Love Before Intelligibility: A Metaphysical Proposal (and Its Hardest Objections)

I. Love and the Ground of Plurality

Metaphysics has long assumed that plurality must be secured by difference. If there are two, there must be something—some property, position, structure, or intrinsic mark—that makes them two. I intend to deny this. I will argue that numerical distinctness need not arise from qualitative differentiation at all. It can arise from love. Before there are describable features, before there is structural articulation, before there is anything that could be counted as an internal ground of identity, there can be non-substitutability—because there can be address. If this is correct, then individuation is not primitive thisness nor formal placement within a system, but the donation of a “you.” And if that is so, plurality itself is personal at its root.

I wish to defend a thesis that will initially appear extravagant: numerical distinctness can be grounded extrinsically—by divine love—prior to any qualitative, structural, relational, or intelligible differentiation. This proposal is not rhetorical flourish. It is a deliberate relocation of the ground of individuation. I reject both the appeal to brute thisness—haecceities or bare particulars posited as metaphysical atoms—and the appeal to purely formal criteria, whether relational position, qualitative difference, or structural role. In their place I propose a personal ground: addressability, the possibility of being second-personally related to by God.

The core claim is austere: non-substitutability need not arise from intrinsic difference. It can arise from being loved.

We are to imagine pre-articulated loci of possibility that are not yet intelligible in the sense of possessing determinables or determinates. They bear no describable profile; they are not “thin objects” awaiting enrichment. Yet they are addressable. Addressability is not a property within them. It is a mode of grounding in God.

The Logos is the one in whom intelligibility is articulated. Articulation here is not conceptual imposition upon chaos, but the taking-up of what is addressably given into determinate form. Determination does not create its own field ex nihilo; it gives intelligible contour to what is already available to be taken up. The Spirit, in turn, is the one in whom articulated possibilities acquire normative weight. The Spirit does not enter the chain of events as a competing cause among causes. Rather, the Spirit orders salience and fittingness within a teleological field, constituting what shows up as to-be-done without coercing the doing.

Christology names the decisive instantiation of this structure. The incarnation does not assume a universal human nature functioning as an abstract medium shared across already constituted individuals. It assumes a concrete addressable particular whose life becomes the normative center of an opened teleo-space into which other particulars may be aligned. If this holds, individuation is not brute, modality is not abstract, universality is not generic, and divine action is not reducible to episodic intervention. Yet the cost is evident: we must show that the framework does not collapse under metaphysical strain.

II. Addressability and the Objection from Haecceity

The first objection is immediate and sharp. If two loci possess no differentiating feature—no qualitative difference, no structural distinction, no relational position—what makes them two? Is “addressability” merely haecceity under another name? If God addresses x and y distinctly, what makes this two rather than one addressed twice?

The force of the objection depends upon an unnoticed assumption: that counting precedes the constituting act. On the account I am proposing, it does not. Addressability is not a thin feature inhering in a locus. A haecceity, however minimal, remains a property belonging to the individual and securing its identity from within. Addressability, as I employ it, is not any feature of the locus whatsoever. It is a constitutive act of divine love that donates non-substitutability without introducing describable content.

We must distinguish arbitrary selection from constitutive bestowal. Arbitrary selection presupposes a plurality of already-countable items and merely chooses among them. Constitutive bestowal is the source of plurality itself. Arbitrariness presupposes fungibility. Love does not. Love is structurally non-fungible. It does not intend “an instance of a kind.” It intends “you.” That you-ness is not a profile, not a set of predicates, not an internal principle. It is non-interchangeability grounded in personal donation.

The charge of fiat will be raised. Yet every ultimate ground appears as fiat if one demands a further ground beneath it. The question is not whether the ground is ungrounded in the same register, but whether the mode of grounding invoked is intelligible. Love is intelligible as non-fungible intention. It is primitive, but not irrational. It halts regress not by stipulation, but by disclosing a different order of grounding.

A second objection presses further: if these loci are “not yet intelligible,” how can we refer to them at all? Does not addressability already imply proto-intelligibility?

Here the distinction between intelligibility and this-directedness becomes decisive. Intelligibility consists in articulable content—determinables and determinates that can be stated, predicated, formalized. This-directedness is the bare possibility of second-personal relation without describable content. To say “addressable but not intelligible” is not to posit a shadow-realm. It is to mark a limit-condition required if articulation is genuinely articulation rather than invention.

