St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, says that what makes something what it is, and not something else, is its formal cause; a chair is a chair because it "participates" in some universal essence of chairness. Form brings a thing identity while distinguishing it from other realities; it is the source of individuation, as well as the cause of sameness among things of a particular sort. John Duns Scotus, following Aquinas, disputed this account of individuation—if formal cause alone marked one specific thing from another, it was indistinguishable from others with an identical formal cause, and so unknowable as an individual even to an infinite Mind. Scotus proposed a quality higher than Aristotelian form by which a thing was set apart from all others, even those most like it—haecceitas or thisness. It is best to think of haecceitas not as a trait which a particular chair or tree possesses, a ghostly antler of me-ness, but the capacity of a thing, likely simply its plumage of variety, to awaken awe in human beings. The look of startled surprise, the being-arrested-by-this-particular-tree, is the tree’s final form, a quality it shares with no other thing. Here is the human contribution to the symbiosis of being, our version of bees’ involvement in pollination and forests’ absorption of carbon dioxide. This looking, this looking hard, enacts thisness and so completes a thing, while wedding the mind to the world. Haecceity: the concern of contemplatives and poets, those on ocular patrol, and their central politics.
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Tim Lilburn
St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, says that what makes something what it is, and not something else, is its formal cause; a chair is a chair because it "participates" in some universal essence of chairness. Form brings a thing identity while distinguishing it from other realities; it is the source of individuation, as well as the cause of sameness among things of a particular sort. John Duns Scotus, following Aquinas, disputed this account of individuation—if formal cause alone marked one specific thing from another, it was indistinguishable from others with an identical formal cause, and so unknowable as an individual even to an infinite Mind. Scotus proposed a quality higher than Aristotelian form by which a thing was set apart from all others, even those most like it—haecceitas or thisness. It is best to think of haecceitas not as a trait which a particular chair or tree possesses, a ghostly antler of me-ness, but the capacity of a thing, likely simply its plumage of variety, to awaken awe in human beings. The look of startled surprise, the being-arrested-by-this-particular-tree, is the tree’s final form, a quality it shares with no other thing. Here is the human contribution to the symbiosis of being, our version of bees’ involvement in pollination and forests’ absorption of carbon dioxide. This looking, this looking hard, enacts thisness and so completes a thing, while wedding the mind to the world. Haecceity: the concern of contemplatives and poets, those on ocular patrol, and their central politics.
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