The irreducible particularity of beings

“I have never asked that all trees have one bark” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise

I

Each angel is its own species, Thomas Aquinas tells us. “Why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for every object?,” asks Roland Barthes. In those I see the rightness and certainty of context I also find in the lines of A.R. Ammons:

though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.

Why not each its own science and species, having-been for the rest of eternity?

II

Is our sense of incompleteness the felt part of an irreducible particularity of each being, that sense we never body forth as representative or total? This sense has been professed by very different world systems and believers:

“The [French] Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists he is unknown to me,” declared conservative critic, Joseph de Maistre.

Or consider the more recent lines of poet, Fernando Pessoa,

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.
I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space