The Thisness of Things

Haecceitas and the Particular

Scotus’s doctrine of haecceitas — thisness — is the philosophical claim that individual things are not merely instances of general categories but have a specific, unrepeatable particularity that is their own: this rose, this stone, this human being, not rose-in-general or human-in-general. This particularity is not an accident of their existence but its deepest feature; it is what makes them what they are rather than something else.

The literary implications are significant. If every particular thing has an irreducible thisness, then the careful attention that literature pays to specific things — the specific texture of a specific moment, the specific quality of a specific person — is not merely aesthetic but ontological. The particular is worth attending to because its particularity is real and is, ultimately, a gift of the God who made it particular.

What Hopkins Reveals

Hopkins read Scotus at Oxford and recognized immediately that haecceitas was the philosophical foundation of what he had been trying to do in his poetry. His concept of “inscape” — the individually distinctive form of a thing, the pattern of its being that makes it recognizably itself — is Scotus translated into poetic practice.

“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells; / Crying, What I do is me: for that I came.” This is Scotus’s haecceitas in verse: the conviction that each created thing exists to express its own unique being, and that this expression is the form of its praise.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the serpent includes the reduction of the particular to the general — the denial of the irreducible uniqueness of each human being made in the image of God. The serpent’s work, in its modern forms, operates precisely through the standardization, the interchangeability, and the reduction of persons to units that Scotus’s haecceitas opposes.

The seed of the woman presses against this reduction by insisting on the irreducible particularity of each created thing. Scotus provided the philosophical framework for this insistence; Hopkins gave it poetic form; TLA reads it in the wide range of literature that, often without knowing it, testifies to the thisness of the human beings it renders.

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