Growing your hands back
On real things and unthings and the gift of appreciation
“As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.”
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, no. 258.
We get the word reality from the Latin word res. The word res is translated as thing. One way to better understand our world now, this savage crisis of meaning we’re in, the mess of our present decadence and how quickly we can and often do lose a sense of reality, is to contemplate real things and how they are sidelined so often in our time by unthings; that is, with nonrealities and unrealities that masquerade as—and so are mistaken for—realities.
We might as well start with the funny side of things; with a joke philosophy meant to mock existentialism. In 1963, Paul Jennings penned the article, Report on Resistentialism, published in the Spectator. Resistentialism presents the idea that things (res) resist us. Jennings writes about the “bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed” philosopher “Pierre-Marie Ventre” (based on Jean-Paul Sartre) who came up with this ridiculous theory about how human beings are always living in “a world of hostile Things” (with a capital T). Jennings jokes, “In the Resistentialist cosmology that is now the intellectual rage of Paris Ventre offers us a grand vision of the Universe as One Thing—the Ultimate Thing (Dernière Chose). And it is against us.” Jennings continues:
“Man’s increase in this illusory domination over Things has been matched ... by the increasing hostility (and greater force) of the Things arrayed against him. Medieval man, for instance, had only a few actual Things to worry about—the lack of satisfactory illumination at night, the primitive hole in the roof blowing the smoke back and letting the rain in, and one or two other small Things like that. Modern, domesticated Western man has far more opportunities for battle-losing against Things—can-openers, collar-studs, chests of drawers, open manholes, shoelaces …”
And so on. “Resistentialism,” Jennings explains, “is largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack and moaning.” The truth in the jest is that things are not entirely compliant. They are more than we imagine them to be. Thought cannot control things.
Things are connected to our hands and handiwork, Heidegger reminds us. They can be ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. We can be handy. We can lend a helping hand. And, yes, we can have our hands full, our hands tied, our hands dirty. We can be hands-on and heavy-handed. Hands-free. Hands-off. We can show our hand, vote by a show of hands, know things first-hand, and watch as things get out of hand. We can get a grip, we can get a handle on things. We can hold fast. We can let go. The thingly character of things is something tactile; it is felt. This feeling for things may not be literal. Perception itself is handy; or, at least, it can be.
In the Grimm’s fairy tale, The Girl without Hands, also known as The Handless Maiden, a misguided father unwittingly trades his devoted daughter for wealth in a bet with someone he fails to see is the devil. Soon enough, the devil comes to collect the girl. But he can’t stand her immediately apparent purity and piety. She is a thing mysterious and good. Her hands reach out into the world and she touches the face of the real. The devil finds her pure, undiluted, unifying contact with reality abhorrent. He demands that the father cut her hands off before she comes to him. He threatens the father: “If you don’t do this, I’ll be taking you down to hell with me instead.”
The fearful father, a symbol in the story of all authorities who betray the grand inheritance that things give us, complies. The girl loses her hands. Those hands that once reached out to grasp things are gone and only stumps remain. The world becomes less tactile and decidedly more visual. The nearness of feeling is replaced with the distance of seeing. In the process, reality begins to disintegrate. Amazingly, however, the devil can’t touch the girl, can’t take her away. She’s protected by a magic deeper than he understands. He has to leave her where she is. She decides that her father perhaps doesn’t have her best interests at heart and she leaves to find kindness elsewhere.
We’ll meet her in her story later again. For now, let’s think about that devil and what he means. The devil is against things. What does he do? The Great Tradition tells us that he lies (he obscures things), steals (he takes things away), and murders (he destroys things). The diabolical is the opposite of the symbolical. The symbolical is thingly. It connects and unifies and integrates. It brings together. It is a meeting place, a place of communion, of laughing together and crying together. Symbállein means to put together. Diaballein, its antonym, means to tear apart. In that grim Grimm tale, the way the devil tears things apart is to cause a loss of contact with things. The devil knows that if we lose touch with things, we lose reality itself. He has the girl’s hands severed.
In our time, in this age of digital gnosticism, in a pact with the devil’s digital electrical nervous system, we are all, like that girl, without hands. We have information now, so disembodied that embodied wisdom has become a stranger to us. We have social media and so our sense of the social is discarnate. Our ability to touch things, to be in touch with people, even, is fast becoming something too old-fashioned and traditional to be respectable to others who have made a deal with the diabolical. I don’t know about you but I want my hands back. I’m pretty sure most of us are sick of living several meters above ourselves, staring down at ourselves as if we’re mere data points in someone else’s information system. Astral projection isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. We need to get a grip. We need to be more than words. We need to take on flesh and move incarnately into some specific neighbourhood.
