Ecceity, Ipseity and Existents

Although Scotus sometimes seems to teach the opposite, he argues, like his compatriot David Hume will, that existence is really the same as essence. This is a doctrine that makes it easier to understand how, against Aquinas, Scotus can endorse Anselm’s argument for the necessity of the existence of God provided it includes a clause specifying that the concept of the highest thinkable being is free from contradiction. But the assertion of the sameness of essence and existence is not obviously true of finite existents. But it is existence as such to which attention must be given if it is to play the role envisaged for it in the blank ecology sketched out for it in the closing chapters of this book. Here it is sheer existence, not predicates, that ground the author’s hope for a widened and more just notion of ecological responsibility, one that listens to the teachings of Scotus and Hopkins and that holds for all the inscapes of the world simply because a thing’s own existence is a good for that existent and therefore calls for our aesthethical (sic) regard.

Categories and Transcendentals Transcended

In this chapter attention is directed again at the relation between attention and intention. ‘Phenomenological’ intentionality may but does not necessarily implicate the will. Whether it does depends among other things on whether willing is understandable as wanting. This is how volo is understood in a Latin phrase cited by Hannah Arendt from a letter to her from Heidegger who attributes it to Augustine, namely ‘Amo: Volo ut sis’. I translate this as ‘I love: I want you to be’. Arendt too has ‘I want’, though it seems to me that the translation ‘I will’ would have been more consonant with the expectations raised in the context of her opinions on Scotus whom she describes as ‘the lonely defender of the primacy of the Will over Intellect’, notwithstanding his own argument for the equiprimordiality of these rather than for the priority of one over the other. However the validity of his argument may depend on what we think of his contention that what he names the natural will (wanting?) is ‘not really will at all, nor is natural volition true volition, for the term “natural” effectively cancels or negates the sense of both “will” and “volition”.’ He appears to take the duality in question here as that of a power in relation to its perfection and what he describes as a heightening of pitch, instress and therefore will. These distinctions are only a few of those that have to be made if we are to be clear about the differences between velle, willing, nolle, being unwilling, velle-nolle, willing not to will, and non-velle, not willing. For Scotus’ purposes and the purposes of this study the most important of these possibilities is that of rejecting both of the original simple alternatives, velle and nolle. For one of the keys to an understanding of this study is an understanding of what it is to will not to will.

Being as Doing

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself, myself it speaks and spells; Crying What I dó is me: for that I came. These remarkable lines from ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ hark back seven centuries to Scotus’ emphasis on willing, and forward getting on for another hundred years to (let us say) the instress put by that Scotus scholar Martin Heidegger on the verbal-nominative grammar of Sein, the German word for being, preparing the ground for Carol Ann Duffy’s planting of the conceit of the verb at the heart of the noun thanks to which the self is said as selving and as a priori ‘yessing’, we discovered in chapter 3, that Hopkins borrows from Parmenides along with the latter’s hyphenation of being and thinking or perceiving (noieô).

Seeming, Observing and Observance

Literature is a treasury of likenesses and unlikenesses. Much is to be learned about the various ways ‘like’ and ‘as’ function from a comparison of how the kestrel is ‘worded’ by Hopkins and how the peregrine is addressed by John Alec Baker. Hopkins writes predominantly as a poet preoccupied with peculiarities or what I call ‘quaints’. Although much of the log of Baker’s observations of the peregrine is written in poetic prose out of love for the bird, much of it is driven by a concern for the increase of scientific knowledge. This difference is marked by the distinction between ‘as if’ and ‘if then’. That is to say, the appeal to Baker in this chapter facilitates an overview of the strategic design of the book as a whole. Located at the beginning of the book’s second part, this chapter heralds a turn toward the application to natural and human science of the logical and ontological lessons learned in the book’s first part. This emphasis on the scientific leads Baker’s readers to notice that allusions to the Creator are almost totally absent from The Peregrine, whereas Hopkins’ ‘The Windhover’ is dedicated ‘To Christ our Lord’. Hopkins’ observations are made in praise of the Creator. Baker’s are made in service to science. Together they announce the hope that adherence to an institutional religion is not a necessary condition of anyone’s finding the reading of Hopkins and (may I say?) this study a rewarding experience. But the field of institutional religions is not the same as that of the religious.

The Crux

Gerard Manley Hopkins called John Duns Scotus the rarest-veinèd unraveller of realty (sic). But unravelling and ravelling call for unravelling in order to lay bare that their meanings turn on the crucial antagonymy that throughout this book will be named chiasmus or chiasm. Another example of such crossover is a certain middle-voiced relation of activity and passivity which, subsequent chapters will show, meshes with the relation between intention and attention in which the latter is seen to have at least as much importance as its less neglected partner, phenomenological or quasi-phenomenological intentionality.

