Hopkins’ Double Discovery, of Scotus and of Himself

‘However, this is me, not you’ writes Hopkins gnomically in his response to a letter from Robert Bridges that makes an unsuccessful attempt to persuade his friend to read Hegel. It is a remark that belongs to the attempt Hopkins makes to come to terms with what he refers to as his ‘self-taste’ and ‘how he finds himself’: ‘searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being’: my ownmost existence, Dasein, as might be said by Heidegger in the light of his dissertation on the theory of categories and signification he and others attributed to Scotus. But nota bene, that theory brings with it the challenge of resolving the apparent inconsistency of maintaining both that haecceitas signifies the singular and that it does so with a name and noun that signifies the universality of the -itas that forms part of that name and of its English equivalent ‘-ity’ in ‘singularity’. Likewise with the ‘-ness’ in ‘thisness’. Hopkins’ resolution of this dilemma, one suggested by the deliberate or happily accidental dropping of the initial aspirate of haecceitas, is to hear these terms not as nominatives but as primarily non-terminal imperatives, for instance ecce, ‘behold’, ‘listen’.