Have you ever thought about how the world is from the verb’s point of view? Things are shadowy, unbounded, seriously over-hyped. There is no “there” really, just movement slowed, turned, impelled, dipped and driven.

No go?  Let’s start with the noun’s POV.  There is a tree at the corner of my street. In the morning I leave the house, turn amd lock the door, walk down the alley to the street, negotiating space with raccoons, ravens and occasionally skunks and of course with cars leaving home on their way to work. I round the fence, avoid the concrete ledge at the edge of the sidewalk and make my way down the sidewalk. Then I stop at the corner next to that tree and say good morning to the raven that is almost always sitting in its branches at that time of day. Moving in the world is like that. I am an object moving between objects, along objects, under objects, even through objects (the air, for example.) We define the world that way for good reason, but not for the reason that this is how the world is.  We define the world in this way because it is a successful way of assessing the environment from the point of view of surviving the various objects that may either intend us harm or not notice us as it rolls right through the space we happen to occupy.

Now try to imagine that same set of circumstances from the point of view of “to walk.”  From the verb’s point of view I only happen to embody the movement, just as from my point of view as an object, the space between me and the skunk is incidental to the existence of the skunk and to my own (still unstinky) self. Just as space is considered an emptiness through which objects move and time something measured by the change of objects, so in a world defined from the point of view of a verb, objects would be defined in terms of speed and direction. Objects are empty categories that exist only in that they point to change of direction or rate of speed.

Think about Descartes. For him a corporeal substance is something that has extension. That is, the space it takes up (and moves in) is an empty category that really only exists to point to the existence of the object substance instantiates. To think from a verb’s POV, just turn this on its head.

An odd world, when pondered, yet no more odd than the one where extension (space) is just something that exists to separate objects. Think about the questions these points of view generate. For example, from the noun’s POV the question “what happens when I die” seems a natural. I mean from an object’s point of view an intact boundary seems rather essential to existence. So disembodiment (i.e. the rotting corpse) requires an answer. From the verb’s POV this is not at all the question. Instead, “to walk” would want to explain away entropy in the same obsessive way we want to cling to the idea of existence without embodiment.

When I stopped at the corner, where did “to walk” go?

Then there’s the adjective. But I won’t go there. (Please speculate and let me know what you come up with.)

The reason I’m thinking about this? Thank you for asking. I have been reading Deleuze – his book called The Fold. It seems to me he takes up the verb’s cause, and to me anyway, it explains why Deleuze chose Leibniz as the platform from which he dove into what he calls Baroque philosophy. It also explains why so many people have problems with Deleuze. Nouns, at this point in history, have the field.

More on Deleuze, Leibniz and folds another day.

Verbs rule!