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1 Objects from the Past David Gross We are, collectively speaking, surrounded by “things,” many billions if not trillions of material objects of every kind. The number of these things is so great, in fact, that it is difficult to gain a conceptual hold on the almost infinite multiplicity of objects that constitute our world. One way to begin mentally ordering what we encounter, though, is to establish a rough taxonomy that distinguishes between what might be called “natural things,” on the one hand (trees, rocks, plants, etc.), and humanly made or humanly fashioned things, on the other hand (shoes, chairs, books, etc.). My concern in what follows is only with the second order of things, which from now on I will call “objects.” Objects are always products of human intentionality, even when they are made by machines. Because they are shaped by human will, usually to meet some need or want, they are social products from the beginning. And they are social, too, because once they are created, they exist and circulate in a social world. (It is true, of course, that natural things also can be brought into the social world. They can be given a certain amount of value—for example, rocks can become “precious stones”—and then be made to circulate as commodities. Nevertheless, because they are not products of human labor or design, I exclude them from my discussion here.) We interact with these man-made objects and become socialized through them, and they in turn become humanized through us as a result of the social uses we give them. Objects, for instance, become “goods.” They are utilized and exchanged; they are “owned” by someone; they become possessions, commodities, gifts—and all of these kinds of things that 29 happen to objects tend to humanize them, but more importantly, they also socialize us as we interact with them. Now with regard to these humanly made objects, it is important to make yet another distinction, this one between objects made in the present and those made in the past. By objects made in the present, I mean those produced during the last few years, perhaps the last ten or fifteen years at most. These would include a great number of the objects we encounter in any given day, including the clothes we are wearing at the moment, the pencil and paper lying on our desk, or the newspaper we read this morning. By objects from the past, I mean those made a generation or more ago that still survive into the present and continue to be used and valued (e.g., furniture passed down from our parents or grandparents, old tools that remain functional, and the like). What is particularly interesting about the latter kind of object is that they were present and part of the everyday experiences of people living in, say, 1940, or 1900, or even earlier, and they are at the same time present and able to be experienced by us today as well. Someone in 1900 could say of a chair or desk in their home, “This object is contemporaneous with me,” and someone in 2002 could say the same thing of the same object, even if, by 2002, the object becomes visibly more time-worn than it was before. My concern here is only with objects from the past, not objects made in the present. And, as just indicated, the past will mean for our purposes that long span of time beginning about two or three decades ago (i.e., about a generation) and stretching back from there, if we want to go that far, to the Paleolithic Age or even earlier, when human beings first began to fashion objects for their own use. Obviously, there are very few objects more than several centuries old that have survived, and those that have are likely to be found in a museum. Most of the objects from the past that I will refer to in what follows would fall into the range of being perhaps thirty or forty to about 150 or 200 years old. The farther back one goes, the fewer the number of objects that have persisted intact into the present. In approaching objects that have survived from earlier times, one of the first things to be noted is that some of these objects are said to be valuable, while others are not. Whole classes of objects from the past, in other words, have come to be described as “worth something...

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