Thisness versus Thatness
Andy Crouch
July 1, 1999
I didn't get much out of my college class in Aristotle -- but I do remember one little word. What is it that makes a thing this particular thing and not something else? asked the Philosopher. The word he (well, his English translators) dreamed up for that particular philosophical problem was thisness -- that quality of being just this thing and not another. It happens to be the perfect word for what makes art, art. Novelist Alexander Theroux wrote recently of his "despair" at helping college students write "creatively." "Any reader can recognize Herman Melville or Gabriel García Marquez or Ernest Hemingway by a mere paragraph," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "But so many of the stories published each year are workmanlike, autumnal, droning, deliberate, efficient." Art, unlike the term papers of legions of "creative writing" students, is particularly, incomparably itself and nothing else. At the other end of the spectrum is the "new artists" sampler disk I popped into my cd player recently. Overstuffed with the agonized pathos that seems to be the exclusive province of basically comfortable middle-class young adults, these earnest musicians, each no doubt following their own muse, turned out track after track of sameness. Most of them had plenty of technique -- what they lacked was art. If they are unlucky, they will do very well at this sort of stuff, and will be told over and over that they are artists until they believe it. If they are lucky, some alchemy of suffering, inspiration, and risk will turn their technique into art. More likely, they will join the thousands of musicians in Nashville, New York, and Los Angeles who butter their bread in exquisite boredom by sounding like someone else, perfectly on cue, ...
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