The bare particular (just this) is for most people something between the curious and the nothing at all. It is, in fact, an I-don't-know-what, just that, in the fact before you. For example, the fact that this is my watch. The idea of watch has become just this very one. It is a rather common wonder of a boy, at least it was for me, that I am me. That you are you. That everything is just itself. The idea or the form of a thing is one thing, but its being just that one there is mysterious. I was easily impressed by it. Likewise, that now is now, that I, the very I that I am, am in this now now. And the same for you and everything else. That here is right here. That this watch glows in the dark and that one doesn't. This one! And on and on – I think you get the point. It is an idea both easy and impossible. Whatever that thing is that accounts for these thoughts, that is the ground and the cause of my thinking them, is the bare particular.

But we have to continue because more wonder accrues. Given a this, and given the idea or form of watch that I have found attached to it, what, in fact, draws them together in attachment, so that this is a watch and not an elephant? So that the particular and its form are one? It is an intimate union, in deed. The tying is tight. It is the Tie! Or in the Latin that rules, the Nexus.

All that is good and well, but one more very sticky problem remains. Bare particular, form and nexus are all united in a most compact unity, but we have just thought them separately in an ontological thinking! The difference between them is not only clean and perfectly complete, but it is vast, it is momentous for our existence. The philosopher views simple things, these first things, as strangely, beautifully from outside this complex world of which there is no other world.

We are all, I think I can safely say, looking for the why of existence. I don't mean something so shallow as the explanations that science gives, which are utterly unsatisfying in their puffed up importance. We are looking for the ground, the final substance of things, the unseen being of things, but we see nothing because there is nothing there to be seen. At least with an ordinary seeing, and all else is suspect. Suspicion and doubt and the uncanny rule. We are floating in the negativity of the Uncertain. A tenuous abstraction. In the Unsafe.

Such are bare particulars and Forms away from all particulars and the Nexus that determines beyond appeal. A filigreed certainty in the Uncertain. The un-united within the Un-united. And the thought of Being as that collapses.