Quiddity and Haecceity: Whatness and Thisness in a World of Becoming - Open Horizons
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By Mark Voigt, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54796411
Insistent Particularity
"The Castle Rock at Edinburgh exists from moment to moment, and from century to century, by reason of the decision effected by its own historic route of antecedent occasions. And if, in some vast upheaval of nature, it were shattered into fragments, that convulsion would still be conditioned by the fact that it was the destruction of that rock. The point to be emphasized is the insistent particularity of things experienced and of the act of experiencing."
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality, emphasis is Whitehead's
It is noteworthy that, while Whitehead was a mathematician and metaphysician, he had a profound sensitivity to what he called "the insistent particularity" of things experienced—and of the act of experiencing itself. Imagine being struck on the head by a rock. Let's say the rock is a fragment of the Castle Rock at Edinburgh. The rock makes contact with an insistent particularity that cannot be reduced to abstractions about the nature of the rock, and the momentary pain you feel likewise resists reduction to conceptual categories. The insistent particularities of the world cannot be explained away by abstractions; they transcend them in their concreteness.
This holds true for all forms of experience, not just physical collisions. When we encounter another person, for example, that person presents a particularity that cannot be collapsed into our ideas or theories about them—a presence that is given to our experience. Even the Mind of the universe, even God, has an insistent particularity, grounded in divine decisions that belong to God, not to us. And we, too, embody such particularity in how we respond—to God, to others, and to the world around us.
This insistent particularity is by no means limited to solid, bounded objects visible to the eye. The key is not to equate particularity with physical solidity. Other states of matter—liquids, gases, plasma—exhibit particularity, and so do sentient beings that may not appear as “material” in any obvious way. Past experiences, even when dimly remembered or shaped by interpretation, possess their own kind of particularity. So do the emotions of others, even when our comprehension of them is partial or uncertain.<br>This is what process philosophers mean by concreteness. It is, I suggest, the haecceity—the thisness—of the world and of God. It is different from the quiddity of the world and God, although both are real, What makes Whitehead's philosophy so interesting is that they occur within, not apart from, a world of becoming.
Quiddity and Haecceity
Whatness and Thisness in a World of Becoming
The philosophical concepts of quiddity and haecceity originate in medieval scholasticism, particularly in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Quiddity (from the Latin quidditas, meaning "whatness") refers to the essence or nature of a thing—what it is. It answers the question: What kind of thing is this? For Aquinas, quiddity represents the defining form or kind of a being—its universal nature. Haecceity (from haecceitas, meaning "thisness"), introduced by Duns Scotus, refers to what makes a thing this particular individual and not another. It is the principle of individuation that distinguishes one being from another, even if they share the same quiddity.
In classical metaphysics, these two concepts operated within a framework of substance and essence. Quiddity was tied to general kinds or universals, while haecceity provided the metaphysical glue that grounded those universals in concrete, particular existence. The assumption was that a thing’s identity could be captured by listing its essential properties (quiddity), and then distinguished from others through its unique thisness (haecceity), even if the nature of that thisness was not always fully explicable.<br>Process philosophy, particularly in the work of Alfred North Whitehead, reimagines these concepts through a radically different metaphysical lens. In this view, reality is not composed of enduring substances with static essences but of actual occasions—momentary events of experience that come into being through processes of becoming and then perish. Within this framework, quiddity and haecceity are no longer static metaphysical attributes but dynamic, relational, and temporal elements of experience.
Quiddity in process thought refers to the pattern of eternal objects—Whitehead's term for pure potentials—that ingress into an actual occasion of experience. These...