The Cultural Power of Personal Objects

Description

The Cultural Power of Personal Objects seeks to understand the value and efficacy of objects, places, and times that take on cultural power and reverence to such a degree that they are treated (whether metaphorically or actually) as "persons," or as objects with "personality"—they are living objects. Featuring both historical and theoretical sections, the volume details examples of this practice, including the wampum of certain Native American tribes, the tsukumogami of Japan, the sacred keris knives of Java, the personality of seagoing ships, the ritual objects of Hinduism and Ancient Egypt, and more. The theoretical contributions aim to provide context for the existence and experience of personal objects, drawing from a variety of disciplines. Offering a variety of new philosophical perspectives on the theme, while grounding the discussion in a historical context, The Cultural Power of Personal Objects broadens and reinvigorates our understanding of cultural meaning and experience.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Traditional Accounts

1. Mereology: Wholes, Parts, and the Big Thicket
Pete A. Y. Gunter

2. Personality in Seagoing Ships
Marc M. Anderson

3. Personified Objects and Objectified Persons in Ancient Egypt
Martin Pehal

4. Seeing and Time: Personal Divinity in the Object of Hindu Devotion
John W. August III

5. Convergence and Divergence of Spirit: Tsukumogami and the Personality of Objects
Kevin C. Taylor

6. The Journey of the Javanese Keris
Alan G. Maisey

7. Cherokee Nonhuman Persons in Dual Realms
Carrie McLachlan

8. The Quilt as Personal Object
Sasha L. Biro

Part II: New Perspectives

9. The New Materialism: A Critique
Michael Jackson

10. Constituting Personal Objects, Constituting Persons
Dwayne A. Tunstall

11. A Personalized Cultural World: A Cassireran Phenomenology of Personalized Intuition
Jared Kemling

12. The Comfort of Things: Personal Objects, Possession, Dwelling, and the Desire to Be God in Sartre and Levinas
James McLachlan

13. Have We Effectively Made Money a Person and Ourselves Its Corporeal Embodiment?
Helen Grela

14. Wampum, Person, and the Life of Exchange
Randall Auxier

15. How My Piano Uses Gendlin's Focusing Method
Ralph D. Ellis

16. Meditating on the Vitality of the Musical Object: A Spiritual Exercise Drawn from Richard Wagner's Metaphysics of Music
Eli Kramer

17. Bring Out Your Dead: Human Bodies, Cultural Objects, and Personality
Laura J. Mueller

18. Sex Robots and Solipsism: Towards a Culture of Empty Contact
Charles W. Harvey

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Métaphysique
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Éthique et morale
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Pragmatism
• Metaphysics
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438486185
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

THE CULTURAL POWER OF PERSONAL OBJECTS
SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought

