Having overturned both the Platonic-Augustinian epistemologies and their
links to theology, Duns presses his attack on the principles of individuation.
This had been one of the main areas of controversy and innovation in the
previous generation. Aquinas, overturning Platonic Forms and Bonaventure’s
spiritual matter, had given matter as the principle of individuation. Henry of
Ghent—for whom universal Forms are the higher reality—had held that indi-
viduation is nothing in itself but consists in a web of negations. Duns again
attacks them both. Matter, he holds, is neither Aristotelean potentiality nor
merely part of a composite of forms, as Thomas had held; rather matter has
its own actuality and could exist without any form at all. That is to say, it is
not logically contradictory that God could create matter without form. Matter
is real; therefore it cannot be merely the principle of individuation of forms.
Duns arrives at a similar conclusion against Henry, for whom universal
Forms are the true realities and individuation merely negation. But the essence
of a thing is neither a universal nor a particular; all horses have a common
nature, which we can call “horseness,” but distinctions of universal and
particular do not arise in “horseness” in itself. Parallel to what Duns says about
being, essence is univocal with respect to universality and particularity. The
universal is the way the common nature of a class of things is apprehended in
the mind; ideas are part of the realm of the intellect, and are founded in the
common nature of things, but they are not things, nor even the constituting
principle of things. Duns here is drastically repudiating the Platonic heritage
of Forms. For “horseness” in general to be the “horseness” of this particular
horse, there must be another metaphysical condition. Duns calls it haecceitas,
“this-ness” (Latin: haec, “this”).
It is, so to speak, the principle of individuation. But to call it a principle
does not capture the force of Duns’s conception. It is the opposite of Henry of
Ghent’s claim that particularity is a mere aspect of negation in a world
composed of universals. This is immediately real, and that, and that. The world
is radically particular in a sense far beyond Aquinas’s world of forms individu-
ated by matter. It is this vision of Duns Scotus that made him admired by
modern existentialists such as Martin Heidegger: haecceitas is like Dasein,
radical contingency of existence in the here-and-now, the being which is never
captured by abstractions. Propelled by opposition to the surrounding intellec-
tual field, Duns arrived at a radical break with the entire Greek tradition; we
find its nearest counterpart in distant traditions, above all in Buddhist mysti-
cism. The Madhyamika Buddists (particularly Nagarjuna) had much the
same term, tathata, “thus-ness” (Sanskrit: tat, “that”), the reality that the
meditator seeks when overturning attachment to name-and-form. The para-
doxes of the Ch’an meditators, attacking the inadequacy of words, were di-
rected toward this experience.
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^483