Gordon Finlayson's website

To The Things Themselves Again: Observations on What Things Are and Why they Matter

‘πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον’ ἄνθρωπον εἰ̂ναι, ‘τω̂ν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστι, τω̂ν δὲ μὴ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν.’

Protagorus.[1]

(forthcoming with Oxford University Press)

1. Sometimes a child’s experience can uncover a dimension of reality that remains hidden to adult sensibilities, and to the prejudices, presumptions and ideologies common sense. I was a clumsy child. I used to break and to lose things. As a consequence I had a keen sense of the fragility of things, and of the badness or wrongness of breaking or losing them. I never stopped to ask: What is wrong with breaking things? Why does it matter if I break this thing? It seemed –obvious to me. Yet that was, and still is, a decent question. After all, the things I broke – cups, plates, bowls, vases – tended to be mass-produced goods of relatively low value. They were on the whole neither unique nor irreplaceable, nor were they expensive. If they could not be replaced on a like for like basis, an adequate substitute could easily be found. The bad that I sensed on such occasions was not only due to the fact that whatever I had broken belonged to someone else. The wrongness of breaking things did not seem to be a matter of depriving someone else of their possession. Whether they belonged to me or to someone else, it was still wrong, though breaking someone else’s stuff was bad in another way too. Anyway, the question never occurred to me, so I did not ever attempt to answer it.

2. I am not the only one not to have answered that question. Philosophers, of various kinds throughout the ages have paid scant attention to it. One might think that surprising, given that philosophers since earliest times have spent much of their time and mental effort inquiring into the question of being, the question of the what the world is like, whether the natural or social world, and the question of the essence of things. That said, maybe this neglect is a consequence of the humanism that begins with the Socratic Enlightenment.

Cicero claims in the Tusculan Disputations that “Philosophy begins with Socrates, and it actually gets going when he turns his back on speculation about the natural world and turns to ethics.”[2] Neither of these domains of inquiry instigated by Socrates into nature (physics and metaphysics) and into the moral life (ethics) have yielded much insight into the question of why things matter. Rather, the fact is that since Socrates much of Western philosophy has tended to look askance at the things of the world, and to hold them in small regard.

Consider that in the metaphysical tradition of stemming from Aristotle and reaching into Medieval Christian thought there is a hierarchy of substances at the apex of which are Gods, then human beings, then animals, plants, and at the foot of which are inanimate and inorganic beings. A certain axiology corresponds to this metaphysical hierarchy. Gods and man stand at the apex, animals and plants in the middle, along with human artefacts, inanimate and inorganic entities. These last are considered of low value and merit comparatively little philosophical interest.[3]

Consider also an idea deeply engrained in some Greek philosophy, particularly in Cynicism and Stoicism, that material possessions are only of earthly value and that attachment to them detracts from one’s engagement with what is truly good and important. For example, Diogenes the cynic is supposed to have thrown away his cup, when he saw a child drinking water by cupping his hands, and discarded his spoon after seeing someone eating lentils with a crust of bread.[4] Later much Medieval Christian thought teaches of the dangers of attachment to earthly things and worldly possessions.

Finally, consider Roman law, in which the right to private property is the right to dispose over things as one wishes. To respect a person is to respect their proprietorship. One respects worldly things, primarily, as belongings.[5] Private right enshrines the belief – one that is still nowadays prevalent – that the owner disposes over her possessions, such that if one owns a thing one may use it or abuse it as one will. Hegel criticizes Roman civil law, according to which children were the property of the parent, and could be legitimately sold into slavery or killed, as being wholly “contrary to right” in just this respect.[6] The wrongness of treating people as things violates the specific dignity of human beings, which grounds one’s obligations to them. This idea about persons is still fundamental to our moral thinking, as it was to Hegel and of course Kant. It is the counterpart idea that interests me here though, that the value of things is low and that we have no such obligations towards them as things, in contrast to those we have toward them as possessions, which are really duties to their owners.

What these various examples suggest is that there are certain tendencies within Western philosophical thinking about metaphysics, ethics and law, which combine together to encourage disregard of the question of things – what things are and why they matter. Martin Heidegger, who is a conspicuous exception on this matter, appears to be right in his judgement that the age old question of the thing, of what a thing is, still more than ever needs to be asked.[7]

On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism

(forthcoming in Harvard Theological Review)

1. The Deprecative Comparison

Adorno’s late work is often been compared to negative theology, yet there is little serious discussion of this comparison in the secondary literature. [1] Moreover, in most of the existing discussions virtually nothing is said about negative theology, as if it is just obvious what it is and what the parallels with Adorno’s ideas are. The truth is that it is not obvious what negative theology is, and what, if any, the parallels with Adorno are. To find out would require a detailed account of both. In this article I shall make a start in this direction.

Let me begin by provisionally characterising negative theology as a discourse about God based primarily upon denial or negation, which is sometimes known as apophatic theology. The Greek word apophasis stems fromthe verb ἀπόφημι, meaning to deny or negate. It contrasts with cataphasis which means affirmation.[2] Apophatic theology was a central preoccupation of the Hellenized Judaeo-Christian tradition of theology, and arose from the confluence of two sets of ideas: broadly – Judaic notions of God’s transcendence, and ancient Greek ontological questions about the nature or essence of God. For the ontological question of what God’s essence or being consists in poses peculiar difficulties when God is supposed to be wholly transcendent and therefore unknowable and ineffable. Apophatic theology is the strategy of responding to these peculiar difficulties through negation or denial, the so-called negative way.

In response to the  Observer article which claimed that "the AHRC was told that research into the "big society" was non-negotiable if it wished to maintain its funding at £100m a year", the AHRC has been embarrassed into posting an 'Important Statement' in which it 'unconditionally and absolutely refutes the allegations reported in the Observer'.

The refutation is in fact only a denial. The denial consists in asserting that they "were NOT instructed, pressured or otherwise coerced by BIS or anyone else into support for this initiative". They offer little evidence for this assertion, apart fromthe fact that the "Big Society' initiative connects up with the Connected Communities Research Programme they have been running since 2008. They also point out that the Observer offers no evidence for its assertion either. This is true, but then the Observer would be unlikely to disclose its sources, if they are appropriately placed in Government or the Research Council, and thus credible.

So which account is true? For they surely cannot both be.