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argue that although certain properties of the thing enable us to describe it, the absence of these properties does not mean that the thing is no longer the same. Such a proposition is “trivial” or “misleading,” according to the externalists. For in one sense, the alteration of one single aspect of a thing makes it different from what it once was. But in another sense, the modification of a single element would merely change our description of the thing. The externalists argue that “there are an infinity of equally correct descriptions, and nothing in the thing itself determines which of these is the description.” The externalists assert that the specification of “essential properties” is thus a nominal exercise and completely arbitrary (Rorty 1967, 125). Thus, to say that “I am a young, American male of Greek and Sicilian descent” is merely to describe what I am. I could have provided an equivalently correct description by saying that I was a man in my thirties, with several birthmarks on my face, working at an American college, and living in Brooklyn, New York. Or I could have said that I was 5′7½″, 145 pounds, with a size 8½ shoe. The point is that I can provide endless self-descriptions and not one of them is truer than any other. To say that one attribute is more “essential” than any other attribute is to place an arbitrarily privileged distinction on one to the exclusion of others.

      But common sense tells us that some things are more important than others. If I were to remove one tiny birthmark from my face, this would have less of an effect on my essential “personhood” than, say, a sex-change operation. What is the something in “maleness” that is more significant to my self than “birthmark-ness”? Would a new “female” appearance alter any of the fundamental “me”? Externalism does not deny that there is this thing called me, but it rejects the claim that there is anything about “me” that we can consider more essential than any other thing. Hence, it views the designation of essence as a purely linguistic, nominal, and arbitrary exercise.

      Curiously, both the internalist and the externalist deny Aristotle’s distinction between essence and accident. The externalists claim that the characterization of a thing’s “essence” is a purely conventional practice, and the internalists also argue that the distinction between “essential” and “nonessential” is arbitrary. They believe that every thing has an intrinsic nature, which is organic and integrated. Though the internalists accept that essence-accident distinctions are inevitable in a world of imperfect knowledge, they seem to imply that such division is ontologically illegitimate, for every aspect is as important as every other.³³ By extension, the internalists also seem to imply that there can be a world of perfect knowledge.

      This helps us to focus on one of the fundamental problems inherent in the most extreme form of internalism: a problem of individuation arising from excessive integration. In Hegel and Blanshard, as in Lossky, there is a tendency toward strict organicity.³⁴ Every part of the totality must be considered when assessing the significance of any other part. Expanding the discussion beyond the mere consideration of an object’s relational properties, Blanshard argues, for instance, that every object has a certain shape, and that this shape is the result of two factors: the object’s nature and its interaction with other objects.³⁵ Blanshard ([1962] 1964) writes that a thing’s “ultimate elements are engaged in manifold interactions, by way of attraction and repulsion, with things around it, and these almost certainly determine its shape down to the last detail. This particular shape, like this degree of malleability, is not externally related to its other characters; they are bound up with these causally and therefore … necessarily” (481).

      Although Blanshard recognizes that different entities have parts that are “more obviously interdependent” than others, still he claims that no element is external to the totality. A thing is what it is by virtue of “lines of demarcation—causal, logical, or both—running out into an illimitable universe” (485). Thus, the thing is affected in varying degrees by its relations, “no matter how external they may seem.” Since “everything is related in some way to everything else, no knowledge will reveal completely the nature of any term until it has exhausted that term’s relations to everything else” (Blanshard 1940, 2:452). This would suggest that everything must be known before anything can be analyzed.

      To transcend this problem, both Hegel and Lossky hypothesized an Absolute standpoint, whereby the Truth lies in a Metaphysical Whole as grasped by an omniscient consciousness. In such a whole, all relations are internal and simultaneous. The main problem for such an internalist orientation is individuation: trying to abstract and define the nature of an individual entity such that it is not dissolved in the relationships that it embodies. It is this dilemma of individuation that prompted Lossky to assert the ontological priority of concrete particulars within the whole. He calls his system concrete ideal-realism and sees both Hegel and Aristotle as his philosophic forebears. He argues that relations are not disembodied; just as no object is external to its relations, relations have no existence except between objects. Lossky ([1917] 1928) explains: “Relations are not independent; they cannot exist on their own account, apart from the elements they relate” (37). And yet if each thing is constituted by a cluster of relations, and the relations themselves can be extended to include the organic whole itself, we are still faced with an unresolved individuation problem.

      Externalists such as Thomas Nagel and A. J. Ayer reject internalist o rganicism because they correctly perceive that it fails to resolve this issue of individuation. Nagel argues further that any search for the real “nature” or “essence” of a thing is incoherent. As Rorty (1967) explained it, Blanshard’s “essence” of X depends on a metaphysical “X-as-known-by-an-ideal-knower,” that is, a Being who can grasp all of the relational interactions between and among all of the constituent properties of the totality (129). The externalists reject organic internalism because such a system ultimately depends on omniscience as a standard of certainty.

      Issues of individuation and omniscience are not inherent in externalism. The externalist orientation claims to oppose the internalism of the Idealists with a hard-boiled philosophic realism. Things are what they are and cannot be defined in terms of their relations to anything else. A thing has an identity and its nature cannot “be constituted by the nature of the system to which it belongs” (Copleston 1966, 405). But the externalist argues that there is a sharp dichotomy between what an entity really is, something which cannot be known completely, and our linguistic descriptions of what an entity is, something which is entirely arbitrary. The externalist perpetuates the Kantian distinction between a noumenal and phenomenal world, necessity and contingency, analysis and synthesis. The externalist’s “realism” dissolves into a crude, dualistic, and atomistic perspective on reality. Its fundamental problem is a lack of integration, owing to excessive differentiation. Every thing is self-subsistent and logically independent of every other thing.³⁶ Relations and systems are arbitrary constructs of the mind.

      It is for this reason that Lossky rejected externalism as a vestige of Kantian dualism. Kant argued that relations are added to the data of our senses by the constructive activity of the mind. The subject creates or constructs the object and its relations. But according to Lossky ([1917] 1928), the mind contemplates relations that exist in the world. The relations we conceive “presuppose relations that obtain within organic being” (24). They are “objective elements which can be perceived” (33). They exist “in the very nature of the object” (34).

      As an organic internalist, Lossky denied both dualism and atomism. Like Blanshard and other internalists, Lossky saw an intimate connection between the necessary and the contingent, the analytic and the synthetic, the causal and the logical. Human knowledge cannot be bifurcated because reality is an integral whole.

      Within this organic totality, the elements can enter into opposition and conflict with one another, but they are still interconnected and interrelated by virtue of their presence within a systemic context. Organicism recognizes the interaction of elements as more than “the mere sum of two actions of which the first follows the second as a response.” The nature of interaction lies in the fact that it involves the “simultaneous determination” of two or more elements, such that “there is no meaning in drawing a distinction between the agent and the patient” (5–6). Lossky recognized metaphysical plurality in the world, but refused to view the world’s many elements as independent

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