The Lives of Things

by Charles E. Scott

Overview

“[Scott] argues that things have lives beyond our cognitive grasp but are nonetheless formative of memories . . . thought, language, and action” (Choice).

In The Lives of Things, Charles E. Scott reconsiders our relationships with ordinary, everyday things and our capacity to engage them in their particularity. He takes up the Greek notion of phusis, or physicality, as a way to point out limitations in refined and commonplace views of nature and the body as well as a device to highlight the often-overlooked lives of things that people encounter. Scott explores questions of unity, purpose, coherence, universality, and experiences of wonder and astonishment in connection with scientific fact and knowledge. He develops these themes with lightness and wit, ultimately articulating a new interpretation of the appearances of things that are beyond the reach of language and thought.

“Like Foucault and Levinas before him, though in very different ways, Scott makes an oblique incision into phenomenology . . . [it is] the kind of book to which people dazed by the specters of nihilism will be referred by those in the know.” —David Wood

“Refreshing and original.” —Edward S. Casey

“This new work situates Scott . . . as a leading American scholar in the Continental tradition. In this important new contribution, he argues that things have lives beyond our cognitive grasp but are nonetheless formative of memories (biological, institutional, and cultural), thought, language, and action. Scott’s argument underscores the importance of the physicality (phusis) of things, which has been sidelined in philosophical thought. Dewey’s and Heidegger’s consideration of physicality and the relation between the pragmatist and Continental traditions are built on to develop an account of phusis that emphasizes animation, lightness, density, and the thereness of physicality. Scott’s analysis of density, luminosity, and physicality in Foucault’s and Heidegger’s work and of the displacement of subjectivity is incisive and critical. His final chapter on nihilism is a significant contribution in rethinking nihilism’s negative connotations and resituating it as allowing for a multiplicity of discourses, for regions of recognition, and for life-affirming experiences. Scott’s wit and personal experiences are woven throughout the text. Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty.” —N. A. McHugh, Choice

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253028273
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2021
Series:	Studies in Continental Thought
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	771 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles E. Scott is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The Question of Ethics, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics in Politics (both published by Indiana University Press), and The Time of Memory.

Read an Excerpt

The Lives of Things

---

By Charles E. Scott

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2002 Charles E. Scott
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02827-3

---

CHAPTER 1

Facts and Astonishments

[T]his story is a test of its own belief — that in this cockeyed world there are shapes and designs [that we can discern], if only we have some curiosity, training, and compassion and take care not to lie or be sentimental.

— Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

I was right when I thought that two friends, a poet and an artist, would think less well of me if I told them that facts are as effective as "poetic experiences" in occasioning astonishment and a sense of wonder. I did not doubt that they were correct in referring to wordless experiences of wonder in which a mountain or a human face or an infinity of other things stands out with awesome singularity and power and escapes conceptual grasp. I am familiar with such events. But when I said that the "facts" of evolution, high-energy physics, biochemistry, or astronomy can have much the same effect, they could not hide their disappointment. The poet's eyes narrowed slightly, the edges of his lips dropped fractionally, and the veins in his forehead that were standing out with engorged excitement a moment earlier waned in deflation. The artist just looked at the floor and tapped his index finger on the chair arm in a way that reminded me of my high school principal tapping his fingers just before he passed sentence on some of us who had successfully penetrated the inside of the girls' empty dressing room. (We had wanted to see what it was like in the mystical presence of their absent bodies.) The poet, artist, and I had been talking about vividness in experience, about the importance of not succumbing to the lure of everyday life with its mundane demands — indeed about the importance of freeing ourselves from the crassness of popular culture, for the sake of a pristine astonishment before the lives of things. I recalled reading an article about the size of the universe when I was seventeen and sitting in my hometown barber's chair. The point of the article was that the "known" universe is so immense that it exceeds the reach of human imagination and that scientific facts help people to extend their imaginative range before this immensity. And, the article continued, seeing how mysteriously big the universe is according to astronomers, imagine how mysteriously huge, how inconceivable is the creative power of God. The intervening years have considerably rusted the latter thought, but the first observation about fact, immensity, and wonder struck home. I even found a certain poetic quality in the notion of facts' engendering a sense of astonishment and wonder without injury to the facts or the wonder. Why shouldn't actual events in their recognition give rise to astonishment?

