The Lives of Things

Charles E. Scott

Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2003

"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

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.

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

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of mind
• Mind
• Body
• Continental

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 10 juin 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253028273
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE LIVES OF THINGS
Studies in Continental Thought
John Sallis, general editor
Consulting Editors Robert Bernasconi J. N. Mohanty Rudolph Bernet Mary Rawlinson John D. Caputo Tom Rockmore David Carr Calvin O. Schrag Edward S. Casey †Reiner Schürmann Hubert Dreyfus Charles E. Scott Don Ihde Thomas Sheehan David Farrell Krell Robert Sokolowski Lenore Langsdorf Bruce W. Wilshire Alphonso Lingis David Wood William L. McBride
The Lives of Things

CHARLES E. SCOTT
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
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© 2002 by Charles E. Scott
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition .
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 .
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Charles E. The lives of things / Charles E. Scott. p. cm. — (Studies in Continental thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34068-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21514-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy of nature. I. Title. II. Series. BD581 .S375 2002 113—dc2                                                  2001005670
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This book is dedicated to the people of Staniel Cay
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Part I
PHYSICALITY
1. Facts and Astonishments
2. What’s the Matter with “Nature”?
3. Phusis and Its Generations
Part II
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: The Sight and Generation of Nihilism
INDEX
PREFACE
But if literature is not enough to assure me that I am not justchasing dreams, I look to science to nourish my visions inwhich all heaviness disappears. Today every branch of scienceseems intent on demonstrating that the world is supported bythe most minute entities, such as messages of DNA, the impulsesof neurons, and quarks, and neutrinos wanderingthrough space since the beginning of time. . . .
—Italo Calvino        
I found the words that begin this preface in Six Memos for the Next Millennium . 1 Calvino speaks in these memos of lightness, quickness, exactitude,visibility, multiplicity, and, had he lived long enough to finish them, consistency.He does not speak of Nature, Substance, Origin, or Universe. Heuses words, rather, in “pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to theirinfinite variety” (26). Words, for him—and thoughts and perceptions,too—in their transformative, levitational energy, can lighten the weight ofliving. Full buckets, he observes, do not fly (29). To perceive things withlightness we need empty spaces, the fantasies of desires, the velocity oflively rhythms that break our hold on whatever we cling to. We need thedistances and incompletions that give us occasions for another look, anotherobservation, another fantasy—we need the “privation of life that istransformed into lightness” (28).
In such lightness we might speak of the lives and densities of things,their “unpredictable deviations and infinite, unexpected possibilities.” Wemight speak of the “dissolving . . . solidity of the world” (9). AddressingLucretius, Calvino says, “even the poetry of nothingness . . . issues from apoet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world”(9). Indeed, in their invisible mobilities and visible, passing distinctness—intheir very physicality—the lives of things encourage the philosopher aswell as the poet, in speaking of them, to speak also at once of nothing.
Were I to continue this preface on the airy avenues and byways thatCalvino’s words provide, I would engage, in addition to many of his other observations and references, his quotation from Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana that includes this observation: “we must‘reform within ourselves the meaning of the category of cause’ as handeddown by the philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, and replacecause with causes” (104, emphasis added). But these byways would thenturn my beginning into something improperly long. My intention now isno more than to introduce the tone and predisposition of this book and tospeak appreciatively of those who have provided ballast and light for meduring this work.
Susan Schoenbohm introduced me to “physicality” as a translation for phusis . That word and its variations play a major role in this book. MichaelBray and Wendy Hamblet helped with the research that informs Part 1 .Dr. Hamblet also provided, with exceptional kindness, order and connectionfor me at Penn State when I was away and writing for extended periodsof time. Omar Rivera gave me exceptionally adept editorial assistance,insight, and suggestions as the book neared completion. As I think ofthose whose thought, work, and support form part of the book’s intangibility,I return to Calvino (whom I read because of the encouragement ofDaniela Vallega-Neu and Alejandro Vallega): “Who are we, who is eachone of us, if not a combinatory of experiences . . . ? Each life an encyclopedia,a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everythingcan be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable. . . . Butperhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: thinkof what it would be to have a work . . . that would let us escape the limitedperspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our ownbut to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching onthe edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, tocement, to plastic” (124). While I do not presume to give speech to otherpeople or to things, I would like to speak appropriately in their regard, touse language so that in it, in moments of success, I am able “to approachthings (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respectfor what things (present or absent) communicate without words”(77) . I am indeed “a combinatory” of many influences, often bespoken inthis book, often kindly given, frequently insufficiently noted, by friendsand critics. I wish that I could name them all. These influences, in the airinessof their transformations in my writing, are lightly and persistentlypresent. I am grateful for the differences that they make.
I note in the dedication the people of Staniel Cay. They will have no interestin this book. But the people I know there begin—always it seems tome—with the life of whatever is before them, whether it be a fish, a machine,a wind, or a man with a basket, begin with its particular density,movement, and manner, with its uselessness or usefulness in their environment.I am not especially useful in their environment. I am rather an odd particular in a world saturated by practical know-how. But their hospitalityand support have not wavered before the singularity of this intellectual,and they too have helped to form some of the experiences that guide myefforts toward what Calvino calls a certain extraction of weight from ourlanguage regarding the lives of things.
1. Italo Calvino, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1985–86 , trans. Patrick Creagh (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Part I

PHYSICALITY
ONE
Facts and Astonishments

[T]his story is a test of its own belief—that in this cockeyed worldthere are shapes and designs [that we can discern], if only we havesome curiosity, training, and compassion and take care not to lie orbe sentimental .
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
I was right when I thought that two friends, a poet and an artist, wouldthink less well of me if I told them that facts are as effective as “poeticexperiences” in occasioning astonishment and a sense of wonder. I did notdoubt that they were correct in referring to wordless experiences of wonderin which a mountain or a human face or an infinity of other things standsout with awesome singularity and power and escapes conceptual grasp. Iam familiar with such events. But when I said that the “facts” of evolution,high-energy physics, biochemistry, or astronomy can have much the sameeffect, they could not hide their disappointment. The poet’s eyes narrowedslightly, the edges of his lips dropped fractionally, and the veins in his foreheadthat were standing out with engorged excitement a moment earlierwaned in deflation. The artist just looked at the floor and tapped his indexfinger on the chair arm in a way that reminded me of my high school principaltapping his fingers just before he passed sentence on some of us whohad successfully penetrated the inside of the girls’ empty dressing room.(We had wanted to see what it was like in the mystical presence of theirabsent bodies.) The poet, artist, and I had been talking about vividness inexperience, about the importance of not succumbing to the lure of everydaylife with its mundane demands—indeed about the importance offreeing ourselves from the crassness of popular culture, for the sake of apristine astonishment before the lives of things. I recalled reading an articleabout the size of the universe when I was seventeen and sitting in myhometown barber’s chair. The point of the article was that the “known”uni