An Introduction, Recapitulation, and Post-Heideggerian Illuminations
I was never sure why receiving four walls, a shut door, and a desk to write at moved me in such a grand way. Perhaps I felt like I had achieved the Woolfian aspiration of being a woman who worked hard enough to have a room. Perhaps, sitting at my desk, I felt I could imagine a fantastic life. It was due, in large part, to the fact I finally had a place to rest my things—a place to rest the compilation of inner mysteries and moments of love that are displayed and held in my little recollective bits and bobs. These objects, taken alone without their invisible and elusive presence, become mere objects; to me, they are little worlds and moments of la réalisation.
In glances across the horizons of my small space, I catch poems from someone I wanted to know, the statue of the Blessed Mother I clutch when the thunderstorms get loud, trying to picture the wrinkled hands that gave it to me, and the volumes of Plato from my grandfather’s home inscribed with his name. These things are missable and actively decaying, but they so affectionately hold a secret universe between reality and a twenty-something wannabe-knower.
Beside my empty fridge is a tall stack of philosophy volumes that have fed me. If left to rot, the whole history of how they appeared to me would be tragically lost. The poems would just be genius rhymes without my wretched longing, and the Plato would just be another copy without any grief. This intense and private humanism languishes quickly in the absence of the knower.
While some objects have a hidden aesthetic dimension containing a private world, others display this stratification of meaning outwardly and indelibly. While this seems to be the case for examples explicitly including architecture and landscape, it does not seem to be the case for the mundanities of life, for the dainty items that decorate a girl’s first home of her own. Through engaging with autoethnographic experiences of lived space and its objects, with contemporary scholarship on the stabilization within time and space, and an exploration into being-in-the-world, I will defend Martin Heidegger’s critique of categorical knowledge and endorse the existential understanding of space in relation to objects that are used mundanely and have implicit (requiring substantial work to discover) histories, with the hope of revealing the secret life of things.
A Recapitulation of Heidegger’s Critique of Categorical Knowledge and Being-in-the-World
A grasp of Heidegger’s critique of categoricalism begins with the framework issued on his concept of “being-in” and the world as the basic properties of Dasein: Human beings come to discover that Dasein can only understand itself with a directionality hurling back towards its own being. For Dasein, being is always an issue; in other words, Dasein is always a possibility.
In each moment of existence Dasein is his own, which leads to the understanding of the profound uniqueness of his own being, a precursor to the entrance of the “sphere of owness” whereby Dasein can either choose authenticity or inauthenticity in the face of the reality of his own being.
Dasein comprises three moments of discovery: the world, the who, and being-in. This leads Dasein to have “care” and come to realize why being as categorically understood is limited in the face of Existentialia. A fundamental distinction between thinking about the world in categories and thinking about the world with regard to Existentialia is evident in the meaning of what Heidegger labels as being “alongside.” For the categorical thinker, this is a mere proximity that is so much less meaningful than the “familiarity” of Existentialia. From these two distinct views of spatiality erupt normal categorical spatiality and existential spatiality. Existential space, also called lived space, is informed by one’s own interaction with the world as a being-in-the-world.
What if one takes seriously that they are always in the world? The categorical model of experience does not bridge the chasm between I-ness and thou-ness. In reflection one’s own being in the world, the continuity of one’s experience shows itself as wholly dependent upon one’s ontology in the world (a world with no gaps) and its dependency on the “worldhood of the world.” From this essential datum a new way of understanding space as to how it contributes and interacts with our own being.
Merlau-Ponty Suspended in Childlike Wonder–Adult’s Failure to Understand the Husserlian Intersubjectivity of the World
Merlau-Ponty draws out the power of the realization of one’s own location of being within the world in the context of children:
That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place.
Merlau-Ponty touches on something that the student has fundamentally lost: the unquestioned childlike belief that the world is just an extension of his own ontology. It is quite common to find oneself tangled in the pursuit of neat categories. In engaging wholeheartedly one comes across problems of language and the problem of other minds. However, in doing so they have ceased to notice the world’s generous holding of an infinite number of phenomena to be experienced across a whole life, in new ways. Phenomenology preaches: “You have unhesitating access to everything around you!” Milton wrote in Paradise Regained that “the childhood shews the man,/As morning shews the day.” In the same way that the dawn makes the day visible, beautiful, and knowable, childhood makes visible and puts into perspective what it means to be a man. Man must remember his childhood in the world and approach it with an understanding of its intersubjectivity and hope to come to any grasp of its magnificent, inarticulable complexities.
Byun Chung-Hal and Hannah Arendt on the Value of Reference Points
Byun Chun-Hal articulates ritual as life’s great stabilizer. It is in this repetitive, symbolic, and community-based form of recognition humans come not only to know, but to finally feel at ease. This is because in the “re-enchantment” of our lives human beings transform from beings in the world to “beings-at-home.” This shift is held and nurtured by the new references man has obtained in his ritualistic repetition.
In his discussion about the role of production and technology in the “disenchantment of the world,” he mentions the use of things as specific reference points in the philosophical musings of Hannah Arendt whereby the ideas of lived space, durability, and lingering are discussed. Most profoundly, Byung Chun-Hal states, “Rituals are in life to what things are in space.” Consumeristic habits that enforce a lack of what Heidegger calls care and disenchant the world in the same way the destruction of rituals does. It allows for the uprooting of our human experience in lived time and lived “visual space.”
The Disappearance of Rituals takes great pains to explicate the value of attention and ritual beyond the context of the participatory effects but also on the equipment: “In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up [verbraucht] but used [gebraucht]. Thus, they can also become old.” Ritual is what can salvage things from the decay of time. Maybe because I leaf through the volumes that are stacked beside my fridge daily, and gaze upon the Blessed Mother as I whisper my prayers, the statue and the books are gebraucht instead of verbraucht; the habit of care keeps them in a meaningful state of existential time and space a bit longer than if they were otherwise passed over in the categorical understanding.
An Analysis of the History of Memory in Things–Explicity and Implicity
A Case of Explicity
This whole history is evident and cannot be changed—there is no substantial privacy. This is perhaps because complexity is anticipated in objects such as human remains, as it does not seem to be so with mundane objects. I will now take up political architecture as an example. In Sharon Macdonald’s Words in Stone, she explains:
Architecture was also valued by Hitler because of its capacity to endure over time. On laying a foundation stone at the rally grounds, Hitler said that he hoped that the buildings would “rede als ewiger Zeuge”–that is, that they would leave a lasting legacy via a physical presence, which would remain in the landscape, capable of “speaking to” future generations.
Although The Zeppelin building (the architecture that this excerpt refers to) had been “de-swastikicized,” and modified in certain ways to try to publicly condemn its Nazi history while also allowing it to remain a witness to a hateful past, it seems it cannot be repurposed because of some permanency built into the ontology of its atmosphere. Macdonald recalled in her paper the words of Himmler: “When people are silent, the stones speak. By means of the stone, great epochs speak to the present.”
The Zeppelin building is visited by people who have come to understand the
horror of Nazism through the experience of others; it is visited by people who lived
through this horrific evil and contemplate loss and mourn; and it is passed through by children playing games with each other who seem preoccupied by other thoughts, but across the board there is a presence: an atmosphere shaped by the stratification of aesthetic values in this architecture of horror.
Some choose to express the affectation of this silent presence on them, others choose to ignore it in an act of defiance from history, and others just try to walk by it as quickly as possible, but the atmosphere produced by the aesthetic signatures of Nazism is one that cannot be removed even after its insignia has been removed because it is self-evident in even the mundane elements of this architecture.
A Case of Profound Mundanity and Intricate Implicity: Little Brown Loafers
I have found myself walking the Holocaust Museum in great pain many times. It is with particular nausea that I call to mind the hall of remembrance that holds the shoes of the victims of extermination. I remember tracing the wear of each sole I could see. Some of them were so small–the small ones made me weep.
There is an understanding beyond the outer history of World War II, in fact there
is a deep aesthetic sadness in the stratum of human meaning that holds the
atmosphere of the Holocaust as victims experienced it–as they lived in it. It is the little brown loafers sitting in front of me that hold something indispensable. This humanistic presence could easily be passed over, particularly if one saw no value in things that don’t explicitly say something, but whisper lightly “look a little deeper” and “look into the lost and unknowable truths of lost phenomenal experience.”
I will never know this boy, who trampled the topography of the same earth as I, in
those brown loafers, or which cookie he liked best. But I have seen his shoes that hold a secret world of implicit history.
The fact that the intricacies of this boy’s consciousness are rendered unknowable is a deeply held tragedy; somehow, in working to understand the lived existential history of the Holocaust, the existence of the secret life of these agonizingly small shoes means something. The best I can do is sit here and weep hoping that I have seen some of him in something as heartbreaking, mundane, and human as a pair of little brown loafers.
The Duty of the Knower
The final sentence of Proposition Seven of the Tractatus–“what we cannot speak about is what we must pass over in silence”–will forever sting like a pestiferous insect. Perhaps the best thing to do is to leave language behind altogether and pester oneself with the humble request of one’s own: to every day go and earnestly attempt to understand beyond category in the pleasure and power of our own being-in-the-world and in sharing in the experience of witnessing the secret life of things to rescue them from the tragic loss of memory to time.
More than an artful depiction of why humans should take seriously in every moment that they are a being-in-the-world with a unique existential spatiality and temporality, and why they should yearn to preserve or estimate about the intricacies of mundanities, is the fact that not all things can be known categorically. Rather, categories, while aiding in coming into truths, may miss a fundamental faction: the mystical and indescribable experiencing of the world and your own being in it. Heidegger’s Being and Time outlines a critique of categorical knowledge that, when taken with diverse examples, points to the failure of categoricalism in the face of preserving memory held in things whether implicitly or explicitly, the diverse truths of the mystical experience by the subject, and the atmospheres of meaning that which they helped create. This, what I am calling the secret life of things, is a fundamental, and categorically ignored necessity of existential understanding.