But the intrusion of such objective, if suspiciously speculative, factuality struck my friends as a kind of betrayal. Isn't that the very kind of objectivity and scientific technological mentality that we must resist in order to see things with astonished attention to their lives? Doesn't wonder arise in connection with "something" beyond the reach of facts?

I didn't think so. At least the "something beyond the reach of facts" that gives rise to wonder struck me as a statement of at least proposed actuality, i.e., a proposed fact. I reported that the gargantuan amount of unperceived "matter" that "had" to be in the "universe" according to calculations that I do not understand gave rise to astonishment as far as I was concerned — not to mention the reported actuality of supernovas, galaxies, light years, and the beginning of gravity. I said that I was even thrown into astonishment when I looked at infrared pictures of one galaxy eating another. It's not only a matter of intense surprise about the facts and speculations. It's also a state of mind to which, in my case at least, the facts and speculations led, and in which the occurrences of barbershops and of us in them felt astonishing.

That's not the point, the poet said. You're talking about your reaction to the size and distance of the universe. I'm talking, he said, about the mystery in and with the life of each thing, in a bridge or an old barn, or in the face of a child.

Well, I wondered, what about a plastic spoon, litter in the street, a McDonald's sign, or a pimple?

He didn't care much for what he detected in my attitude, but he was about to respond in a guardedly positive direction, I thought, when the artist said enthusiastically, "Yes! Yes, that too and so much more. It all depends on how you see pimples and plastic spoons. They too can be beautiful — not pretty, but beautiful, if you can really see them, really experience their texture and color in their striking presence." I took his point, although I wondered about a lyric to the purple pimple upon her nose. (See! How she flourishes! / See! How she grows! ...) Wonder has an originary quality that exceeds facts. ("Is that a fact?" I said to myself, silently.)

Okay, I said. But now let's say that someone gives an account of the life of a pimple, the facts of its bacteria and other microscopic elements, its cellular origins and processes of formation, an account of the very building of this pimple — all that happened and happens in its coming into being and its being able to come into being. I believe that the account would need to tell us about the "making" of some of those microscopic elements in the explosion of stars billions of years ago, their movements through space and their splattering over the earth, their endurance during the earths own formation as well as the development of cells and cellular organizations that "know" when and how to produce pimples. Wouldn't that be simply astonishing? Isn't it a question of learning how to read with your intellect, feeling, and imagination as you are guided by those perceived processes that come to fruition (as it were) in these pussy beings on this nose? Seeing it by means of a history of facts would fill a book. Aren't we talking about a possible story that could give rise to astonishment? A story built on facts, no matter how tentative and culturally determined those facts might be? Doesn't scientific objectivity carry with it a high potential for eliciting and expressing astonishment?

The conversation did not stop there because both the poet and the artist thought that I was not giving due consideration to the fallout of scientific objectivity in a society that is mesmerized by facts and the technology that, depending on your perspective, makes them or uncovers them. They thought that the overall effect of scientific objectivity is found in the loss of a state of mind that is predisposed to astonishment and wonder, one more given to everyday preoccupations — in short, a predisposition to banality. I, on the other hand, thought that their perspective might be predisposed by a quasi-religious belief that "real" astonishment (its very fact) requires a sense of transcendent mystery, a predisposition that places a person in a virtually worshipful state of mind, one that divides and opposes at least quasi-sacred and profane realms. When all hints of divinity, "calling," and exceptional perceptiveness dissolve, what would be left other than a profane sense of magnitude and meaningless force? Astonishment and wonder would be left, I thought, and left without disappointment over the loss of "the sacred" and without diminishment of attentiveness to the unspeakable wonder of lives, even when these lives are also measured. Lives are, as a matter of fact, forever breaking the measurements and shining in their passing intensities.