If Logos-articulation is to be more than projection, something must be available to be taken up without already being conceptually formed. That availability is not a hidden property; it is pre-semantic givenness referable by God, though not describable by us. Conceptual articulation does not exhaust ontological availability. The excess is not another concept waiting to be coined; it is the condition under which any concept can have purchase.

III. Universality, Normativity, and the Non-Causal Spirit

The Christological objection follows. If Christ assumes a concrete particular rather than a universal human nature, how does his life become relevant to other particulars? Classical Christology has appealed to shared nature precisely to avoid arbitrary particularism.

The alternative is not arbitrary isolation, but shared participation in a Logos-open teleo-space. The unity of articulation across loci is secured by the one Logos. Teleo-spaces are not private spheres. If the same Logos articulates multiple loci, the field of sense can be genuinely shared without presupposing a universal substrate. The Spirit then functions as agent of normative alignment. The Spirit does not merely render Christ psychologically compelling; the Spirit renders Christ normatively authoritative within other teleo-spaces. Christ’s life becomes measure of fittingness.

Universality, then, is not the universality of a nature abstractly possessed, but the universality of a normative center communicable across created particularities. Christ cannot be merely exemplary. He must be the particular in whom Logos-articulation becomes maximally public and teleologically central. Otherwise alignment degenerates into aesthetic resonance rather than redemption.

The final objection concerns the Spirit’s “weighting” of possibilities. If the Spirit orders salience and fittingness, is this simply causal influence? If not causal, is it merely phenomenological?

The distinction required is that between event-event causality and normative constitution. Event-event causality answers the question, “What happens next?” Normative weighting answers the question, “What counts as fitting action for an agent?” The Spirit’s work concerns the constitution of practical intelligibility—what shows up as to-be-done—without entering the chain of events as a competing cause. To avoid reducing this to subjective affect, one must affirm that the Spirit constitutes an objective ordering of reasons within the teleo-space. Experience is our mode of access to that order; it is not its ground.

Agents must indeed be capable of responding to reasons. The Spirit does not replace agency; the Spirit renders agency answerable. Freedom is preserved precisely because the good can present itself as demanding without becoming inevitable. Normativity is real without being coercive.

IV. The Severe Conclusion

If the distinctions I have insisted upon are maintained, the relocation of metaphysical centers becomes clear. Individuation moves from brute thisness to personal grounding. Modality moves from abstract possibility-spaces to addressable loci. Universality moves from shared natures to shared teleo-spaces. Divine action moves from event-causation to the constitution of intelligibility and normativity.

The final claim is neither sentimental nor ornamental. Love is not an adornment placed upon an already-structured metaphysical order. It is the ground by which plurality, intelligibility, and normativity first become possible. An impersonal ground may secure structure. It cannot secure non-fungibility. It cannot account for why there is this one rather than another, nor why “you” is not substitutable for “someone.”

If intelligibility is grounded in Logos and plurality is grounded in love, then metaphysics is personal at its root—not by projection, but by structural necessity. The alternative is either brute multiplicity without reason or formal unity without non-substitutability. Neither suffices. Only personal donation halts the regress without collapsing into arbitrariness, and only such donation renders counting itself real.

Bare Particulars, Trinity and Incarnation I

I

I was blessed thirty years ago to be a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Iowa.  It was in the 1980s, a time where the influence of the "Iowa School" was rapidly waning.  The "Iowa School" of philosophy was associated inter alia with the work of Herbert Feigl, Gustav Bergmann, Wilfred Sellers and Everett Hall.  These men deeply understood logical positivism and further grasped that ontological questions could not be disassociated from it.  While none were teaching at Iowa in the 1980s, excellent philosophers like Panayot Butchvarov remained who were profoundly interested in questions of contemporary metaphysics.   

Of all of the Iowa philosophers, Gustav Bergmann was perhaps the most interesting.  Born in Vienna in 1906 with a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Vienna, Bergmann was briefly a member of the famous "Vienna Circle" before moving to Berlin in 1931 to work with Einstein on certain aspects of mathematical physics.

Bergmann later migrated to America in the late 1930s and was invited to the University of Iowa to work with the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin.  While Bergmann and Lewin parted company fairly quickly, Bergmann made connections at Iowa and was appointed a lecturer in the early 1940s, finally progressing to full professor by 1950.    Bergmann stayed in Iowa City beyond his retirement in 1974.  I remember seeing him occasionally in the philosophy department in the early 1980s when I was there, often reading an Italian novel.  Unfortunately, he developed Alzheimer’s and succumbed to the disease in 1987.  