Afterword

The pivotal notion of willing not to will marries intention to attention. It casts light on the letting of letting-be, Seinlassen and Gelassenheit as these figure in the later writings of the author of the Treatise on Duns Scotus’ Theory of Categories and Signification. Willing not to will is the regard attention pays to intention. It is the disponible waiting for the coming of one knows not what, what may turn out to be unsolicited thoughts the imagination of which is both ‘subjectively’ and ‘objectively’ genitive, generative, receptively active and actively receptive: creative but also ‘decreative’ in the sense in which Simone Weil uses this word. Endowed with properties like these, is it any surprise to find that Hopkins’ mentor John Ruskin deems the imagination to be ‘the highest intellectual power of man’, despite that deponent power’s being placed between intellect and sensibility just like the will not to will?

From Method of Ignorance to Way of Love

Although against Giles of Rome Scotus holds that existence is not necessarily the cause or ground of thisness, he maintains that thisness may entail existence. When this entailment is associated with the propositions that the existence of a thing is a good for that thing and therefore to one’s own at least prima facie obligation not to be indifferent to its survival and wellbeing. But this argument for what we have named blank ecology glides from metaphysics to theology when Scotus maintains that the cause or ground of the thisness of finite worldly things is ultimately the will of the Creator. That is, the only undogmatic mode of facing this claim is to engage with the arguments of the theologians, even if our arguments amount to an adoption of the via negativa. Following that route is tantamount to following what in this chapter is referred to as the method of learned ignorance, docta ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa). A method is a means that is voluntarily applied, like Descartes’ typically Western Enlightenment method of doubt. A way is usually more passively pursued, as in Oriental religious practices. Via admits either interpretation, ideally a combination of both, right-brained ratiocination and left-brained waiting attentiveness, without which there is no love—and therefore no God, if, as we are told by theologians and poets like Hopkins’ favourite George Herbert in the poem by him that Hopkins liked most, God is verily Love.

Peirce’s Post-Kantian Categories

In Peirce’s terminology to be actualised means to exist. Existence falls within the category of Secondness which is intermediate between the purely qualitative presence of Firstness and the lawfulness of Thirdness in the triad of categories of being based on Kant’s list which he substitutes for the traditional Aristotelian and Scholastic decad. This substitution tallies with Scholasticism in that the argument by some Schoolmen for the reality of universals is succeeded by Peirce’s argument for the metaphysical reality of power and law. Passing from Peirce’s theory of categories to his theory of signs, a passage that is analogous to ones made by Scotus, in Heidegger’s treatise on Scotus, and in Locke’s Essay, we come upon the difficulty of reconciling Peirce’s assertion that the interpretant of a sign can be in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum with his assertion that it is possible to reach the ‘entire general intended interpretant’, ‘the very meaning’. Steps toward a dissolution of this problem are made by recognising the huge part played in Peirce’s theory by the would-be and the if-then of counterfactual conditionality, and by heeding the fact that the meaning is not the finite or infinite series, but a habit or practice conveyed by the series, hence not the sort of thing of which it makes sense to ask whether it is finite or infinite. What in opposition to nominalism Peirce calls his Scholastic realism and his pragmaticism are foreshadowed in the emphasis put on willing and doing by Scotus and Hopkins in their analyses of being.

Another Transcendental?

Having produced evidence, albeit fragmentary, for maintaining that Scotus is among those who are sympathetic to classing goodness or the good as a transcendental, it behoves us to ask whether he and-or Hopkins accord the distinction of transcendentality to beauty or the beautiful. That they do derives direct support from the putative fact noted above that transcendentals are mutually penetrative. That Hopkins does is further supported by what some of his readers, including this one, will regard as a tiresomely excessive use of the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’. He sometimes uses the noun ‘beauty’ as another name for God or for one of the attributes of the Singular Origin of Singularity: prima species primaque pulchritudo. The Latin species can be synonymous with ‘beauty’. It can also be translated by ‘pattern’, ‘design’, so perhaps too by ‘inscape’. When we grant that inscape is instressed in the way described in chapter 2 and if we accept that readiness to sacrifice oneself for another is a prerequisite of truly agapeistic love, we may begin to understand that the most beautiful word for beauty may be ‘loveliness’, provided that the verbal force of this word’s first syllable is acknowledged and with it that the love of loveliness is practical, an expression of the will, not least when moral loveliness is what we mean. Would that Hopkins had taken to heart Ruskin’s lesson that the highest beauty is sublime, and the highest sublimity beautiful. He would have seen the relation between beauty and sublimity as one of formal distinction. Beauty and sublimity are conceptually quite distinct from each other independently of any operation of reason, but they are metaphysically, a parte rei, not separable, even by God.

Some Transcendentals

Being, the topic of metaphysics, is the melting pot in which it and other so-called transcendentals, for example the good, truth and unity are ingredients in one another. But unity or oneness can be taken either numerically or less than numerically. Without this possibility Scotus cannot appeal to the notion of common nature as distinguished from universality and to the idea of a contraction of nature toward the non-numerical singularity in terms of which he defines distinctio formalis following the hint Avicenna gives when he says ‘horseness is horseness’. More than a hint toward phenomenological ontology is given by Scotus himself in so far as he recognises that the sphere of logic is the sphere of intentionality and that intentionality is intrinsic to the work of the categories and transcendentals in signifying judgement. So what is analogical in the field of reality is univocal in the ‘reduced’ field of logic. It remains to be seen whether this emphasis on intentionality conceals the need to be more attentive to attentionality.