I wish that I had also said to my friends that astonishment, too, is a fact, if "fact" means an occurrence that is communicably recognized in the occurrence's appearing. And I might have said, too, that "facts" means statements about what happens (as well as other actual happenings) that can change as knowledge and perceptions change, that facts are social events and bear all manner of mutable elements, and that factual certainty is, in fact, fairly changeable over time. But at least I got this much articulated in our conversation: astonishment and facts — mundane facts — can be friends; there appears to be no necessary reason why various disciplined knowledges — "the" sciences among them — should be antidotes to astonishment and wonder or why people who prize astonishment and come to ideas, poems, and paintings in its inspiration should view scientific knowledge and mentality with suspicion, as though such knowledge and mentality were somehow hostile aliens to people of wonder — unless, of course, wonder must have a quasi-worshipful basis to be wonder at all. Then, I suppose, that factual claim about wonder would eliminate from consideration a lot of other facts and their combinations from being able to generate wonder.

I would like now to pursue further some of these observations about astonishment with the intention of showing that an inclination toward astonishment inheres in some people's physicality and is manifest in the very situations that are presented by mundane facts. If I carry out this intention successfully, I will also eliminate a certain loftiness and an image of transcendence that often attaches to interpretations of astonishment. The emotional overtones that sometimes come with experiences of mystery will be lowered a notch or two and brought back into the everyday world. Astonishment, I wish to propose, is for many people part of the everyday occurrences of their lives. It belongs together with facts. The cost of separating it from the everyday is found in senses of special qualities in those people who enjoy astonishment as well as in judgments of decadence regarding those who do not pay much attention to it. By emphasizing the physicality, contingency, and worldliness of astonishment, its "at homeness" with facts, I believe that we can dispense with judgments of privilege and transcendent regions of reality that have traditionally often swarmed around it.

* * *

Let's begin again, this time with ears and sounds instead of poets and artists. No matter how intricate and complex the occurrences of hearing are, the waves, intensities, vibrations, amplifications, and cellular transfers in ears do not by themselves compose even one meaning, much less astonishment. Perceptive meaning and astonishment come from elsewhere. But consider the metaphors and allusions that "we" use in speaking of the physiology of hearing. People have "inherited" auditory "equipment" from their aquatic "ancestors." The outer ear is "gathering equipment." The ear as a whole is an "energy transformation system." Composing the ear are canals, drums, tubes, and cavities; ossicles, chains, anvils, stirrups, and mallets; vestibules, windows, rooms, and labyrinths; codes, waves, hydraulic systems, analyzers, envelopes, and even a superior olive — words that mean several different things and that in this application transfer and accrue both ordinary scientific and unscientific meanings. As we learn to speak of the ear's anatomy, we are in a remarkably rich metaphorical field that speaks of the pre-meaning processes of sounding. I will return in a moment to this strange juxtaposition of meanings, metaphors, and processes that appear to be outside of the range of meaning and metaphor.

By means of a package not much larger than a sugar cube, ears hear sounds that are found by transmissions of waves of air pressure, which are transformed into waves of liquid, which in turn produce miniscule movements in tiny hair cells, which excite neurons and bio-electric energy. No meaning yet in that astonishing process. Nor is there meaning as our ears establish a sense of balance and our brains calibrate intensities, coordinate patterns, and match sounds. After all of that and much more happen, a person can hear the sounds and still ask, "What did you say?" Or, "What was that noise?" Or not hear with alertness anything at all.

