Sentence examples for whatness from inspiring English sources
The word "whatness" is a correct and usable word in written English
It is often used in philosophical and literary contexts to refer to the inherent nature or essence of a thing or concept. One example of its usage could be: "The poet's main theme in the novel was the whatness of human existence and the search for meaning in an uncertain world."
The fixed entities are not the "archetypes" of the existent entities but are rather identical ('ayn) with them; nor are they "essences", if by this is meant anything other than the entities' specific whatness.
Her monochrome landscapes, made using long exposures at dusk or early morning, alert us in their meditative way not just to the thereness, but also to what James Joyce called the "whatness" of things.
It is, rather, a non-qualitative property of a substance or thing: it is a "thisness" (a haecceitas, from the Latin haec, meaning "this") as opposed to a "whatness" (a quidditas, from the Latin quid, meaning "what").
Another way to describe the apprehension of the whatness of a thing is to say that it is a realization of what the world would look like if you were dead.
What Joyce meant by an epiphany was, he said, just "a revelation of the whatness of a thing" — a sudden apprehension of the way the world unmediatedly is.
What Joyce meant by an epiphany was, he said, just "a revelation of the whatness of a thing"—a sudden apprehension of the way the world unmediatedly is.
It's as if he had set out, time and again, to nail down the whatness of his objects but couldn't get beyond the preliminary matter of their whereness.
The grand form of death in stories has to do with Joyce's notion of "the whatness of a thing".
Eventually, they experience an unfamiliar feeling that he calls the "no-matter-whatness".
There's a certain so-whatness to this juxtaposition of the self-taught James Castle's drawings and collages with late Polaroids by the sophisticated photographer Walker Evans.
One that seems today to have a high quotient of so-whatness is "Yucatan Mirror Displacement" (1969), involving the installation of foot-square mirrors at various sites on the Yucatan peninsula to give different twists to the landscape, shown here in a series of photographs that accompanied a fantastical travelogue Smithson wrote for the magazine Artforum of that year.