Randall E. Auxier and John R. Shook, editors
THE CULTURAL POWER OF PERSONAL OBJECTS
TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTS AND NEW PERSPECTIVES
EDITED BY
JARED KEMLING
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Kemling, Jared, editor.
Title: The cultural power of personal objects : traditional accounts and new perspectives / Jared Kemling, editor.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438486178 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438486185 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Traditional Accounts
Chapter 1 Mereology: Wholes, Parts, and the Big Thicket
Pete A. Y. Gunter
Chapter 2 Personality in Seagoing Ships
Marc M. Anderson
Chapter 3 Personified Objects and Objectified Persons in Ancient Egypt
Martin Pehal
Chapter 4 Seeing and Time: Personal Divinity in the Object of Hindu Devotion
John W. August III
Chapter 5 Convergence and Divergence of Spirit: Tsukumogami and the Personality of Objects
Kevin C. Taylor
Chapter 6 The Journey of the Javanese Keris
Alan G. Maisey
Chapter 7 Cherokee Nonhuman Persons in Dual Realms
Carrie McLachlan
Chapter 8 The Quilt as Personal Object
Sasha L. Biro
Part 2: New Perspectives
Chapter 9 The New Materialism: A Critique
Michael Jackson
Chapter 10 Constituting Personal Objects, Constituting Persons
Dwayne A. Tunstall
Chapter 11 A Personalized Cultural World: A Cassireran Phenomenology of Personalized Intuition
Jared Kemling
Chapter 12 The Comfort of Things: Personal Objects, Possession, Dwelling, and the Desire to Be God in Sartre and Levinas
James McLachlan
Chapter 13 Have We Effectively Made Money a Person and Ourselves Its Corporeal Embodiment?
Helen Grela
Chapter 14 Wampum, Person, and the Life of Exchange
Randall Auxier
Chapter 15 How My Piano Uses Gendlin’s Focusing Method
Ralph D. Ellis
Chapter 16 Meditating on the Vitality of the Musical Object: A Spiritual Exercise Drawn from Richard Wagner’s Metaphysics of Music
Eli Kramer
Chapter 17 Bring Out Your Dead: Human Bodies, Cultural Objects, and Personality
Laura J. Mueller
Chapter 18 Sex Robots and Solipsism: Towards a Culture of Empty Contact
Charles W. Harvey
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who saw the value in this project and provided helpful feedback on how to improve it. I would also like to thank the editorial and production staff at SUNY; without them this volume simply would not exist. Versions of several chapters in this volume have been published elsewhere, and I would like to thank those publications for their permission to include the following works in this volume:
An earlier version of chapter 9 , Michael Jackson’s “The New Materialism: A Critique,” was originally published as “The New Materialisms,” in Critique of Identity Thinking (Berghahn: New York, 2019): 56–72.
An earlier version of chapter 16 , Eli Kramer’s “Meditating on the Vitality of the Musical Object: A Spiritual Exercise Drawn from Richard Wagner’s Metaphysics of Music,” was originally published in Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 3, no. 3 (2019).
An earlier version of chapter 18 , Charles W. Harvey’s “Sex Robots and Solipsism: Towards a Culture of Empty Contact,” was originally published in Philosophy in the Contemporary World 22, no. 2 (Fall 2015/Spring 2016).
On a personal note, I would like to thank my wife Larissa and my daughter Florence for their tremendous love, support, and guidance. Every day they inspire me, and gently remind me of the true value of philosophy.
Jared Kemling December, 2021
Introduction
The first question that a reader might reasonably have when opening this volume is: What do you mean by personal object? As it turns out, that is a very good question. It is also a very difficult question to answer—difficult enough to prompt us to create this volume. There is no single English term that encapsulates the whole of this concept; and different terms are liable to introduce different misunderstandings. I have chosen to call these experiences of “personal” objects because the word “personal” retains its connection to the concept of “person”—put succinctly, we wish to discuss “objects” (or at least, experiences usually labelled as objective) that are also persons. Depending on the case, these objects might be understood to truly be person in the fullest sense, or they may be objects that are metaphorically “person-like,” at least enough so as to be philosophically interesting. In other words, these objects might literally be a person in the full personalist sense (whether understood as possessing Kantian dignity, or various other conceptions of person). Or they might be understood as possessing a “persona” or a “personality” that gives them an aura unlike other objects.
The downside of choosing the term “personal” (as opposed to “vital objects” or “anthropomorphized” or similar) is that to the modern English speaker the term might connote “possession.” For example: that car is my personal property. While there is an interesting relationship between private property and personal objects (see for example chapter 13 of this volume), we do not want to limit our conversation to just this sense of the term. Somewhat closer to our usage is the sense of “personal” as a marker of importance and value: this car is personal for me because it was my mother’s. Why are certain objects more personal to us than others? Why do we so often give names to our cars (and ships, and weapons, and so on)? How is the experience of a personal object distinct from experiences of other objects? Personal objects are present in nearly every culture (as this volume will demonstrate), and they play a powerful role in our experience of the world. Further, these objects often have important cultural and sociological functions: whether religious, economic, ethical, aesthetic, or political. However, philosophy has not done an adequate job in addressing this aspect of the human experience.
The narrative of “modern” philosophy since Descartes, at least as it is commonly understood, has been the story of increasing dominance by a certain form of scientific and mathematical understanding of the world—an understanding that has taken a certain view of subjects and objects, which prioritizes quantifiable (mathematizable and measurable) articulations of experience. The benefits of this worldview have been great, but the detriments have at times been less emphasized. Questions concerning our Cartesian heritage (a broad term I take to mean not just Descartes but the style of philosophy that followed him) proliferated in the twentieth century: such questions were brought to crisis by the tragedies of the two world wars and the Cold War.
Now we live in a transitional time in which the dominance of that modern worldview has tilted (which is not to say that it does not remain incredibly influential). We are not yet sure if it will right itself, or if something new will rise in its place. It is not enough simply to critique the tradition or lose ourselves in skepticism; either solutions must be offered, or alternatives must be proposed. In the midst of this struggle, large sections of the academy are either struggling for new worldviews to articulate, or seeking to look back and reclaim something of what has been covered up by the dominance of Cartesian “modernism.”
It is in the spirit of both of these efforts that we have written this volume. Ironically, science itself has already in many ways outgrown “modern” philosophy—modern philosophy has failed to keep up. More critically, however, human cultures (especially Western European dominated cultures) have also failed to keep up. While work has been progressing on quantum physics and non-Euclidean geometries for over a century, culture at large is still firmly Cartesian. The effects of that influence are not aging well.
This volume attempts to broaden and reinvigorate our understanding of cultural meaning and experience. Personal objects—objects with significant cultural value (with personality)—are a class that cannot be understood from the standpoint of the dominant mathematized modern worldview. And yet, experiences of this sort are incredibly pervasive and appear throughout almost every culture. Most readers are bound to recognize their own experiences in depictions of different personal objects: for example, your grandfather’s watch is not just any watch. It has a personality that other (even materially identical) watches do not.
These experiences cannot be denied, and yet they also cannot be accommodated by the dominant cultural form. As a result, work is necessary either to adapt the dominant form or propose alternative forms of understanding. That is precisely what this volume seeks to do. Some authors look to existing or historical cultures for examples, while other authors propose new systems of cultural thought. Many chapters in the volume feature some blend of both approaches.
This volume has three aims. The