The facts of ears and auditory functions appear in these words and concepts richly endowed with meaning, fully connected with wide ranges of experiences and established recognitions (e.g., windows, waves, and olives). And in their meaningful appearances a dimension of their occurrence can be discerned that, while meaningfully recognized, considerably exceeds their meaning. Such excess of meaning in the meaningful appearance strikes me as an important component in the astonishing factuality of hearing. An excess with the worldly, textured, and meaningful occurrence and the complex transfers of meanings in metaphorical language altogether compose the factual understanding of hearing. And while people certainly do not need that understanding to hear, the mechanical, metaphorically transforming language that figures their understanding can help in an allowance of soundings difference from heard meanings. The instrumental, equipmental, and mechanical usage refers meaningfully to dimensions of sounding occurrences that sound outside of the boundaries of meaningful alertness as they are converted to significant perceptions. Heard meanings, in other words, cover over considerably with meaning the impersonal, pre-significant goings-on in hearing that our instrumental metaphors call attention to. It's this difference in hearing between meaning and no meaning that facts of physiology bring out and that I find ingredient in the possibility for one kind of astonishment.

To speak of the instrumentality of a loving whisper or of the sounds of Mahler's First Symphony or of the modulations in a subtle suggestion can sharpen our alertness to the completely impersonal, utterly corporeal, and "other" dimension in even our most stirring auditory experiences. This is a dimension that can noisily qualify, like a galactic wind, our sense of familiarity and purpose in our hearing. It can give reticence to feelings of full and encompassing meaning and allow us to "overhear," perhaps, in our understanding of sound the minuscule slosh of salty solution in our inner ears, a solution that came out of the sea with our amphibious predecessors as nothing more (nor less) than a balancing mechanism. Our humanity and meaning stretch only so far in our lives, and the human meanings of sound come through "tunnels," "caves," and "electromagnetic fields" that compose our lives as much as the values by which we make our way in the world.

The metaphorically expressed, culturally evolved, scientifically construed facts of hearing make stark the awesome, impersonal complexity of this tiny organ and set an interpretive stage for experiences of the astonishing occurrence of meanings and all else by which we communicate with sound.

Consider these bits of information about ears. They detect soft sounds that move the eardrum one tenth of the diameter of a molecule and loud sounds that are ten trillion times stronger than that. The balance system that aquatic animals brought with them from the sea to the land remains a vital function in human inner ears. The fluid in the middle ear now transfers degrees of amplified vibration into tiny wave actions, and the mechanical linkage of vibration and waves provides the hydraulic movement that passes on in cellular movements in minuscule hairs that activate neurological responses (bio-electric energy) in the brain. Such highly tuned transferal activity takes place before patterns of sound are available for the brains decoding and people have something that appears meaningfully. If our ears were more sensitive we could hear the random movements of molecules in the air, a cacophony of sounds that would drastically alter human perceptions and, I assume, our entire orientation in the world as well as our ordinary understanding of it — a continuous sounding without ordered patterns that would constitute a backdrop in the brains perception of everything it hears and hence in everything that it experiences.

Even without this extreme sensitivity, the patterns and orders of sounds that we hear are nonetheless given randomness with their enormous range of frequencies, intensities, directions, sources, and interspersing silences. When I stop for a moment and listen to all that I can hear, I do not have the impression of an ordered piece of music, even like that of George Gershwins symphonies of city sounds or of Dmitri Shostakovich's transpositional, atonal string quartets. These sounds that I hear are not authored to hang together nor are they in any sense "written." They do have this ears location as a site of hearing, and they are ordered only somewhat by the ear's complex limits. But the silences among them and the randomness of their trajectories and frequencies give a fading and ephemeral quality to the limits of hearing what I hear where I happen at the moment to be. In order to hear something we "block out" sounds, cock our ears as it were, and add the forces of concentration to the silence-pervaded mess of waves that wafts and sloshes and beeps through our hammers, stirrups, and hydraulic systems to the fringes of our consciousness where they appear in their distinctions.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Lives of Things by Charles E. Scott. Copyright © 2002 Charles E. Scott. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Preliminary Table of Contents:

Preface
Part 1. Physicality
1. Facts and Astonishments
2. What's the Matter with "Nature"?
3. Phusis and Its Generations
Part 2. Topics at "Nature's" Edge
4. Physical Memories
5. Starlight in the Face of the Other
6. Physical Weight on the Edge of Appearing
7. Lightness of Mind and Density
8. Feeling, Transmission, Phusis: A Short Genealogy of "Immanence"
9. Psalms, Poems, and Morals With Celestial Indifference
10. The Phusis of Nihil: Sight and Generation of Nihilism
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Like his On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics, (CH, Oct'97), this new work situates Scott (Pennsylvania State Univ.) as a leading American scholar in the Continental tradition. In this important new contribution, he argues that things have lives beyond our cognitive grasp but are nonetheless formative of memories (biological, institutional, and cultural), thought, language, and action. Scott's argument underscores the importance of the physicality (phusis) of things, which has been sidelined in philosophical thought. Dewey's and Heidegger's consideration of physicality and the relation between the pragmatist and Continental traditions are built on to develop an account of phusis that emphasizes animation, lightness, density, and the thereness of physicality. Scott's analysis of density, luminosity, and physicality in Foucault's and Heidegger's work and of the displacement of subjectivity is incisive and critical. His final chapter on nihilism is a significant contribution in rethinking nihilism's negative connotations and resituating it as allowing for a multiplicity of discourses, for regions of recognition, and for life—affirming experiences. Scott's wit and personal experiences are woven throughout the text. Highly recommended for upper—division undergraduates through faculty."—N. A. McHugh, Wittenberg University, Choice, February 2003

". . . [T]his new work situates Scott (Pennsylvania State Univ.) as a leading American scholar in the Continental tradition. . . . Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty.February 2003"—Choice

From the Publisher

Like his On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics, (CH, Oct'97), this new work situates Scott (Pennsylvania State Univ.) as a leading American scholar in the Continental tradition. In this important new contribution, he argues that things have lives beyond our cognitive grasp but are nonetheless formative of memories (biological, institutional, and cultural), thought, language, and action. Scott's argument underscores the importance of the physicality (phusis) of things, which has been sidelined in philosophical thought. Dewey's and Heidegger's consideration of physicality and the relation between the pragmatist and Continental traditions are built on to develop an account of phusis that emphasizes animation, lightness, density, and the thereness of physicality. Scott's analysis of density, luminosity, and physicality in Foucault's and Heidegger's work and of the displacement of subjectivity is incisive and critical. His final chapter on nihilism is a significant contribution in rethinking nihilism's negative connotations and resituating it as allowing for a multiplicity of discourses, for regions of recognition, and for life—affirming experiences. Scott's wit and personal experiences are woven throughout the text. Highly recommended for upper—division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice - N. A. McHugh

. . . [T]his new work situates Scott (Pennsylvania State Univ.) as a leading American scholar in the Continental tradition. . . . Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty.February 2003

Choice

Like his On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics, (CH, Oct'97), this new work situates Scott (Pennsylvania State Univ.) as a leading American scholar in the Continental tradition. In this important new contribution, he argues that things have lives beyond our cognitive grasp but are nonetheless formative of memories (biological, institutional, and cultural), thought, language, and action. Scott's argument underscores the importance of the physicality (phusis) of things, which has been sidelined in philosophical thought. Dewey's and Heidegger's consideration of physicality and the relation between the pragmatist and Continental traditions are built on to develop an account of phusis that emphasizes animation, lightness, density, and the thereness of physicality. Scott's analysis of density, luminosity, and physicality in Foucault's and Heidegger's work and of the displacement of subjectivity is incisive and critical. His final chapter on nihilism is a significant contribution in rethinking nihilism's negative connotations and resituating it as allowing for a multiplicity of discourses, for regions of recognition, and for life—affirming experiences. Scott's wit and personal experiences are woven throughout the text. Highly recommended for upper—division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice - N. A. McHugh]]>