Diminished things

Modern thought is often materialist. Whatever happens to spirit in such an outlook, at least we’ve got things left. Right?

Not so, argues William Desmond ( Being and the Between ) . The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, he says, is a “classic bifurcation of thinghood into two extremes of objectivism and subjectivism.” It ends up diminishing things “on two fronts. On the one hand, objectivity contracts the range of concreteness. On the other hand, subjectivity is placed outside of the thing in a mind that has essentially nothing to do with things in themselves . . . . Equivocity is influential here in the very negative sense that a difference gets erected into a dualism of opposites.”

Citing Descartes’s distinction of res extensa and res cogitans , he argues that “Thinghood has been de-selved, objectified, reified in a homogeneous neutralization of thereness; selfhood has been abstracted from things in their concretenes and hovers mathematically over the quantitative homogeneity of exeternality, ready to impose the categories of its mathesis on that homogeneity.”

Thus, “really there are no things in Descartes. In different but related senses, there are also no things in Newton and Hume. The thing is decomposed under the gaze of the objectifying, univocalizing mind.” As an alternative, Desmon suggests that we have to learn to think “beyond univocity,” and recognize the “aesthetic presencing” of things that “present themselves” and are recognized as such “when the mind as other is in proper community with them, in proper rapport with things.”

Again: “If things pluralize themselves, they are plurivocal in themselves. They utter themselves; they outer themselves; they bespeak themselves in more ways than one. I suggest that our plural perspectives on them is in response to this plurivocity of the thing itself. The diferentiation of the thing is just this, its qualitative plurivocalization . . . . A thing may be small or big, or may be big and small, depending on perspective, but this seeming contradiction is not something that comes from the outside of the thing itself. The thing presents itself plurivocally.” Seeing “as” doesn’t cancel “seeing is”: “When we see a thing as other, we may really be seeing it as it is.”

Perspectivism isn’t relativistic in this case, but a hint of the multiple richness and plural presencing of things. In fact, perspectivism seems relativistic only when things are already diminished, only if things are univocally objects and their plurality a function of subjectivity. Nietzchean perspectivism is relativistic only when one retains the modern prejudice about things, which, as Desmond has argued, actually loses things.