The particularity of proper names

As for my own reading, I read two unrelated things this last week that seemed to share a fair bit in common. I'll see if I can flesh that out.

The first was a paper by Cora Diamond dealing with Wittgenstein's Lectures on Religious Belief. I find Diamond frustrating, because she's brilliant, insightful, and sometimes immaculately clear, but then sometimes seems to decide not to bother explaining what seems to me to be the crucial point. But that's neither here nor there.

In the paper, she talks (among other things) about a view she ascribes to Franz Rosenzweig, Kornelius Miskotte, Helmut Gollwitzer, and in a less academic way, Flannery O'Connor. This is a view opposed to the position that any mature thinker has outgrown an anthropomorphic conception of God, a position best exemplified by Norman Kemp Smith, who refers to God as "the Divine" in order to de-anthropomorphize divinity. These theologians that interest Diamond counter this position by insisting on the importance of God's having a name, and of His presence as not just an all-pervading divinity, but as being able to manifest itself in particular places at particular times in particular ways so that the Hebrews, for instance, could rightly talk about God's presence among their people as not just an instance of God's omnipresence.

This insistence that God have a name is closely tied to the particularity that proper names bestow: in calling my friend "Kevin," I associate him not just with a role or a set of qualities, but with his particular self, and if Kevin were to die, it would be no comfort if I were to befriend someone else with similar qualities because that someone else, no matter how similar to Kevin, wouldn't be the particular person that Kevin was.

One thing, Diamond claims, that the particularity of a name makes possible is that the named person can change us at the level of our concepts. She uses the example of George Eliot, who was famously ugly. If one got to know Eliot, saw her lively wit in conversation or read her books, one would come to see her as beautiful, and knowing this particular person as beautiful, despite her ostensibly ugly appearance, would have the effect of shifting our conception of beauty. Similarly, she claims, the idea that God has a name--has particularity--makes it so that God is not simply the word we associate with our concept of divinity, but that witnessing and contemplating God's actions--by considering the ways in which the Hebrew or Christian or whatever God manifests Himself to his people--actively shapes our conception of divinity. And, Rosenzweig and Miskotte claim, only by understanding God in terms of his actions can we understand what kind of responsiveness those actions call for in us.

The other thing I read, totally unrelated, and for unrelated reasons, was a short story by Peter Carey called "The Chance." It imagines a futuristic world in which a race of aliens called the Fastalogians have come to earth and mingled with us. Like the Americans before them, what they bring to the people that they come to dominate is superior technology, canny business acumen, and the ability to promise a better life. Their great product--or swindle--is called the Genetic Lottery, known colloquially as The Chance. For several thousand dollars, you can take a Chance, where your body and face are randomly changed, so that you may come out looking older or younger, prettier or uglier, but with most of your memories and the like intact.

The Chance has a devastating impact on the unnamed society our narrator lives in, though we're only given hints about just how it plays itself out. It's clear enough, though, that The Chance is like opium in China, becoming a universally addictive drug that becomes the most important thing in people's lives. People cease to take any interest in their present role, and are constantly saving for a Change that will thrust them into a new life. We get a sense of a crumbling city, where institutions are left to rot because everyone's too caught up in pursuing their next Chance and aren't connected to the present. (I'm doing a terrible job of relating this story).

Our narrator--a middle-aged man who's unable to raise the money for his next Chance because he spends all his meagre salary on booze to numb the pain of his downcast position--falls in with a beautiful young woman from a well-off family, who he can tell has never taken a Chance because of the comfort and ease with which she inhabits her body. Soon after they become lovers, he learns that she's a Hup, part of a revolutionary organization that wants to overthrow and kick out the Fastalogians, and that is disgusted with bourgeois ideals of beauty. Like senior members of the Hups, Carla wants to take a Chance as soon as she can so that she can make herself ugly and rebel against the societal standards that judge her beautiful. Our narrator is horrified at the thought, and we follow their relationship in the months and weeks leading up to her Chance, as he tries to persuade her to stay the way she is. I find the ending heartbreaking; I don't want to ruin it.

One of the things that the story captured quite well for me was this notion of particularity, this time coming not with a name but with a face and physiognomy. The cliché that beauty is only skin deep fails to appreciate just how much of our expressiveness is uniquely our own, and that cliché in a way does violence against our particularity in insisting that a different physiognomy could just as well express the same person. The Hup mentality, with a few alterations, could be the mentality of Norman Kemp Smith, the view that the essential thing--about people, about God, about life--lies in concepts, abstractions, universals. What I find interesting about Carey's story, as well as the theologians Diamond discusses, is the fierce insistence upon particularity, however superficial or superstitious it may seem.

And like Diamond's example of Eliot's particularity being able not just to instantiate a pre-conceived concept of beauty, but to effect a shift in that concept, what I find moving about the story is that the two main characters effect a shift in one another's concept of what love is, so that what's threatened by Carla's intention to take a Chance is the love that they've discovered by sharing in one another's particularity.

I think there's a lot more to be said about particularity, though I think I've typed enough for now, and I'm not sure what more I might say. One thing to remark upon in closing is a thought a professor articulated for me some years ago, that only language, through the use of proper names, opens up a world of particulars for us. Here he distinguishes between particularity and specificity. I can hone in on identifying Kevin with greater or lesser degrees of specificity by picking out various qualities that attach to him--American, student of French literature, frequently unshaven, etc.--and while sufficient specificity may pick him out uniquely, that uniqueness is merely contingent, as it relies on the fact that it just so happens that no one else shares just that set of properties. The particularity that proper names gives us allows for an entirely different way of picking out uniqueness.