Unnatural Essence

Unnatural Essence names the paradoxical ontological status of the Cartesian subject as Ruda reads it: the subject has no natural, given essence — no Aristotelian ousia rooted in a telos or species-form — because its very essence is constituted through a contingent, externally imposed determination that is unthinkable from within the subject's own perspective. For Descartes (via Ruda), freedom is not an inherent capacity belonging to a pre-given nature; it is a result, something that befalls the subject from outside (figured as the divine determination). The subject thus possesses an essence, but that essence is structurally unnatural: it cannot be grounded in biology, habit, virtue, or any immanent developmental logic. It is the trace of an external contingency that the subject must retroactively own as its own.

This notion directly engages the dialectical-materialist understanding of essence. Where the Hegelian tradition insists that essence is not a fixed hidden substrate but a retroactive, reflexive effect of contradiction and appearing, Ruda's move is more polemical: the essence of the free subject is precisely that which exceeds, and actively opposes, every naturalization. The fatalist imperative — "Act as if you were not free!" — becomes the practical expression of this unnatural essence: by suspending the spontaneous belief in natural freedom, the subject paradoxically enacts the only genuine freedom available. The "unnatural" qualifier is thus not merely negative (the absence of nature) but positively structural: it names the gap that separates the Cartesian subject from any Aristotelian or ideological suturing of essence to nature, while the subject's simultaneous embodiment (as Descartes's Passions of the Soul insists) prevents this unnatural essence from becoming a purely disembodied idealism.

In provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, Unnatural Essence functions as a hinge concept in Ruda's argument for fatalist freedom. It sits at the intersection of the cross-referenced concepts Essence, Freedom, Fatalism, Contingency, and Form. With respect to the canonical treatment of Essence in the corpus — where Hegelian-dialectical reading denaturalizes essence by making it a retroactive, reflexive effect of appearing rather than a hidden substrate — Ruda's Unnatural Essence is a specification and radicalization. While the Hegelian move shows essence to be non-substantial and temporally constituted ("essence is what has been"), Ruda adds a polemical edge: the Cartesian subject's essence is not merely non-substantial but actively anti-natural, constituted through a contingent external determination (God, fate) that is irreducible to any immanent developmental logic. This makes the concept a direct rebuttal of Aristotelian naturalization, and by extension of ideology in the sense of misrecognizing contingent social determinations as natural givens.

The concept also speaks to Form: the "unnatural" character of Cartesian essence implies that what the subject is cannot be read off from any natural form or telos. Yet the embodiment caveat — that the subject is not simply free will but also a body — prevents the concept from dissolving into pure formalism or abstract idealism. This tension between unnatural essence and bodily embeddedness (cross-referencing Embodiment of the Unrelation) marks the concept as occupying a specifically Cartesian problematic that Ruda leverages for a contemporary materialist politics of freedom, opposing every Ideology that naturalizes the subject's position.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (page unknown)

Only one option is possible: my essence is unnatural. But at the same time, as The Passions of the Soul demonstrates, I am not simply my free will but also a body

The phrase "my essence is unnatural" is theoretically loaded because it directly inverts the Aristotelian equation of essence with nature (physis/ousia), declaring the Cartesian subject's innermost being to be constitutively outside any natural order; the immediate qualification "I am not simply my free will but also a body" then prevents this unnatural essence from becoming a purely spiritual or disembodied abstraction, installing an irreducible tension between the unnaturalness of freedom and the materiality of embodiment at the heart of the concept.