‘Each person has his own gift from God – one person has one kind of gift and the next person has a different one.’ St Paul is clear, if a little pedestrian. Every one is individual, so generalisations, though useful up to a point, cannot be insisted on. Everything is an exception if you look closely enough. As you move further and further away from the acutely-perceived individual, so things become blurred. [Footnote: one of the great values of imaginative literature, and especially the novel, is its particularity. The journalist and historian usually deal in trends and demographics which are necessarily imprecise and divisive. Paradoxically, the novelist, in presenting fictional individuals, can highlight the universal, as James Baldwin explains: ‘What the writer is always trying to do is to utilize the particular in order to reveal something much larger and heavier than any particular can be.’] Our very attempt to understand the world distorts reality. We explain each haecceity to ourselves in analogies and generalisations, likening it, in other words, to things different from itself. Each generalisation overemphasises the importance of the spot from which the perspective was taken. It exalts the viewer and ‘others’ the view. And this is the rat-run to Auschwitz – the assumption that one element out of the thousands that comprise a creature can, by a kind of diabolic metonymy, be made to represent the entire being, that a single description – black, female, tall, right-handed, human – is sufficient to categorise the complex whole. It will be obvious from the list above that some of these elements are customarily used in this way, that others for some reason are not. They are all equally inadequate. It is quite as logical to discriminate between people based on the length of their big toe, as to use skin colour or gender – all three are biologically determined characteristics. Larry Siedentop, writing about William of Ockham and the Realist vs Nominalist debate in the fourteenth century, reminds us that the problem is not a new one: “The assumption that universal categories such as ‘man’ are more real than the experiences of ‘man’ … fosters the illusion of a corporate human mind. Thus, belief in universals or concepts as ‘things in themselves’ … is also a threat to individual freedom, to the belief in equal moral agency.”
This obvious point is so widely ignored that it bears labouring a little. There is me and there is the universe. There is you and there is the universe. Every intermediate distinction is unreal. A creature is not a man because it has a penis and Y chromosome; it is uniquely itself, and those are merely two of its myriad attributes, but because of them it is called a ‘man’ by taxonomists for classification purposes. This may to some extent be helpful medically [Footnote: though note Suzanne O’Sullivan’s comment: ‘Everybody’s experience of illness is their own … That is why medicine is an art’ and the current emergence of patient-specific medicine.] but is otherwise entirely unnecessary. Such categorisations are, however, immensely useful to those (whether religious, political or scientific) who are eager to control us by the age-old tactic of Divide and Rule, or to use this petty name-calling to distract us from more important matters.
Ronald Blythe recounts a legend of the aged St John, surrounded by children. They are amazed that, as a young man, he had known Jesus, crucified half a century before, and they eagerly pester him: ‘What was he like? What was he like?' John replies, in what the kids probably dismissed as an old man’s senile rambling, ‘Little children, love one another’. ‘What was he like? Love one another.’ – not his height, race, hair colour, attractiveness, accent, class, distinguishing marks, tattoos, dress sense, nationality, make of car, intelligence, size of house and style of décor therein, wealth, artistic taste, political affiliations, favourite TV show, type of biscuit he would have been had he been a biscuit, poise or presence, hairstyle, sporting affiliation, preference for cats or dogs, religious persuasion or any of the other frail amulets in which we invest our identities …
Love one another – that’s what he was like. That was, in fact, his haecceity – his behaviour and the values that instructed it.
No-one is merely the product of their anatomy like a machine. Life is endlessly unexpected: it is not simply ‘Fate’ that makes it so, but the ultimate unknowability of everything that surrounds us. Chesterton remarks, ‘An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet it is not round after all … A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword because it comes to a point, but it doesn’t. Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable … It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything’ – the haecceity that makes a nonsense of taxonomies.
Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (detail) (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Group identity (and group prejudice with which it immediately becomes synonymous) is an acculturated, societal delusion with no basis in reality. The Red-Headed League was not more fanciful than the notion of a racial or gender identity. The misery these unnecessary divisions cause is a powerful recommendation of a STA way of thinking – a pre-social and pre-historiographical view based not on deep layers of fantasy which have petrified into custom but on the fact of our individuality. As Marilynne Robinson puts it, ‘to identify sacred mystery with every individual experience, every life … is to arrive at democracy as an ideal, and to accept the difficult obligation to honour others as oneself.’ It is a much more deeply-rooted democracy than the tarnished ‘tick-a-box-every-five-years’ performance we have graced with the name.
Our haecceity gives us enormous freedom, unconstrained by the pre-determined rules of particular groups. ‘To be free is to be able to act in accordance with one’s own nature – not from an extrinsic impulse,’ says Spinoza. We are back with Ruskin’s conception of our ‘true life’, the condition we must arrive at before we can create, love or live honestly. And our collective response will be all the richer if we acknowledge the individuality both of ourselves and of every moment, as William James explains: ‘I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we expect to work out identical solutions. Each, from his particular angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner… Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely.’ The diversity which Daniel Davis found in our compatibility genes, constructing an ever-widening defence against disease, parallels that which James finds in consciousness – the ever-widening creation, each creature with its own unique perspective, constructing an ever wider perception of the world. This begins to resemble the argument that God made the universe to understand himself, our multifarious perceptions like all the fragments of sensory information which flood into our brains every second. Whether, as in our brains, all these perceptions do in fact combine to form a single consciousness is of course, for the moment at least, unanswerable.
What sublime motives to self-respect with humble Hope does not the Idea give, that each Soul is a Species in itself; and what Impulse to more than brotherly Love of our fellow-creatures, the Idea that all men form, as it were, one Soul.
(Coleridge)
Our haecceity, our unique combination of qualities, is the part we have to play. ‘The most important thing each of us can know,’ writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction.’ We are not, as some Eastern sages maintained, indistinguishable droplets in the ocean, contributing only quantitatively our infinitesimal bulk to the universe. We are instruments in the orchestra. We’re jamming with the universe. Jammin’ in the name of the Lord, conceivably.
Anyway, I hope you like jammin’ too.
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