Bergmann was committed to logical positivism early on, and retained a general orientation towards logical empiricism throughout his life.[1]  He was also an unregenerate realist who held that metaphysics was not only possible, but necessary if one was going to give a coherent account of the ontological structure grounding the semantic conditions of ideal language.  Starting with the syntax of the language of formal logic, Bergmann attempted to make explicit the logical structure of that language by pointing to the metaphysical constitution of the objects and states of affairs referred to by that language.[2] 

The Iowa School has always been interested in the metaphysics of universal and particulars, believing that careful analysis of a logically perspicuous language could bear metaphysical fruit.   And Bergmann’s vineyard was indeed lush!   A committed realist who granted ontological status to various kinds of abstract objects, Bergmann advocated that the common sense particulars of which we are directly acquainted, e.g., this ball and that spot, are actually not metaphysically simple, but rather are constituted by metaphysically more basic bare particulars exemplifying various universals.  Bergmann thus argued for a “complex ontology” while eschewing a “functional ontology” (Frege).[3]   There is much wisdom to be gleaned in reading Bergmann, though such reading is mostly out of favor today.[4]

II

In this essay I want to review Bergmann’s notion of a bare particular with an eye towards its theological appropriation.   Is there any way that this notion can be helpful in understanding the ontological grounds for Trinitarian and Christological discourse?  

Bergmann’s Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong gives a description of what he means by a ‘bare particular’. 

A bare particular is a mere individuator.  Structurally that is its only job.   It does nothing else.   In this respect it is like Aristotle’s matter, or, perhaps more closely, like Thomas’ material signata.   Only, it is a thing.[5]

Bergmann claims that two red spots can “exemplify” the same universals (e.g., redness, spot-shapeness), and are yet different spots because they are constituted by different bare particulars.  Like Aristotelian primary substances, bare particulars can neither be “said of” any other thing nor be “present in” something else.  Furthermore, while bare particulars are predicated, they cannot be predicated of any other thing.  Bare particulars, unlike properties, are thus the ultimate subjects of predication.  While ‘white’ can be “said of” particular white properties or can be “present in” particulars as such, it can also be predicated: this particular white property had by this particular can itself be said to be white.[6]  This is not possible with a bare particular.  In phrases like ‘x is a bare particular’, the “is” must be one of identity and not attribution.  

Bill Vallicella has written quite cogently about the metaphysical situation regarding bare particulars.[7]  Such particulars, while possessing properties, have no natures, that is, they have nothing by virtue of which the particular is the particular that it is.  Bergmann countenanced that an external relation of exemplification obtains between bare particulars and the universals that are “exemplified” in them.   For instance, bare particular a can exemplify whiteness and felininity (catness), in that whiteness and felininity are both “here.”   The relation of exemplification is external because there is nothing about whiteness or felininity that necessitates there exemplification at a.   Conversely, there is nothing about being a that requires whiteness and felininity to be so exemplified. Since every bare particular is externally related to the properties that are exemplified at that particular, the properties had by the bare particular or merely accidental to it.   While this particular exemplifies white and felininity, it is possible for it to have exemplified black and canininity (dogness). 

The fact that bare particulars are not Aristotelian substances is easily grasped.  Aristotelian substances have a “layer” of properties without which the particular could not be the particular it is.  One might say that the individual is internally related to its nature for Aristotle.[8]  As Vallicella points out, on an Aristotelian understanding, the particular Fido is no longer free to take on any property whatsoever.  The dog Fido cannot, as it were, take on the property of felininity and still be the dog Fido.  In other words, the particular Fido is a canine in each and every possible world in which Fido exists.  

This is not the case with the bare particular a, for apparently, a can take on properties like canininity or felininity at will as it skirts through possible worlds.  The capability a posseses to do this is necessary if a is properly to individuate, for a bare particular simply is that which individuates two qualitatively identical objects.   This red spot and that red spot are individuated by the fact that this red spot is this one and that red spot is that one.   A bare particular always exemplifies some property or other, but does so only contingently. Any properties exemplified at a are simply primitively exemplified at a.  There is no deeper ground in a, no nature, that determines the expression of any particular properties at a.   Vallicella terms this feature “promiscuous combinability”: each bare particular can “hook up” with any universal, in that it is logically possible for any universal to be exemplified at any bare particular. 

