On the Nature of Thingness
One of the most beautiful things in the world, and also the saddest, is
the object which does not yet exist, except as a pure potential.
A pure potential is a possibility for connection -- for love and wonder, for hatred
and fear, for sadness and joy. It is a potential for becoming an object of experience, a "thing."
A pure potential has no hole and is entirely open, says the poet Zbigniew Herbert.
It is timeless: "Neither blindness nor death can take it away."
And yet in its openness it is missing something. It cannot cry or
suffer or enjoy. It cannot fall in love or remember the past.
It has no reason to hold onto a lover's hand in the moonlight,
knowing she is dying of cancer and will someday be gone.
The formed things of the world, the things that can feel, give flesh to
the abstractness of what is potential. They give potentiality its life.
and yet the potentials give the formed things life, too.. Without the
the potentiality for form, for structure, for feeling, there cannot be
formed things in the first place.
Without no-things there can be no things.
Emptiness is form and form is Emptiness, says the Heart Sutra. Only with
the sounds of abstraction, can there be ears to hear and a world to love.
What is a Thing?
What is a thing? This most beautiful thing, says the poet Zbigniew Herbert in his poem Study of the Object offered below, is the object which does not exist. It is beautiful because it is a pure potential. It does not carry water or preserve the ashes of a hero. A rat could not drown in it. The hairs of all its lines form one stream of light.
It is an empty space bristling with possibility because not yet actual. Herbert speaks of it as "a white paradise of all possibilities." The philosopher Whitehead calls it the realm of eternal objects. It can be felt by the imagination and entertained by the intellect. But "it" is not exactly an it. It is a thing that is a no-thing.
A Thing is Something that Can be Felt
So what is a thing? The word has many meanings. Here are some of them:
Many people use the word "thing" to refer only to actual things. They don't consider possibilities to be things. They think that just because something doesn't exist it is not real. Whitehead disagrees. He believes that something can be real but non-actual. One example of this is what we call the future. It lies ahead of us, as not yet actual. And yet it's non-actual "reality" is something we apprehend all the time through anticipatory feelings. We prepare for it; we are afraid of it; we look forward to it; it helps define us. Another example of something real-but-not-actual would be a fictional character in a movie. The actor is actual, but the character presented by the actor dwells in our imagination as a real presence, with qualities of his or her own, even as the character is not an actual person. The point is simple: something does not have to be actual in order to be powerful.
Things can be Actual or Potential
So what is an actual thing? Whitehead believes that an actual thing is something that makes decisions and, in so doing, 'actualizes' possibilities. For the moment we might simply say that an actual thing is something physical, something with a surface. It is physical in the sense that it can be physically felt by our bodies. On this view a body of any sort is a thing. A person is a thing. A river is a thing. A mountain is a thing. Even the earth's atmosphere is a thing. A thing can be sentient or insentient, clearly bounded or vaguely bounded. Even the soul of the universe -- the cosmic life whose body is the universe itself -- is a thing, sometimes called "God."
It is important to recognize that not all "actual things" are available to visual perception, even as they have outsides and insides. Consider the sounds of music. The sounds can be "here" in this part of the world but not "there" in that part of the world, which means that they have an inside or an outside. But they can only be heard, not seen. The same applies to odors or scents. And to tastes. We see the apple, but we do not see the taste of the apple; we simply taste it. Emotions such as anger and tenderness and worry and hope are actual things, too. Whitehead says that they have forms of their own, but that their forms are subjective not objective. He calls them "subjective forms."
Some people who are influenced by science, technology, engineering, and math may be tempted to think that "things" must be subject to definitions, and that the best definitions are mathematical, because they seem "precise." But mathematics is simply one language for understanding a thing, and it abstracts one aspect of a thing while neglecting or even hiding from others. Another person is a clear example of this. We miss so much if we describe a person and her life only with quantitative measures. We miss what is most important in her life: her relationships and feelings, her hopes and dreams, the story of her life. Often poetry and film and music are much better at describing a person than are the rubrics of mathematics.
It is an empty space bristling with possibility because not yet actual. Herbert speaks of it as "a white paradise of all possibilities." The philosopher Whitehead calls it the realm of eternal objects. It can be felt by the imagination and entertained by the intellect. But "it" is not exactly an it. It is a thing that is a no-thing.
A Thing is Something that Can be Felt
So what is a thing? The word has many meanings. Here are some of them:
- an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to.
- an inanimate material object as distinct from a living sentient being.
