It is through our haecceity that we praise, love and create. It is the mode in which we perform those natural duties. Each will inevitably be coloured by our character – my love, my creativity will be different from yours, but they will still be objectively recognizable as love and creativity, just as each mountain stream is identifiable as ‘water’, however differently it is coloured by the chalk or sandstone rocks from which it sprang. There is no chink for egotism to exploit here. You cannot give your unfaithful wife a black eye and claim you did it ‘because I love her’. No, you did it because you felt hurt, unvalued, deceived, possessive – all egotism, even if provoked. Anyone focussed on praise and love will avoid the perils of haecceity slipping into egotism.
(Someone might claim that, by the logic of my argument, if I am able to hit my wife – if I have that attribute – it is part of my haecceity, and I should be allowed, even encouraged, to do it. I would disagree. The basic attribute in question is not ‘wife-beating’ but ‘arm-swinging’, articulation of the limbs. This glorious attribute you must indeed exploit, but beating your wife or anyone else runs counter to the equal duties of love and praise. You should articulate your limbs to better purpose – cook the dinner, put the bins out, conduct the LSO. Haecceity does not exist in isolation – nothing does. It is the necessary method through which we praise, love, create and live our lives.)
In the forecourt of the temple of Apollo at Delphi was inscribed Gnothi seauton – ‘Know thyself’. This is the ancient motto of individuation. Coleridge, in one of his poems, rails against this teaching, asking, ‘What hast thou, Man, that thou dar’st call thine own? … Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God.’ Well, up to a point, I think he was right. The Big Thing – how the universe is, regardless of me – is the first thing to address, and that is why STA starts outside, rather than inside, ourselves, standing staring at suns and trees rather than lying on the couch, talking. But we need some understanding of ourselves too. We can only know the world through our own capacities; we can only know ourselves in relation to the world. In effect, the mind and the world jointly create one another. While we live we are inseparable. ‘Life and environment comprise one linked system.’ So, Gnothi seauton – but learn it on the job, because it is by being, more than by thinking about oneself and fancying a made-up identity, that one comes to know oneself.
All we really know about what we are is what we do.
(Marilynne Robinson)
Of course, this all suggests the existence of individual identities in the first place. Certainly if we have an identity, it is not a racial, gendered, cultural one – a dangerous fancy which is currently and unwelcomely resurgent. (Presumably this is because in a fast-changing, confusing, ‘global’ world, tribalism offers certainty. But it is a regressive escapist fantasy to suppose that the shape of one’s genitals, one’s sexual preferences or the colour of one’s skin provides the basis for a mutual understanding denied to others. Every creature is unique and we are all related. Therefore, all our differences are only of degree, not of kind.) Theodore Zeldin is doubtful that we inherently have individual identities at all. ‘The idea of a sense of identity was invented for people who wanted to be less complicated,’ he argues. ‘The alternative is to be a different person in different circumstances, to make the broadening of one’s sympathies and understanding of others a higher priority than understanding oneself.’ Perhaps I am just quibbling about words but with ‘identity’ being both broadened with notions of ‘group identity’ and narrowed to mean ‘fixed personality’ as in Zeldin’s quote, we may find the word ‘haecceity’ more useful. Our haecceity is not so inflexible; it is not an unchanging thing, nor an immutable force of nature to which we must succumb. We can still ‘be a different person in different circumstances’. At every point in our lives we can exercise our will, make a decision, change course. The psychologist Viktor Frankl found from his own experience that even in a Nazi concentration camp the prisoners had a choice: ‘Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.’ The ultimate choice lay in their attitude towards life and death – a choice which those of us in much more comfortable surroundings will have to make sooner or later too. [Footnote: haecceity gives agency. There are vulnerable people who are treated by the media or their neighbours or the social services as ‘types’, cases, statistics, demographics. You cannot exert your haecceity, or the awareness, love and creativity that flow through it, if you feel you are merely a datum on a spreadsheet. For all the numbers and passwords that represent us – NI, PIN, account number, NHS, postcode – they are not us. They can each be hacked or forged, we cannot. ‘I am not a number. I am a free man!’ cried Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. It’s ironic that these days you can only see him digitised.]
Our haecceity – the unique but constantly-changing identity – and our ego – a willed self-image – are different things. When Jung, who did so much to develop and popularize the notion of individuation, can write, ‘how important it is to affirm one’s destiny. In this way we forge an ego which does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate. Then to experience defeat is also to experience victory. Nothing is disturbed – neither inwardly nor outwardly, for one’s own continuity has withstood the current of life and of time’, he seems to be describing a perilous, battle-scarred world through which an armoured, inflexible (and, indeed, self-consciously invented) ego fights its way. This is not the STA world I recognise. I prefer a less militaristic image: our haecceity is not a long, narrow road forging ahead with no turnings. It is more like Milton Keynes: there are junctions and roundabouts galore enabling you, enticing you, to explore another route. You will still be you, but you will have had to put off the uniform, constructed ‘personality’ that constrained (perhaps you thought it protected) you. Then you will have the flexibility to respond to the ‘fate’ you encounter without prejudice. [Footnote: ‘heads-up rugby’ is a phrase currently in vogue in the sport. It means suiting your play to the situation immediately in front of you – the ball, the space, the opposition, the support – rather than following a pre-set move ‘off the training ground’. This is roughly the difference between haecceity and an ego identity.] You will be, in Christopher Alexander’s phrase, ‘true to [your] own inner forces’ with ‘a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions’.
There is, it seems to us
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.
And at every moment we too are new (and maybe even shocking) if we let ourselves be.
Tintoretto, Self-Portrait (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
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