Individual est ineffabile

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Individuum est ineffabile ( Latin for “The individual cannot be grasped”) is a philosophical sentence . It can be used in different ways and is classically understood as an epistemological thesis: our terms only cover general things (e.g. "man"), and thus in principle no concrete individual objects (e.g. "Socrates").

The idea comes from ancient Greece. It can be found in Plato and Aristotle , for whom, for the reason mentioned, no knowledge of the individual is possible. In particular, according to Aristotle, there can be no definitions of individual sensible beings. The doctor Galenus stated that the patient could not be described by a formula.

The phrase is often ascribed to scholasticism ; it is not literally there, but it can be proven in a general sense. For example, Thomas Aquinas , following Aristotle, formulated that the individual cannot be scientifically discussed. Something similar can be found in Francisco Suárez . Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz formulated the idea more literally and often discussed the problem of a conceptual definition of the individual.

Even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took up the idea. With him there is also the thesis that we only mean empirical content, a "sensual being", but cannot ultimately say it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe seems to have found the idea in Baruch Spinoza or Leibniz and speaks enthusiastically about it several times, for example in an often quoted letter to Johann Caspar Lavater of September 20, 1780. Johann Gottfried Herder also takes up the idea.

The romantics have the proof of the intangibility of the individual tries to base their opposition to a presumption of the general concept over the individual. The sentence can also be understood here in the sense of an opposition between ontology and personal individuality: All otherwise existing objects are to be classified under ontological terms, but not persons . In this sense there are continuities, for example, with Martin Heidegger , Theodor Adorno and French philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas .

Like Leibniz, Franz von Kutschera justifies the inability to detect individuals with the assertion that they have an infinite abundance of properties. Even if one accepts individual terms, these can never be completely analyzed using general terms and at best are labels, not descriptions.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Metaphysics 7, 15, 1039b 27
  2. ↑ De med. meth. 10, 159f, 181f, 206
  3. ↑ Cf. but Johannes Assenmacher: History of the Individuation Principle in Scholasticism (= research on the history of philosophy and pedagogy 1,2), Leipzig 1926, p. 3
  4. ↑ Expositio in 4 libros Met. Arist. 1 meteor 1a; see. W. Janke: Article Individual , in: Theologische Realenzyklopädie Vol. 16, S. 117
  5. ↑ Disputationes Metaphysicae 1,5,146: Commune enim seu universale dicitur, quod secundum unam aliquam rationem multis communicatur, seu in multis reperitur; unum autem numero seu singulare ac individuum dicitur, quod ita est unum ens, ut secundum eam entis rationem, qua unum dicitur, non sit communicabile multis ut inferioribus et sibi subiectis aut quae in illa ratione multa sint.
  6. ↑ Nouveaux essays , 3,3,6
  7. ↑ Phenomenology of Spirit , works ed. Lasson, Vol. 5, 82
  8. ↑ Jannidis; Dirk Kemper: Ineffable. Goethe and the problem of individuality in modernity , Munich 2004
  9. ↑ See e.g. B. Josef Wohlmuth : Chalcedonian Christology and Metaphysics , in: M. Knapp / Th. Kobusch (ed.): Religion-Metaphysics (Critique) -Theology in the Context of Modernity / Postmodernism . Berlin-New York 2001, pp. 333–354, here 340
  10. ↑ See e.g. B. Franz von Kutschera : Aesthetics , Walter de Gruyter 1998, p. 49
  11. ↑ A somewhat more detailed discussion of the reference problem A. Pieper: Article Individual , in: H. Krings / HM Baumgartner / Ch. Wild (eds.): Handbuch philosophischer Grundbegriffe , Vol. 5, Munich 1973, pp. 728-731, almost completely in López accessible online