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.

The Difficulty of Change

Posted by Tessa den Uyl 

We often use the word 'change' in our conversation. Everybody seems to understand such expressions as: change yourself, we have to change, things are changing, change is needed, or if only something would change.

Change presupposes a certain kind of disruption in the way we think. We guide our perceptions through the creation of conceptual relations, which we think of as stable, of which we are consciously aware, and of which we recognise certain qualities within.

Upon such conceptual relations we act and react. And yet we desire change. This would not be so but for the fact that we question these relations.

In a world of myriad relations, we tend to extract only a few as valuable for the pattern of our proper life. And where we ascribe everything to specific relations in our life, desiring change signals trouble. Yet without change, we have no descriptive material. Without the stream of constant sensory change, how can we perceive life? 



This morning, in a small village in Morocco, I go out to buy a washing powder called Tide. My friend Ilias understands not Tide but tête, meaning 'head'. Ilias does not understand what I want. With the help of a description of laundry, and pointing to the package, eventually we arrive at 'Oh, you want Tide.' Now why would one buy a 'head' in a shop which sells products for the home?

Over the past two years, Ilias and I have conducted a dialogue over many such misunderstandings regarding pronunciation. I try to apprehend his pronunciation, to speak slowly, but today we’re still at the same place where we started.

We are stuck. Ilias thinks that I should learn to speak better French – or from my point of view, I should learn to speak his kind of French. We are caught in a no-man's-land, where there is a problem about who will leave their territory to risk entering another – in which proper communication becomes possible.

What do we learn from this situation, about change? We learn that, in attempting to communicate, both parties need to reconsider the relations which lie behind the words and concepts of their communication. The problem was never really about Tide or tête, but rather about different cultures and perceptions, different languages and foci.

Ilias and I have no 'common ground' where we may place our verbal misunderstandings. His change is not my change. 
My interests are not his, and the relations which he traces in this world are not mine.

However simple this example might seem, it illustrates the difficulty of finding the mutual understandings which are essential before we try to change something in the understanding of another: my lack must become his lack, and his lack must become mine. To be able to act for change, we have to be willing to change the descriptions of the world which we ourselves possess.

In arguments about words, there is always a defence of a supposed norm. And so it is with all change. Change challenges ideas of truth which each one of us carries about with us inside. Psychological change always trespasses on property in this sense – the property of truth. Could it be, then, that change can only come about when we are aware of the diversity among us?

Consider another example. A Yemeni woman exclaims: 'Sometimes I hope that a missile would just blow us all away' – meaning: destroy herself and her family. What the woman desires is her liberation by that same force which took the old, recognisable relations from her.

Often we desire change without having to let go of ideas we have previously used to describe and make sense of the world. We want to continue to recognise something, while (impossibly) including within that old recognition a new, unlived experience of change. This may be why the Yemeni woman 'desires' death – which is the most logical change we can imagine. Although death itself does not change.

Change poses the problem and risk of being reconstructed inside of previously constructed ideas, which are thought upon the logic of some existing principle. Change, then, will eventually serve the function of that principle. If there is to be true change, apart from the irreversibility of death, then this change is not found in adapting to previous notions.

Yet if change is something that does not conform to a previous pattern, then where does change live? Can change then be thought? In a certain way, change can only live in a space unknown to our psyche.

We long for change, knowing that change is about a combination of more things than we can consider. These unconsidered things create not only linguistic difficulties when we talk together, but muddy all of our living together. In whatever way we may use the word 'change', perhaps change truly means the inability to point to ourselves.

The Difficulty of Change

Posted by Tessa den Uyl 

We often use the word 'change' in our conversation. Everybody seems to understand such expressions as: change yourself, we have to change, things are changing, change is needed, or if only something would change.

Change presupposes a certain kind of disruption in the way we think. We guide our perceptions through the creation of conceptual relations, which we think of as stable, of which we are consciously aware, and of which we recognise certain qualities within.

Upon such conceptual relations we act and react. And yet we desire change. This would not be so but for the fact that we question these relations.

In a world of myriad relations, we tend to extract only a few as valuable for the pattern of our proper life. And where we ascribe everything to specific relations in our life, desiring change signals trouble. Yet without change, we have no descriptive material. Without the stream of constant sensory change, how can we perceive life? 

This morning, in a small village in Morocco, I go out to buy a washing powder called Tide. My friend Ilias understands not Tide but tête, meaning 'head'. Ilias does not understand what I want. With the help of a description of laundry, and pointing to the package, eventually we arrive at 'Oh, you want Tide.' Now why would one buy a 'head' in a shop which sells products for the home?

Over the past two years, Ilias and I have conducted a dialogue over many such misunderstandings regarding pronunciation. I try to apprehend his pronunciation, to speak slowly, but today we’re still at the same place where we started.

We are stuck. Ilias thinks that I should learn to speak better French – or from my point of view, I should learn to speak his kind of French. We are caught in a no-man's-land, where there is a problem about who will leave their territory to risk entering another – in which proper communication becomes possible.

What do we learn from this situation, about change? We learn that, in attempting to communicate, both parties need to reconsider the relations which lie behind the words and concepts of their communication. The problem was never really about Tide or tête, but rather about different cultures and perceptions, different languages and foci.

