Dissection

God gave himself up to our dissection.
An ultimate openness; a kenosis.

“Leaves don’t exist as such”—sure.
But can there be such a house with no foundation?
Can there be haecceity all the way down?

Things evolve at random when there’s nothing at stake;
but what strange trajectories mine have!

And when does the bread I eat become me?
Where does it become not-bread?
And shouldn’t I ask this on Sunday?

Oh, what can I make of all these games?
Only silence! Breath. Heartbeat.

It feels right to share this poem on Good Friday.

After all, this is the day when we commemorate the death of Jesus, the emptying of his life and dignity out of love for all those who would consider his death a worthy sacrifice.

It is fitting, then, to mark the day with a poem about how God Himself offers himself to our dissection, our ever-probing minds seeking endlessly to understand and control ourselves and our environment. He yields willingly to our probing, revealing more and more of his mystery.

And yet there always remains mystery.

If this still seems too poetic for you, bear with me.

I’d like to start by looking at the concept of “haecceity all the way down.” The natural first question is, “What is haecceity?” and then, “What does it mean to say that there is haecceity ‘all the way down’?”

Regarding the first question, haecceity is a word from medieval scholastic philosophy that describes the “thisness” or unique individuality of a thing.

To grasp the principle of haecceity, or “thisness,” think of the differences between any two cups that you ignore in order to call them the same thing. Maybe they are different colors, different materials, or even different shapes. There is “a cup” and then there is “THIS” (gesturing).

So the idea of haecceity all the way down is that on every scale of nature, there is some individual difference which is ignored by any abstract system of description. In other words, within whatever category we create (“leaves,” “jaguars,” “gold,” “water,” “DNA,” “electron”), there is actually ontological variation.

Haecceity all the way down would not preclude certain statistical regularities that could be captured by abstract systems of description. In fact, the randomness we observe in nature could then be conceived as relative to an attempt at conceptual order, reflecting the “spread” of haecceity around posited sameness of a category.

This is the sense in which “leaves don’t exist as such”: that each leaf is ultimately irreducibly individual. No two jaguars are exactly the same. As Wittgenstein pointed out, no two “games” are the same, and it’s not even clear whether there is an essence of “game-ness” that every game can be said to possess. This is another way to say that the category of “game” encompasses a high degree of ontological variation.

Okay, so that’s the idea. So what? What does the idea of “haecceity all the way down” buy us?

Well for one thing, it is an acknowledgment of intellectual humility: it is the belief that there is always some level of irreducible mystery beyond any conceptual system. The benefits of this disposition are manifold.

For one thing, it reduces the grip with which one holds to their own conceptual systems. It keeps one open to the possibility of revising one’s own beliefs with further evidence or better arguments. It promotes the view that conceptual categories never correspond perfectly to objective reality itself. There are other reasons to believe this. If you’re interested, see the discussions around measurement in my short book. This is a position of epistemic humility that is needed direly in the United States, in light of our rampant political polarization.

So then if conceptual categories can’t capture the capital-T Truth of the world, what are they good for?

One can consider that conceptual categories and systems are tools that influence and organize activity. My words right now will influence the next actions that you take in your day, even if in ways you don’t recognize. Communication influences behavior. We call things “jaguars” so that we can know how to behave as it regards jaguars.

Different systems are meant to organize different kinds of activity. Physics helps organize and direct behavior in certain activities, such as creating a laser. Biology organizes behavior around such things as protecting jaguars from endangerment. Religion obviously organizes behavior.

Within a particular kind of activity, or more particularly for a given set of objectives and values, some systems are better than others. The key question then becomes how to improve one’s own conceptual systems, if at all. This requires sustained self-criticism and at least periodically seeking evidence to the contrary of one’s beliefs.

This is essentially to internalize the scientific method, the wildly successful paradigm that we have developed for theory generation and recursive self-correction.

Thus, if you are scientifically minded, adopting an assumption of haecceity all the way down is immensely productive.

Okay, so if conceptual systems are meant to organize activity, what sort of activities is this present discourse meant to organize?

Amongst other things, it is meant to organize a new ethics of conversation. It is a call to acknowledge the provisionality of our systems of knowledge as a basic starting point for any productive dialogue at all.

What do you think about all this? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

For Christians:

Remember the haecceity of Jesus’s death. No amount of conceptualization you can do captures the irreducible and irreproducible real experience of his crucifixion. If you believe that he lived and died as it is written, then no matter what your conceptual interpretation of his death is, the haecceity of his suffering remains a reality.

May everyone have a blessed Good Friday!