Thinking Things Through:
A Meditation on H. Peter Steeves’s
The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and
the Return to the Everyday
This paper was given during the “Author Meets Critics" panel
(chaired by Michael Naas) at the APA Pacific Division Conference in
San Francisco, California, on April 8, 2007.
Peter Steeves’s The Things Themselves (T3) is a strange book. But
then, life is strange. And so is the world. As Emerson observed long ago, in his
prophetic essay on nature, we are strangers in our own house, and estranged
from one another. If philosophy begins in wonder, then it isn’t so strange that
someone should write a book about it. For wonder {thanma) is just a synonym
for strangeness. And philosophy is nothing if not strange. And yet, the strangest
thing of all is that strangeness is an everyday occurrence—no phenomenology of
it is necessary, for it is the most familiar thing of all, and, once we’re used to it,
we greet it as a friend, embrace it as a lover, and make it our own.
Even the word ‘"thing” is both strange and familiar, simultaneously.
The dictionary (where we find all the words we know, as well as all the ones we
don’t, along with many we thought we knew, but didn’t) gives ten meanings of
the teiTn: (i) a separate entity, quality, or concept; (ii) a word, symbol, sign or
other referent; (iii) an individual object; (iv) whatever can be owned; (v) the
latest fad or fashion; (vi) clothes, possessions, or equipment; (vii) a unit; (viii) a
creature; (ix) a problem, dilemma, or complicating factor; and last but not least,
(x) a slang word for penis [the Yiddish word “schmuck,” so much in the news
these days, originally meant “Jewel or ornament” but has the same metaphorical
significance, which must mean something]. Steeves’s book isn’t about any of
these “things”—for which we may be grateful, or at least relieved. But what’s
really strange about the word “thing” is its etymology, and one other thing:
synonyms. For the latter, the dictionary gives “stuff’ (which we could discuss at
great length, but won’t) and “yoke,” which suggests everything from laying an
egg to human bondage, with farm labor, breakfast food, and abject suffering as
uncanny denominators. For the origin, which we ignore at our peril, we have
“meeting, assembly” (Old English, still used in Scandinavia), and related ideas,
such as “subject of deliberation” by an assembly, body, court, council or other
legislative group: in short, an entity that meets to consider an entity (a bill or
proposal), then votes on it at an appointed time. The law’s the thing—but more
than the law, the body politic that decides what the law is or shall be. Old
English, Old Frisian, Old High Gennan, Middle High Gennan, Old Norwegian,