I came across this description after reading this column by David Brooks in the New York Times, highlighting a number of answers to the question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? The question formed the basis for a symposium organized by edge.org to which 164 thinkers submitted their answers.
The concept of haecceity (described by Bruce Hood) resonated with me in the context of our discussions of hybrid as well as the idea of classic. I am intrigued by the idea that a gradual transformation of an object can still yield an impression of the object being the same, being familiar (such as the point about restoring/rejuvenating works of art). Thus far perhaps we've been thinking about the hybrid as a different form, but what if it were the same form, altered in some slight way? Perhaps altered many times in small ways so that it was fundamentally "different" but still appeared the same?
Haecceity is originally a metaphysical concept that is both totally obscure and yet very familiar to all of us. It is the psychological attribution of an unobservable property to an object that makes it unique among identical copies. All objects may be categorized into groups on the basis of some shared property but an object within a category is unique by virtual of its haecceity. It is haecceity that makes your wedding ring authentic and your spouse irreplaceable, even though such things could be copied exactly in a futuristic science fiction world where matter duplication had been solved.
Haecceity also explains why you can gradually replace every atom in an object so that it not longer contains any of the original material and yet psychologically, we consider it to be the same object. That transformation can be total but so long as it has been gradual, we consider it to be the same thing. It is haecceity that enables us to accept restoration of valuable works of art and antiquities as a continuous process of rejuvenation. Even when we discover that we replace most of the cellular structures of our bodies every couple of decades, haecceity enables us to consider the continuity of our own unique self.
Link to all the responses here.
