaining a charge of the pre-individual—hence multiple teloi and ongoing openness. (53:37–54:19)

• Individuation as elicitation: organisms have constitutive internal variation; encounters with external alterity elicit/select subsets; “life is individuation.” (55:08–56:25)

• Closing example (snake): perception fails when constrained by preformed representations; the “here-and-now” event (haecceity/exity) matters, and hylomorphic perception-talk can obstruct real encounter. (1:07:18–1:08:22)

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2) Similarities + problems from a GSNV lens

Where Jackson is strongly GSNV-aligned

• Genesis over givens: GSNV’s insistence that “laws/structures” are stabilized outcomes of deeper processes matches his “universals explain nothing; explain the abstract from the concrete.” (5:12–6:12; 58:14–59:30)

• Anti-reification of spaces: His warning about predefined state spaces and “ending up in the math department” lines up with a GSNV caution: spaces are useful, but only if tethered to how systems enact them. (10:39–12:20; 34:09–35:21)

• Open-ended individuation: His “life defers complete individuation” resonates with GSNV’s stratified becoming: higher-level agency is continuously negotiated, not fixed. (53:37–54:19; 55:08–56:25)

• Alterity as ontologically real: His non-closure argument overlaps with GSNV’s view that stable regularities are negotiated, local, and contingent in wider possibility—never “God’s-eye complete.” (41:47–43:55)

The biggest GSNV pushbacks (useful “problems,” not gotchas)

1. Variation isn’t enough; you need an evaluative manifold

   • Jackson makes indefiniteness/variation foundational (apeiron, chance, overproduction). GSNV agrees—but adds: what makes variation become directed is an evaluative gradient array (value/valence/selectivity) that is not merely “external selection” and not merely stochasticity.

   • In other words: GSNV wants the normative dimension (better/worse; viable/non-viable; satisfying/unsatisfying) to be explicit, not smuggled in as “selection.”

2. Fields + structural coupling are underplayed relative to alterity

   • Jackson emphasizes “alterity” (outside-ness) and elicitation. GSNV would ask for a clearer account of field effects and structural couplings: what persistent coupling structures the encounter so that elicitation is not arbitrary?

   • Without that, “alterity” risks becoming a metaphysical solvent that dissolves the very regularities we’re trying to explain.

3. Periodicity is missing as a stabilizer

   • GSNV leans on periodicity (multi-scale rhythms, cycles, attractor recurrences) as a concrete way stable forms arise without eternal forms.

   • Jackson nods to dynamics/coarse-graining but doesn’t foreground periodic stabilization as one of the engines of persistence (which is central if we’re translating to Levin’s “morphospace” talk).

4. “No effective theory of life” is too strong unless scoped

   • GSNV can happily grant: no complete, closed, totalizing effective theory.
     But it will also say: there are robust, locally valid effective descriptions because some co-variances are extraordinarily stable (your “co-variants of constants” idea).

   • So the refinement is: no final closure, yes layered, domain-limited invariants—and the interesting scientific work is mapping how new invariants are made.

5. Darwin/Neo-Darwinism framing: a GSNV nuance

   • His “neo-Darwinism is hylomorphic” critique is directionally compatible with GSNV’s anti-gene-primacy stance, but GSNV would tighten it:

     • genes are not “form” in the artisan sense; they’re one constraint/evaluative potential among many (bioelectric, mechanical, ecological, developmental memory).

     • The deeper target is single-level explanatory privilege, not “genes = form” per se.

Net: Jackson gives you an excellent negative metaphysics (anti-closure, anti-form-first, anti-artisanal projection). GSNV’s contribution is to add the positive machinery: evaluative fields + coupling + periodic stabilization that make “open-endedness” scientifically tractable rather than only philosophically necessary.

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3) Conference-style GSNV follow-up presentation (responding directly to his frame)

Title: From Alterity to Attunement: How Living Systems Build Real Possibility Spaces Without Eternal Forms

Abstract (what I’d say in the program):
Jackson shows why closure fails: effective theories externalize genesis and smuggle an artisan into nature. I agree. I’ll add a constructive complement: living systems don’t just face alterity; they attune to it through evaluative gradients, field effects, structural coupling, and periodic stabilization—thereby enacting real “spaces of possibility” that are neither mere mathematics nor Platonic eternals.

1 — What Jackson gets exactly right

• Metaphysics is always present; make it explicit.

• Hylomorphism is a technical paradigm; it misleads in biology.

• Closure dreams (Laplace) externalize creativity.

2 — The key move: replace “form imposed” with “evaluation enacted”

• In living systems, “form” is not a blueprint.

• It is a stabilized resolution within a manifold of possibilities.

• The stabilizer is not only constraint—it’s valuation: the system treats some states as preferable/repairable/viable.

3 — Four engines that make possibility spaces real (GSNV core)

1. Field effects: global-to-local influences (bioelectric, mechanical, chemical, ecological).

2. Structural coupling: persistent mutual constraints between organism and milieu.

3. Normative dimension: success/failure isn’t observer poetry; it’s implemented as error-correction, setpoints, satisficing.

4. Periodicity: rhythmic recurrences stabilize trajectories and make “memory” physically real.

(This is the “positive package” missing from a pure alterity story.)

4 — Reframing “Platonic space”

• The question is not “Platonic or not.”

• The question is: is the space merely our diagram, or is it enacted by the system’s control architecture?

• In morphogenesis, there is strong evidence for enacted spaces (goal-directed repair, modular re-targeting, etc.).

5 — Khōra upgraded: from receptacle to evaluative manifold

• Jackson’s retrieval of khōra is gold: a characterless matrix with wandering cause.

• GSNV adds: khōra is not only receptive; it is gradiented.
  It has directions of better/worse that make some actualizations more likely and more stable.

6 — Against “no effective theory of life” (the constructive version)

• Agree: no totalizing closure.

• Add: living systems generate local closures (temporary unitarities) that behave lawfully.

• These are stable co-variances—“promises” the world keeps long enough for agency to exist.

7 — Darwin’s variation-first, but completed

• Variation-first is necessary.

• Not sufficient: without evaluative gradients, variation doesn’t become organized persistence.

• Selection is not just external filtering; it is also internal: tissues/organs enact norms of repair, completion, and coherence.

8 — What this predicts/clarifies in Levin’s domain

If morphogenetic “spaces” are real, we should find:

• control variables that index the evaluative manifold (bioelectric setpoints, boundary conditions, error signals),

• topological invariants of repair (what the system preserves across perturbations),

• periodic signatures of stabilization (rhythms that correlate with successful re-patterning),

• and coupling laws between levels (cell ↔ tissue ↔ organ) that are asymmetric but reliable.

9 — A friendly challenge back to Jackson

• “Alterity is ineliminable” — yes.

• But for biology we need a theory of attunement: how organisms convert alterity into new stable covariances without external designers.

• That requires taking normativity and fielded coupling as first-class, not derivative.

10 — Closing

• The world is not a closed machine.

• But neither is it pure abyss.

• Life is the craft of making partial closures inside openness—and those closures are the living reality behind “spaces.”

Roy