Duns is not a mystic. He did not arrive at haecceitas as the result of
meditation or the attempt to explain what the meditation experience might be
about. His train of argument comes from contentions within the highly ration-
alistic intellectual community of his time. In Duns’s haecceitas, this community
argues itself beyond its own deepest premises. From now on it has two possible
frontiers of transcendence, God and immediate reality: possible frontiers, be-
cause the struggles of the intellectual field did not immediately push upon both
of them.
Duns overturns the hierarchical conception of the cosmos which had pre-
vailed for centuries. The Neoplatonic hierarchy of concepts and realities, as
well as Aristotelean levels of generality, are ordered according to their degrees
of universality. But Duns declares that universals are merely a way that humans
think because of the imperfection of their cognitions. If one could know the
haecceitas of all things, one would have all possible knowledge of reality—al-
though this is impossible for a merely human intellect in its present condition,
and presumably only God can know everything in this way. This position is
the extreme opposite from that of the Muslim philosophers, for instance
Avicenna, who held that God knows only through universals, not stooping to
particulars in their contingency (Leaman, 1985: 112).
The world is not only radically particular; it is much more a realm of will
than of intellect. Thomas Aquinas had made the human intellect relatively
passive, guided by reason. He cleverly saved the doctrine of free will by arguing
that although one always acts toward what one conceives to be good, one does
not necessarily judge things very clearly, and hence one exercises freedom of
choice. Duns is more radical. The haecceitas of a person is, so to speak,
centered on that person’s will; what ideas one has is also fundamentally a
matter of one’s volition. Duns does not push this doctrine into a glorification
of irrationalism; God acts consistently and not illogically. But God did not
have to create the world out of any necessity or reason. Duns’s universe seems
rather existentialist. God is logically remote, separated by a gulf from the
world; the fundamental reality, both high and low, is volition and haecceitas,
the contingent particular force of the way things happen to be.
Duns Scotus indeed provided the Franciscans with a champion. But al-
though his doctrine gave rise to a movement of dedicated Scotists, counterpos-
ing the spread of the Thomists both within the Dominican order and beyond,
the intellectual outcome was unstable. Duns had again radically rearranged the
cultural capital of the field; among the Franciscans themselves as well as outside
their ranks, the more radical implications were soon taken much further. It
appears that many thinkers jumped at the opportunity, though the credit and
the designation of leadership were given to William of Ockham. At the same
time came a reaction in the other direction, salvaging the most extreme ele-
484 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths