The Thing-in-Itself

By Thomas Scarborough

Benjamin Lee Whorf, the American linguist, made a puzzling observation which, for no patent reason, has held our fascination for nearly eighty years. Whorf wrote it briefly, in simple language:

'Around a storage of what are called 'gasoline (petrol) drums', behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called 'empty gasoline drums' it will tend to be different-careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. Yet the 'empty' drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor.'

Whorf, I here suggest, had stumbled upon the core problem of the thing-in-itself, and with that, the core problem of the thinking of our entire Western civilisation. The interpretation of the thing-in-itself is not critical here.  It is sufficient to understand it most simply as any 'object of inquiry'. Let us begin at the beginning.

First, the Scottish philosopher David Hume observed that all knowledge may be subdivided into relations of ideas on the one hand, and matters of fact on the other. That is, one begins with a handful of facts (which includes objects), and these facts stand in a certain relation to one another.

This view has remained engraved on metaphysicians' minds ever since. Generations later, Bertrand Russell wrote that many philosophers, following Immanuel Kant, have maintained that relations are the work of the mind, and that things-in-themselves have no relations. While this is not to say exactly the same, the thought is not far from Hume's.

A marble is a thing. A house is a thing. Even gravity, ideology, taxonomy are things (we call them constructs), which may in turn be related to other things. In a sense, even a unicorn is a 'thing', although one is unlikely ever to find one. Of course, our 'things' may not be exactly the same as we perceive them – but the point will be clear.

Things-in-themselves are not, of course, facts. They first need to be involved in what we call truth conditions – which is, they need to be inserted into statements. Then one may affirm or deny such statements, which is an essential condition of facts. For example, we insert the thing 'marble' into a statement: 'A marble sinks' – or the thing 'unicorn': 'The Scots keep unicorns.'

On the surface of it, our world is filled with such facts: 'There's a car,' 'A bird has wings,' or 'The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.'

But there is a mistake. There are no things, there are no objects, and therefore there are no facts. Hume got it wrong, and so did every philosopher since. One finds only relations. The mind is incapable of comprehending anything else. No mind can ever settle on a 'thing' alone.

Someone might object: 'But this is a coffee cup, and that's a fact!' But is it really? Take away the table on which the coffee cup rests, and what does one have? One has a coffee cup which rests on nothing.  If we ever found such a thing, we would marvel that it exists.  One would have scientists queuing up at the door to see it.  Further, the table, on which the coffee cup rests, stands on the floor, and this in turn rests on the earth, and so on.

The same is true if we down-scale our thinking as it were. Supposing that we should say, 'This coffee cup has a handle.' The same applies. We have to have a mind for a whole world of relations to be able to speak of a handle.

We never worried about this much – before the publication of Samuel Johnson's great dictionary of 1755.  But since then, our 'things' have been defined, and they have been defined (if implicitly) as things-in-themselves. But this they are not, as we have seen.

This now promises to explain Benjamin Whorf's puzzlement over the dangerous way in which people went about with empty petrol drums, and our continuing fascination with the same today. We have come to see petrol drums today as things-in-themselves, without the obvious relations in which they are involved.

One might wonder at the possible significance of it all. Quite simply, when we speak of the world today, our language causes us to view it as people viewed Whorf's petrol drums, namely, as a profusion of things-in-themselves.  Yet we deal with things far more dangerous than petrol drums.

What Is This Thing Called Beauty?

Posted by Keith Tidman

What is this thing called beauty? Our reflexive first thoughts might turn to people creating paintings, sculptures, dance choreographies, songs, novellas, and the like. Without the imposition of rules that prescribe how beauty should be observed and experienced, and that box it in by formalities and what is ‘correct’, this is the most simple, descriptive account that many of us might give.