- an action, activity, event, thought, or utterance.
- any object of any sort that can be felt in any way
Many people use the word "thing" to refer only to actual things. They don't consider possibilities to be things. They think that just because something doesn't exist it is not real. Whitehead disagrees. He believes that something can be real but non-actual. One example of this is what we call the future. It lies ahead of us, as not yet actual. And yet it's non-actual "reality" is something we apprehend all the time through anticipatory feelings. We prepare for it; we are afraid of it; we look forward to it; it helps define us. Another example of something real-but-not-actual would be a fictional character in a movie. The actor is actual, but the character presented by the actor dwells in our imagination as a real presence, with qualities of his or her own, even as the character is not an actual person. The point is simple: something does not have to be actual in order to be powerful.
Things can be Actual or Potential
So what is an actual thing? Whitehead believes that an actual thing is something that makes decisions and, in so doing, 'actualizes' possibilities. For the moment we might simply say that an actual thing is something physical, something with a surface. It is physical in the sense that it can be physically felt by our bodies. On this view a body of any sort is a thing. A person is a thing. A river is a thing. A mountain is a thing. Even the earth's atmosphere is a thing. A thing can be sentient or insentient, clearly bounded or vaguely bounded. Even the soul of the universe -- the cosmic life whose body is the universe itself -- is a thing, sometimes called "God."
It is important to recognize that not all "actual things" are available to visual perception, even as they have outsides and insides. Consider the sounds of music. The sounds can be "here" in this part of the world but not "there" in that part of the world, which means that they have an inside or an outside. But they can only be heard, not seen. The same applies to odors or scents. And to tastes. We see the apple, but we do not see the taste of the apple; we simply taste it. Emotions such as anger and tenderness and worry and hope are actual things, too. Whitehead says that they have forms of their own, but that their forms are subjective not objective. He calls them "subjective forms."
Some people who are influenced by science, technology, engineering, and math may be tempted to think that "things" must be subject to definitions, and that the best definitions are mathematical, because they seem "precise." But mathematics is simply one language for understanding a thing, and it abstracts one aspect of a thing while neglecting or even hiding from others. Another person is a clear example of this. We miss so much if we describe a person and her life only with quantitative measures. We miss what is most important in her life: her relationships and feelings, her hopes and dreams, the story of her life. Often poetry and film and music are much better at describing a person than are the rubrics of mathematics.
Study of the Object
1
The most beautiful is the object which does not exist it does not serve to carry water or to preserve the ashes of a hero it was not cradled by Antigone nor was a rat drowned in it it has no hole and is entirely open seen from every side which means hardly anticipated the hairs of all its lines join in one stream of light neither blindness nor death can take away the object which does not exist 2 mark the place where stood the object which does not exist with a black square it will be a simple dirge for the beautiful absence manly regret imprisoned in a quadrangle 3 now all space swells like an ocean a hurricane beats on the black sail the wing of a blizzard circles over the black square and the island sinks beneath the salty increase 4 now you have empty space more beautiful than the object more beautiful than the place it leaves it is the pre-world a white paradise of all possibilities you may enter there cry out vertical-horizontal perpendicular lightning strikes the naked horizon we can stop at that anyway you have already created a world 5 obey the counsels of the inner eye do not yield to murmurs mutterings smackings it is the uncreated world crowding before the gates of your canvas angels are offering the rosy wadding of clouds trees are inserting everywhere slovenly green hair kings are praising purple and commanding their trumpeters to gild even the whale asks for a portrait obey the counsels of the inner eye admit no one 6 extract from the shadow of the object which does not exist from polar space from the stern reveries of the inner eye a chair beautiful and useless like a cathedral in the wilderness place on the chair a crumpled tablecloth add to the idea of order the idea of adventure let it be a confession of faith before the vertical struggling with the horizontal let it be quieter than angels prouder than kings more substantial than a whale let it have the face of the last things we ask reveal o chair the depths of the inner eye the iris of necessity the pupil of death —Zbigniew Herbert From The Collected Poems, 1956-1998 (Ecco), translated by Alissa Valles. Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/study-of-the-object-by-zbigniew-herbert#ixzz5S1Pc8sly |
On the Nature of Thingness from Nathan Davis on Vimeo. On the Nature of ThingnessFrom the New York Times Review, Dada
"In Whitehead’s ontology actual space-time is filled by actual atomic (indivisible) entities: it is not empty. But there is also a yet-to-be-filled space-time, which, however, is a mere potentiality." 
|