But what is a thing anyway? “We use the word ‘thing’ almost without noticing it, but it names something elemental yet enigmatic,” says William Desmond in Being and the Between (1995). He goes on: “There are things: fish and fowl and beasts, things that crawl, that leap, that think, that weep, artificial things, things of the spirit, things of moment, things beneath contempt. In the most general sense, things are certain determinate happenings of the power of being.” Read that last line again: things are certain determinate happenings of the power of being.
We cannot find ourselves, I mean we cannot discover ourselves and locate ourselves, in the midst of a fearful pandemonium of ghostly apparitions and pixellated abstractions. Contact with reality can only happen properly in the midst of a solid world. It has been ordained that transcendence cannot be ours apart from our animal materiality. Hands tapping on tables. Hands clapping, wildly applauding the miracle and inherent goodness of being. Hands holding hands. Hands wiping away tears. Hands open in worship. Hands open to receive the gift of being.
Even becoming is only intelligible against a backdrop of being. Even impermanence is only properly conceivable against a scenography of permanence. We get a sense of the astonishing power of being, this enduring permanence, in how things manifest themselves to us as themselves. As things.
Things reveal the world to us, says Martin Heidegger. They stabilise human life, says Hannah Arendt. Things provide continuity to our lives by establishing a basic trust in life’s repetitions. Things are like those calm little islands around which the flow of the sometimes turbulent rivers of dreams and life can continue. Rivers are things too, when we are not overwhelmed and drowning in them. Patterns of and in being are thingly. Things repeat themselves, says Catherine Pickstock in Repetition and Identity (2013), and so reveal themselves as anchored unities. They show us a world that does not have to be stuck in literalisms and can allow for the power of astonishment and wonder. Things symbolise the union of heaven and earth. Things are “aesthetic presences,” says Desmond. “Their aesthetic presence is their sensuous being there in their full concreteness.” Try to reduce a thing to a number and you’ll find yourself in trouble. Things are plurivocal. They speak of so much more than their immediate appearance. In their particularity, they suggest harmony with the created order.
We impart our souls to things, says Hegel. In ownership, we give ourselves to things and they become more meaningful to us; and, in becoming more meaningful, we can share things with the world. We receive being as a gift in things. And we give it back to the world in ensouling things and sharing them.
I notice how things awe my infant daughter. She looks at simple things and then up at me and she utters an exclamation of wonder. An item of clothing inspires her. The texture of a carpet makes her happy. A simple little empty box brings her into contact with the absolute miracle of the almost incomprehensible thereness of everything. Even resistentialist realisations are a delight to her. My other daughter, older than her sister and blessedly still with gleeful hands that reach out to touch the real, grants life to things in a way that gathers everything up into a larger unity. Her toys are not just empty voids but charged with the grandeur of God. Her teddy bears and stuffed bunnies are alive. And at night she asks me to hug them, to impart my soul to them, so that when she is asleep, she can feel my presence in those things. I am not nearly as contained as I once believed I was. I am a thing, too. Slowly, with the help of my beautiful girls, through their grateful and open and brilliant attention to things, I am growing my hands back.
It would be a mistake, though, to assume that things are only physical. Gods are things just as demons are unthings. Nations are things. Plato’s forms are things. Santa Claus is a thing in the sense that his mythical-spiritual presence gathers the world up into a unity of praise for the profound gift of being. The tooth fairy is a thing, a real thing. She has, like many transcendent figures, what in technical language we might call a structural ontology. We may not believe in her but we can act as if she is real. In acting out her remarkable task—taking, with our hands, those little teeth that chewed the food that granted nurturance to our precious offspring—we render our unbelief futile and idiotic. There may be something unthingly in atheism but I have yet to meet an atheist who doesn’t act as if God is real. God, Meister Eckhart notes, is the ultimate Thing—the reconciler and unifier of all things, the One who wishes to see all things redeemed by being gathered up into Himself.
