The Individuating Factor - Ownness, Jemeinigkeit, Haecceitas

Two indiscernible infants lie in a ward, banded on the first day. Beside them lie two indiscernible bands. Both pairs are two, and only one pair is anyone. An answer to which one is not yet an answer to someone rather than merely something, and an account that supplies only the first has explained the bands. This article defends one result of Montaruli's doctrine of modal coincidence against the objection most likely to be brought against it: that ownness is haecceitas minus the constituent and Jemeinigkeit minus the first-person requirement — two subtractions, and the conjunction renamed. The objection is answered by taking both rivals at full strength, trying the conjunction it proposes, and showing what the pair yields and what it leaves standing in the ward. Scotus is engaged on the Ordinatio II, d. 3 in the Vatican edition, with the vocabulary corrected: the contracting principle there is entitas individualis, differentia individualis, ultima realitas entis, and haecceitas — Scotus's own coinage on three independent attestations — occurs rarely and, where it does occur, not in reference to the individuating factor. The argument against him is architectural rather than a denial of his datum, and it is made from the friendliest available exposition: on Cross's own count, the doctrine has three terms where the question concerned one, and the particular is numerically one because it includes the component introduced to explain it. The explanation is not circular; it is one term short. Heidegger is engaged on two passages of Sein und Zeit that are not, so far as the author is aware, standardly read as they are read here. At SZ 283 the analysis of Schuldigsein, having spent two pages in the with — owing, a claim, being the ground of a lack in another's Dasein — is formalised so that the vulgar phenomena of guilt related to concerned being-with-others drop out. What survives is Grundsein einer Nichtigkeit: from owing another, to grounding a nothing; and at SZ 286 the order inverts, with what was disclosed relationally made derivative of what is reached alone. This is not a reconstruction of what an architecture required. It is a printed methodological instruction, followed by its execution. At SZ 273–276 the call of conscience — silent, unworldly in its caller, coming aus mir und doch über mich — is read as an addressive relation with its term removed; and Heidegger's own refusal of that reading at SZ 275, where the caller's indeterminacy is called nicht nichts, sondern eine positive Auszeichnung, is quoted in full before any reply is offered. The positive account holds that the coincidence is not assembled, and that the two alleged subtractions are consequences of that single claim. Non-vicariousness is the differentiating character of the who-category, grounding no who and standing beneath none; it faces two ways, refusing that the coincidence recur and that anyone stand in this place; and it carries plurality twice — inwardly, other whos, without whom the refusal would be empty; outwardly, other ways of being, without which it would differentiate nothing. Neither is inferred. Both are read off formulations already given. The article prints four conditions under which it fails, and names which of them is the likeliest to succeed. Keywords: individuation; haecceity; Duns Scotus; Heidegger; Jemeinigkeit; mineness; ownness; non-vicariousness; modal coincidence; personal identity; Sein und Zeit; being-with; Mitsein; guilt; conscience; deixis; phenomenology; a-metaphysical ontology; Kant; dignity.