More liberal reflection, however, eclipses our first thoughts, to arrive at a far broader, more nuanced description of our perception of beauty. Our aesthetic experiences might encompass images of galaxies and supernovas, deft turns of phrase, powerful metaphors, elegant equations, breakthrough technologies, humour, love, fantasies, theatre, and cultural rituals. Urban and rural landscapes, athletics, architecture, physical pleasure, animals and plants, calligraphy, oceans, and chemical formulas. Food presentation and taste, music, unbroken silence, geometry, alone time, learning, engineered structures, social engagement, serendipitous discovery, and the birthing of new life. Texture, colours, lines, beam of light, laughter, computer code, altruism, photography, imagination – and so much more.

We may turn to more specific examples. Beauty in the eye of the beholder, and rules-free, has included Einstein’s iconic equation e=mc2, the neuronal/synaptic activity of the brain, the three-dimensional structure of C6H12, the human genome, and the problem-solving of the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Poignant lines from Shakespeare, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Mozart’s Missa da Requiem, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The aurora borealis, a breaching orca and its calf, Istanbul’s skyline at night, and the Lascaux cave paintings. Melt-in-the-mouth chocolate truffles, Provence in spring, Hohenzollern castle, the Grand Canyon catching sunlight, the vision of alternative world futures, the rich nuances of Indian and African languages – and more.

Since these represent descriptions of our experience of beauty, some will be commonly shared – in some cases globally – while others will be appreciated only through individuals’ cognitive lenses, or through culture’s interventionist hand. Yet others are regarded as examples of beauty by ‘insiders’, who are in one way or another habituated to them through educational training, life experiences, or other uniquely personal circumstances. Yet all these experiences are equally legitimate as descriptions of our perception of beauty – none ascends above the others.

What is it, then, that unites these myriad conceptions of beauty? We may now turn our look inward as it were, to our own personhood – which is epitomised by intelligent consciousness. The aesthetic content of beauty as we have described it rests on the individual: not only on the stimuli being experienced, but influenced by the medium between the source and ourselves, by our senses, and by our human cognition. And while it is yet little understood, our consciousness is key to the experience of aesthetics – although these ‘things’ exist independently, their beauty transitions from what is potential to what is real only by being observed and experienced. Through neuroscience – which is informed by physics, biology, and philosophy – consciousness is bound to play an ever-increasing role in our understanding of the cognitive processes associated with our experiences of beauty.

Meanwhile, ‘personhood’ must be folded, however imperfectly, into the explanation of aesthetic experience. Personhood is definable by a multiplicity of factors – the following being just a few among many: our awareness of our existence, our functionality both apart from and as part of a societal network, our accumulation of experiences from which to learn, our vision of alternative futures for which to strive – in fact, a menagerie of cognitive abilities, such as creative, innovative, imaginative, linguistic, computational, logical, and analytical skills. A religious or secular-humanistic framework for personal experience. As well as emotions, sensory messages that reflect our environment, unbridled and insatiable curiosity, awareness of the arrow of time, abstract questioning of meaning and purpose, intuition, and a sense of destiny.

And so we circle back to the beginning – now being able to correlate descriptions of our perception of beauty with our cognitive apparatus. An appreciation of the ‘elegance’ and precision of mathematics is required – in fact, of the universe – to see the beauty in e=mc2. An appreciation of early people’s linking of art and what they valued for survival is needed, to see the beauty of the Lascaux cave art. An appreciation of how music triggers the release of emotions and flights of imagination is required, to hear the soaring beauty of Mozart’s Missa da Requiem. An understanding of humankind’s magnificent complexity, with all its implications for leapfrogging natural evolution is needed, to see the beauty of the human genome – and so forth.

Everything, then, that ‘personhood’ entails feeds into and gives shape to what we consider sources of aesthetic experience – and how, precisely, we respond to those sources. And it is the magnificent breadth of what constitutes our personhood – encapsulated (in part) by the qualities described – which allows for, and makes sense of, the equally magnificent breadth of all that falls under the rubric of descriptive aesthetics.