being is real. Seizing the advantage, the AshÀarite lineage continued to hammer
away against the notion that reality is structured by universals or forces
operating according to universal principles. Al-Juwayni argued that if an object
has particular characteristics but could have had others, there must be some-
thing causing it to be particularized. This cause, which al-Juwayni identified
with God, may be regarded as an abstraction on the concept of particularity,
equivalent to Duns Scotus’s haecceitas or Buddhist “thusness.” Al-Ghazali,
al-Juwayni’s pupil, went on to refute Ibn Sina by arguing against the notion
of necessary cause, using arguments against causality parallel to Hume’s: Ibn
Sina’s notion of contingency is not radical enough, and needs to be extended
to the point where we see that even causality is particular, the sheer acts of
God’s will. The arbitrary power of God to establish or disestablish any general
principles at all, stressed by both Duns Scotus and al-Juwayni, is a very
high-level claim about fundamental ontology; the same assertion would resur-
face in Heidegger’s “thrown-ness” of the world and Sartre’s point that the
nature of being is to be unfounded, without any reason for anything to exist
in the first place.
This radical conception of particularity emerges at various times in the
world networks, in sequences of debate against systems which make universals
into the ontological centerpiece.^17 But radical particularity too is never sus-
tained for long without answering strokes in the intellectual field. It is an
extreme, anchored against an opposing extreme of realism of universals, and
disappears along with its enemy. Buddhist Madhyamika, made popular by
Nagarjuna, sustained its radical “thusness” only as long as it had Hindu realists
as a foil, and even so was answered on its own side by Yogacara Idealism,
whose seeds in the mind are the equivalent of universal forms. Scotism,
encircling its radical haecceitas in a bastion of high-level abstractions, faded
from focus in the intellectual attention space of the 1300s and 1400s.
In Europe, the history of nominalism-realism picks up once again in the
1600s, but in much moderated form. Extreme claims for either transcendent
universals or inexpressible particulars gave way to compromises which at-
tempted to show how experience of particular things allows persons to formu-
late names, or general ideas, which stand for the resemblance among things.
The terminology changed along with the center of ontological gravity; “real-
ism” now meant the reality not of universals but of the material world. Since
all issues are driven by conflict, proponents of universals were a crucial part
of the field of oppositions which set off the debate. Neoplatonism had made
a comeback during the Renaissance, when the metaphysical advances of the
medieval Schoolmen were rejected in the name of reviving classical antiquity;
once again in a revolt against Neoplatonism, the nominalist critique came to
the fore.
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^829