Bergmann is a constituent ontologist holding that bare particulars are ingredient in each ordinary particular, that is, an ordinary particular is constituted by a bare particular exemplifying properties.   One could argue that a bare particular having constituent parts violates the nature of that particular’s particularity, and advance instead a non-constituent ontology for particulars.   On this view, there would be no deeper constitution of an ordinary particular. The particular is numerically distinct from other particulars, although that by which it is numerically distinct is not specified.  This seems the tactic of Nicholas Wolterstoff, who rejects Bergmann’s constituent analysis claiming that ordinary particulars are, in fact, simple.[9] 

At this point we might distinguish Bergmann’s “bare particular” from the notions of “thin particular” and “thick particular.”   David Armstrong seems – unjustly in my view -- to think his “thin particular” is different than Bergmann’s “bare particular.” But his distinction between thick and thin particulars is useful.   While a thin particular is a particular considered in isolation from the properties it instantiates, a thick particular is that thin particular considered in combination with the properties it instantiates.[10]  Armstrong declares, “the thin particular remains the particular with its attributes abstracted away.  The thick particular is again a state of affairs: the thin particular’s having the (particular) attributes that it has.  Armstrong’s thin particular, like Bergmann’s bare particular, is committed to a constituent analysis of ordinary particulars. 

I assume for the remainder of this article that the notion of a “bare particular” or “think particular” is ultimately philosophical defensible, though I know that much work is needed in making that defense.  As a theologian, my purpose is not to do the philosopher’s deep work at this time, but rather to move to a different question entirely.   What do the doctrines of the Trinity and two natures of Christ look like when assuming that notion of bare particularity?  How do “bare” or “thin” particulars relate to the tradition’s understanding of hypostasis and persona?  Finally, how might this discussion connect with Scotus’ notion of haeccity?   I will take up these questions in the next post.         
   

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[1] Defining “logical empiricism” is not easy.  Richard Creath writes, "What held the group together was a common concern for scientific methodology and the important role that science could play in reshaping society. Within that scientific methodology the logical empiricists wanted to find a natural and important role for logic and mathematics and to find an understanding of philosophy according to which it was part of the scientific enterprise.”  See Creath, Richard, "Logical Empiricism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .[2] For an overview of the life and philosophy of Bergmann, see William Heald, “From Positivism to Realism: The Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann, 1992, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/bai/heald.htm.
[3] His constituent ontology analyzes seeming particulars into bare particulars exemplifying universals.   A function ontology eschews “in” as the primary metaphysical relationship, substituting instead a coordinating function, e.g., the function of {green, oval, spatio-temporal location} as argument delivers “this spot” as a value.
[4] Bergmann does place fairly heavy demands upon his reader.   Those interested in his work should study the following:  Philosophische Analyse / Philosophical Analysis: Ontology and Analysis:  Essays and Recollections about Gustav Bergmann, eds., Addis, Jesson and Tegtmeier (Muenchen: Walter de Gruyter, 2013); Philosophische Analyse / Philosophical Analysis: Fostering the Ontological Turn: Gustav Bergmann (1906-1987), eds. Egidi and Bonino, (Muenchen: Walter de Gruyter, 2013); and Philosophsche Analyse / Philosophical Analysis: Gustav Bergmann: Phenomenological Realism and Dialectical Ontology, eds., Langlet and Monnoyer, (Muenchen: Walter de Gruyter, 2013).
[5]Gustav Bergmann, Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong (Madison, WS: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 25.
[6] All of this goes back, of course, to Aristotle in his Categories.   Aristotle famously said that only particular substances are neither “said of” nor “present in” something else.
[7] See http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2014/11/bare-particulars-versus-aristotelian-substances.html.
[8] a is internally related to b if and only if the being of a is in part determined by the being of b, e.g., I am internally related genetically to my father.  a is externally related to b if and only if the being of a is not affected by the relationship a has to b, e.g., my father is externally related genetically to me.
[9] See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Bergmann’s Constituent Ontology,” Nous 4:2 (May 1970), 116ff. 
[10] See David Armstrong, “Universals as Attributes,” 65-93, Michael Loux, Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings (New York: Routledge, 2001), 79:  “The thin particular is a, taken apart from its properties (substratum).   It is linked to its properties by instantiation, but it is not identical to them. . . .  However, this is not the only way a particular can be thought of.   It can also be thought of as involving its properties.  . . This is the thick particular.  But the thick particular, because it enfolds both thin particulars and properties, held together by instantiation, can be nothing but a state of affairs.”   Armstrong seems to think that Bergmann’s “bare particular” does not instantiate properties, a view that Bergmann explicitly denies.