Ilias and I have no 'common ground' where we may place our verbal misunderstandings. His change is not my change. 
My interests are not his, and the relations which he traces in this world are not mine.

However simple this example might seem, it illustrates the difficulty of finding the mutual understandings which are essential before we try to change something in the understanding of another: my lack must become his lack, and his lack must become mine. To be able to act for change, we have to be willing to change the descriptions of the world which we ourselves possess.

In arguments about words, there is always a defence of a supposed norm. And so it is with all change. Change challenges ideas of truth which each one of us carries about with us inside. Psychological change always trespasses on property in this sense – the property of truth. Could it be, then, that change can only come about when we are aware of the diversity among us?

Consider another example. A Yemeni woman exclaims: 'Sometimes I hope that a missile would just blow us all away' – meaning: destroy herself and her family. What the woman desires is her liberation by that same force which took the old, recognisable relations from her.

Often we desire change without having to let go of ideas we have previously used to describe and make sense of the world. We want to continue to recognise something, while (impossibly) including within that old recognition a new, unlived experience of change. This may be why the Yemeni woman 'desires' death – which is the most logical change we can imagine. Although death itself does not change.

Change poses the problem and risk of being reconstructed inside of previously constructed ideas, which are thought upon the logic of some existing principle. Change, then, will eventually serve the function of that principle. If there is to be true change, apart from the irreversibility of death, then this change is not found in adapting to previous notions.

Yet if change is something that does not conform to a previous pattern, then where does change live? Can change then be thought? In a certain way, change can only live in a space unknown to our psyche.

We long for change, knowing that change is about a combination of more things than we can consider. These unconsidered things create not only linguistic difficulties when we talk together, but muddy all of our living together. In whatever way we may use the word 'change', perhaps change truly means the inability to point to ourselves.

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 in simple language, and briefly:

'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.

Picture Post No. 8: Apples COMMENT ADDED

This is definitely not a Picture Post, Thomas. I think you have to reformati it. It is a bit more of your theory of how language works, so I guess should be 'potentailly' a post. But even as that it does seem rather trivial. You would need I think to redynamise this one - more examples maybe?

Martin

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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NOTE:  I have put a preferred version of this post at the top, yet have left the previous versions intact (below), to give priority to the editorial eye. Thomas.

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

One sees, above, the results of two Google Image searches. First, I searched for 'apples'.  Then, I searched for 'pommes'.  Then I jumbled them up.  Pommes, of course, are apples in French.  Do not scroll down. 

The 'apples' (English) have an ideal form.  Several shift even into abstraction or stylization.  They only occur singly, and most of them sport only one leaf.  They are red, and only red, and are polished to a perfect shine. One apple has been cut: not to eat, but to engrave a picture perfect symbol on it.  The 'pommes' (French) belong to a family of pommes, of various colours: red, green, even yellow.  One may take a bite out of them to taste, or cut them through or slice them: to smell their fragrance, or to drop them into a pot.  Pommes, too, are always real, unless one should draw one for a child.

Now separate out the apples from the pommes. Scroll down. You probably distinguished most apples from pommes. In so doing, you acknowledged – if just for a moment – that in some important way, apples are not pommes.

(While this example is flawed, try the same with more
distant languages, and more complex words).

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Posted by Thomas Scarborough

One sees, above, the results of two Google Image searches. First, I searched for 'apples'.  Then, I searched for 'pommes'.  Then I jumbled them up.  Pommes, of course, are apples in French.  Do not scroll down. 

'Apples' have an ideal form.  So much so, in fact, that they tend to shift into abstraction or stylization.  Mostly (though not in every case), they sport only one leaf.  Apples only occur singly.  They are red, and only red, and they are polished to a perfect shine. One apple has been cut, though not to eat it – rather to engrave a picture perfect symbol on it.  'Pommes', on the other hand, belong to a family of pommes, of various colours: red, green, yellow, even plum.  And leaves: they may have one, or two, or none.  One may take a bite out of them to taste.  One may cut them through, or slice them: to smell their fragrance, or perhaps to drop them in a pot. And pommes are always real, unless one should draw one for a child.

Now separate out the apples from the pommes. Scroll down. You probably accomplished this with 80% accuracy. In so doing, you acknowledged – if just for a moment – that in some important way, apples are not pommes.

(Now try the same with more distant languages, and more complex words).

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

---

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Two Google Image searches.  First, 'apples'.  Then, 'pommes'. (A pomme, of course, is an apple in French). 

The 'apples' (English) have an ideal form.  Several shift even into abstraction or stylization.  They sport one leaf (with two exceptions).  They only occur singly.  They are red, and only red, and are polished to a perfect shine. One apple has been cut: not to eat, but to engrave a picture perfect symbol on it.  The 'pommes' (French) belong to a family of pommes, of various colours: red, green, yellow, even plum.  One may take a bite out of them to taste, or cut them through or slice them: to smell their fragrance, or to drop them into a pot.  Pommes, too, are always real, unless one should draw a picture for a child.

Signifier points to signified, we are told, whether 'apple' or 'pomme'. But in English and in French, are the signifieds the same?

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