The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood

4. The Child in the World of Things

F O U R The Child in the World of Things Show him how joyful, how innocent, how much ours, a thing can be, how even the lamenting of sorrow resolves into pure form, serves as a thing, or dies into a thing—and when it crosses over blissfully flows out of the violin. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy THE GESTURES OF THINGS Worlding More than any other existential form (such as space, time, and other human beings) things are present, tangible, and near in the environment of the body, but they also withdraw from philosophical reflection. They are close and distant at the same time. Things are so ordinary that they do not seem worthy of philosophical thought. Should we not leave them over there, in the separate sphere of the “real” world, where they are de- fined as empty, indifferent objects over and against us as internal subjects ? Heidegger, in the late essay The Thing (1971) pointed out that we cannot afford this luxury of indifference toward things anymore. The objectification of things is a direct antecedent of the atom bomb and, I would add, of the destruction of the earth through global warming and the extinction of species. He warns us that the scientific enframing and redefinition of things as objects makes the thing into a nonentity “in not permitting things to be the standard for what is real”: “Science’s knowledge , which is compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects, already had annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb 81 exploded. The bomb’s explosion is only the grossest of all gross confirmations of the long-since-accomplished annihilation of the thing: the confirmation that the thing as a thing remains nil. The thingness of the thing remains concealed, forgotten. The nature of the thing never comes to light, that is it never gets a hearing” (170). The word Thing in German refers to a gathering, a coming together, while the Latin word objectum describes what stands opposite or against us. When we live in a world of “objects,” we live in a world without nearness . We have forgotten the gathering of things. The thing, because it does not get a hearing, does not lay claim to thought, nor can we think about what it gathers. This does not mean that things have no existential significance. On the contrary: things are deeply woven into the structures of the human body and, as we saw before, determine locations in the web of lived space. But the way we think about them misses the subtlety and power with which they lay hold of our psychological life. In the language of psychoanalysis, I would say that objects dwell in the light of consciousness, but things are active in the darkness of the unconscious; they exert a dynamic power in the deep structures of the psyche. Heidegger calls us to vigilance—the first step toward a philosophy and psychology of things is a step back from a thinking that merely represents and explains presences—and urges us to cultivate “the thinking that responds and recalls” (1971, 181). Phenomenological thinking is faithful to the response and the recall: to co-respond with what is there and create a clearing in our attention so that the thing can address us and we can hear its appeal; to re-call means to remember the fullness of the world, for which every thing is a gathering place. Sometimes this process requires the transformation of our habitual use of language (which explains the many hyphenated words of existential philosophers) in order to grasp phenomena that are outside the range of established concepts. There is a great anecdote about a lecture the young Privatdozent Heidegger gave in Freiburg on a gray February day in 1919. The students expected him to talk about “experience” and with anticipation they probably thought: “is that not a label for hidden secrets, for the black sack from which metaphysical treasures may, after all, be conjured up?” (Safranski 1998, 94). But instead of giving them metaphysical razzledazzle , Heidegger stepped up to the lectern and for the next two hours talked about the lectern. He spoke about what the students saw when they entered the room, how the lectern appeared to the speaker, how it is 82 CHAPTER FOUR more than a geometrical box, and how it gathers a...