Prisons without Prisoners, or Can a Scorpion Refuse to Sting?

Abstract

Retelling the age-old fable of the Scorpion and the Frog in her book Context Changes Everything, Alicia Juarrero humorously coins the term scorpionality: the set of primary properties that make scorpions scorpions1 . In a long-lasting philosophical debate, primary properties are seen as the essence of things. However, the very notion of a miserable lack is sustainable only under the assumption of an essence; you are only lacking if there is something that stands as your eternal and immutable identity, your essence. Can it be that misery is this sense of lack?2 If so, would perhaps getting rid of essences (or at least, destabilising them) allow for an affirmative opening instead of resentful, miserable, and spiteful enclosures? Can the Scorpion save both the Frog and itself by rejecting its essence, or, in other words, by defatalising its existence? [...]