Seeing Through God: A Geophenomenology

10. SEEING THROUGH SEEING THROUGH

156 SEEING THROUGH SEEING THROUGH landscape and inscape What force does the schaft of the Landschaft acquire in the light of what has been written by the thinker-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins? Calling Hopkins a poet does not exclude the possibility that he is also a scientist, at least insofar as poetry, poieō, schaffen, is at the beginning of science—Wissenschaft—not only for the so-called pre-Socratic scientistpoets Heraclitus, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and so on, but for modern scientific methodology too, as was demonstrated in our chapter (Chapter 3) on the methodologies of the so-called rationalist Descartes and the so-called empiricist Bacon. The question how the natural sciences might be related to creatively aesthetic practice and how both are related to an ecologically sensitive ethics can be approached by asking how the relationship between certain tenets of Aristotelianism and Thomism, on the one hand, and of Scotism, on the other, was crucial in Hopkins’s life and work. It is important to remind ourselves that one of the tenets of the Aristotelianism and Thomism that Hopkins’s Jesuit education impressed upon him 157 seeing through seeing through is that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. The kind of hylomorphism advocated by Aristotle, however, does not allow that there can be a science of the singular. The genus informs the species and the species informs matter, but there is no science, no knowledge, of the singular or individual this. Duns Scotus, a follower of Saint Francis of Assisi, upheld the subtle doctrine that there is an essence of the singular thing that is its thisness, its haecceitas. On February 20, 1875 Hopkins wrote to Robert Bridges from Saint Beuno’s College in North Wales that he had been reading Duns Scotus and that he cared for him ‘‘more even than Aristotle and more pace tua than a dozen Hegels.’’∞ But well before this date, and before he had begun reading Scotus seriously three years earlier, Hopkins had experienced what he called the inscape of things. This scape, this Schaft, in a thing is the thing’s uniqueness, selfhood, or ipseity. Hopkins also found this thisness in species. It would therefore be in the inscape of the species that science would come face to face with the poetry and prose in which Hopkins endeavored to inscape his motif, that is, to express its inscape. Face to face, because the inscape of the maximally specific, of the infimae specii, is the place where the scientists Polanyi and McClintock and the poet Hopkins discover what they all three call a personal knowledge of things, a Wissenschaft , where the Aristotelian universal, conceptualized in the Critical philosophy of Kant, is not merely instantiated by a particular, but is singularized , and the It regains the respect accorded to it by, among others, Martin Buber, if not by Emmanuel Levinas, or by the latter only derivatively from its relationship to another human being. In his self-styled ‘‘Greek’’ thinking, Levinas repeatedly maintains that there is no way to God except through the other human being. Buber seems to make the possibility of an I-Thou relationship with something we would usually refer to as an It depend upon the relationship of the It to God. Unsurprisingly, this latter dependence, mutatis mutandis, is often affirmed by Hopkins. Levinas’s humanism does not posit any such onto-theological dependence. Nor does it rule out such a dependence. But it eschews the language of onto-theological relations. Its language is the language of the ethical relation from which Levinas holds they derive their sense. So the most he can say is that the word ‘‘God’’ derives what sense it has from the humanism of the other human being. On several occasions he goes as far as to allow that the work of art may present a face, and therefore may have an ethical force. But he appears never to allow that works of nature themselves exert any ethical force upon humans. The forces of nature call for no ethical response. He leaves it to scientists such as Einstein to speak of ‘‘cosmic religiosity.’’ Whether with Cicero we take religio to derive from religare and to imply nothing more than the idea of a ligature, or with Lucretius take it to derive from religere, meaning to re-collect, gather, or, perhaps, read together ,≤ for Levinas cosmic religiosity would amount to either pantheistic [18.191.228.88] Project...