If you remember, the idea is that phenomenology is using the language in ways that confuse some (most?) readers and, hence, contribute to the accusations of meaninglessness. I want to see if, by approaching words individually, I can come to understand what Gadamer and his compatriots experience when reading poetry.

Here again is the sentence from part 1 of this post:

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

One important word in the sentence is “thing.”

Dictionary.com defines “thing.”

thing

–noun

1.

a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimateobject.

2.

some entity, object, or creature that is not or cannot bespecifically designated or precisely described: The stick had abrass thing on it.

3.

anything that is or may become an object of thought: thingsof the spirit.

4.

things, matters; affairs: Things are going well now.

5.

a fact, circumstance, or state of affairs: It is a curious thing.

6.

an action, deed, event, or performance: to do great things;His death was a horrible thing.

7.

a particular, respect, or detail: perfect in all things.

8.

aim; objective: The thing is to reach this line with the ball.

10.

things,

a.

implements, utensils, or other articles for service: I’llwash the breakfast things.

b.

personal possessions or belongings: Pack your things andgo!

12.

a living being or creature: His baby’s a cute little thing.

I’ve cut some aspects of the definition out but this is enough to see two basic attributes of the word “thing.” The first is that it is a complicated word with many shades of meaning. The second is that even when “thing” refers to a life-form (item 12), it nevertheless refers to an object, in this case the baby. “Thing” in English refers very much to the objective world. Definitions 1 through 3 are the most common ways in which we understand something referred to as a “thing.”

The intensity of “thing”‘s meaning baggage is evident when we discuss animals we love. Technically a beloved pet is a thing. To be correct in English I would say “It ate its dinner already.” I don’t of course. I say “She already ate.” Calling someone an “it” is dehumanizing and quite insulting. That’s one reason I usually refer to the divine mythological “father” as “it” and not as “he.” “Are you telling me it killed all life on earth ’cause it was upset at the morals it gave us? Radical, dude.” Insulting, even without the obvious sarcasm. Using “it” for a life form impels disdain into the sentence. It implies an existence as an object as opposed to an existence as a subject.

Yet when Bruns speaks about “thing” in his introduction to Gadamer on Celan this isn’t what he means at all.

The following are from pages 20, 23 and 24 of Gadamer on Celan.

Something is thing-like if it is outside the alternatives of subject and object.

A thing is “set apart, elsewhere, outside not what we have made our own but that which is self-standing and alone…”

Things are strange when they are no longer “subject to our concepts and categories, when they escape us.”

The conceptual device that is subject/object gives meaning to “thing” in its normal use, and it is what Bruns and other phenomenologists are trying to get out from behind. “Things” are radically not-human in the sense that they are outside the  limits our language/concepts place on the world. That is, there is an apple that is the concept of “apple” pointing to the world object that tastes lovely with a bit of cheese and then there is the world thing which fundamentally is not captured by the word “apple.” This world-thing is what is outside the world as seen through the lens of the subject/object conceptual framework. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?

The best I can do at the moment is provide what I think is an example of such “outsideness” in action. Most people have had the experience of staring at a word they have used for most of their lives and then suddenly the word is alien, strange. Watermelon, for example. Normally it is only a signifier of that heavy, sweet, green skinned fruit synonymous with summer. The word is transparent or instrumental to what it signifies. The word in itself disappears into the world of what it points to. But sometimes there is that odd thing that happens and suddenly, the word fractures. W A T E R M – E L O Π bursts apart and the letters, the shapes, the history if its existence comes to the forefront and what it signifies has to share the stage with its carrier. Odd feelings are triggered when this happens. Meaning surfaces, but not linguistic meaning. That is, older, pre-linguistic sources of meaning close in on awareness. This kind of “meaning” moves in us like whales just below the surface of the ocean’s skin.

Poetry makes a habit of trying to make this feeling happen. It tries to make language visible again, tries to trigger these bodily, non-conceptual sources of meaning. So one of the things I am being asked to do when reading Gadamer, Celan or Bruns is to feel for the world-object, but further, I am being asked to see words as “things” themselves. Personally I find the first request much simpler than the second. The implication of the words as “things” in Bruns’ sense is that they have an existence in the world apart from humanity. Perhaps as memes exist? Not sure yet.