Fairy tales are things, too. In the language of folk phenomenology, they present us with a deep ethos. You read a story about a girl with no hands and you find yourself in it. Only a failure of imagination would give rise to the statement that the story has nothing to do with us. In a fairy tale like that, you can find your world rendered comprehensible. It’s shocking to realise that somewhere in your own life, someone—maybe you—made a deal with the devil and now you’re paying for it. Hands down devilry. How were you the father who betrayed his daughter? How were you his pious daughter? How were you the prince and the king who shows up later in that tale?
At its best, religion is thingish, too. It gathers us up and weaves us into a coherent tapestry that, for all of its hermeneutical and phenomenological complexity, can be profoundly life-giving. You kneel and you stand and you take into your own being the body and blood of Christ and you are made whole. You pray the rosary and the world gets put back together, even with all of the suffering and confusion in it. I have experienced the darker side of religious life, as many of you have, and it’s made me doubt the thingly character of faith and its various praxes. I, too, have heard hollowness in so many liturgical regurgitations. But this is not because the religious life is unthingly. When the religious establishment alienates instead of offering a welcome, it is because of a forgetting. Religion is truly a thing. Faith is truly a thing. But our various human errors may render such things unthingly. Things can be mistakenly treated like objects, which instead of dwelling with us stand over and against us. I’ll say more about objectification in a moment.
Things are, it turns out, rather stubborn. Yes, they can resist us. They are there and there’s nothing we can do about that, although we can be distracted from their thereness and we certainly can ignore them. We can misrecognise them, too. But here’s the thing. I’ve already hinted at this a few times but it’s time I gave the hint a bit more solidity. Some things aren’t things but unthings. To get a sense of what I mean, it helps to notice that there isn’t a clear identity between things and objects or entities. An atom bomb, for instance, is certainly an object but it is by no means a thing. It is determinate in the sense that it has discernable limits and something resembling a form. But it does not only distort but undoes the power of being.
This is, more or less, how Martin Heidegger kicks off his discussion of things in his essay The Thing (1950). As he points out, the atomic bomb brings with it a terrible foreboding, unbearable anxiety, a sense that everything can, at any moment, be left in tatters. Reality can be discombobulated, dismantled, and deconstructed in the most ferociously literal fashion. Sounds like some sort of warped ideological mandate. Unthings destablise. That’s how you know it’s not a thing. It is diabolical and devilish. In its presence, we find not a gathering of realities under the umbrella of thinghood but a scattering and shredding and dispersing. Realities can be undone. Tapestries of being can be unwoven. Unthings do not build but destroy. One preliminary implication: the Current Thing is often nothing but a Current Unthing.
An atomic bomb is an object but its anti-thingly quality is most evident in the fact that it disintegrates being. Where it is, even when we just think about it as an unthing located in thought, all that is solid evaporates into thin air. The atomic bomb is perhaps an extreme example but it alerts us to the fact that there are apparent things that are most definitely unthings. What other unthings can you think of? I’ll leave it to you to consider how to answer that question. You can identify them by the fact that they do not bring with them any real coherence. They do not assemble parts into a holistic narrative but violently smash the real to pieces. The real gets Lego-ified, turned into the component parts of an unworlded abstraction. People become meat-Lego in this time of unthings. People become data. Everything becomes data. Personhood is transformed into zombiehood. Bodies become corpses.
Heidegger writes about thinging. Things thing. He’s not offering a lisped singing but the idea that things are not just whats but hows. Nouns, too, can take on a verbish quality if we’ll feel them instead of just thinking them. At the mercy of a shrunken consciousness, sadly, unthinging can happen too.
Unthinging is the result of a consciousness out of touch with thinghood. Too much left-hemispheric interference. Unthinging makes unthings. Unthings are entities, clumps of congealed undeath, objects that fail to live up to thingly integrity, entities that are life-denying. They are made through something like an abstract universal rather than being instances of something concrete and particular. They impose on the world an idea that has no origin in being itself. The message should be pretty clear. Avoid the unthing as much as you can. With that in mind, let’s get back to the story of the Girl without Hands.
Well, the devil plays all of his tricks as the story goes on. He doesn’t let up. Brokenness has a way of begetting more brokenness. But the Girl remains pure. She remembers how the world used to feel and she trusts that things might show themselves to her again. She remains faithful to things even when she cannot touch them. And not all goes badly, thankfully. Life is a mixed bag. She meets a prince and marries him and, when he becomes king, she soon becomes the mother of his child. The world becomes tangible to her in a new way. Her loving but somewhat misguided husband makes some silver hands as substitutes for her real hands—how silly of him to assume that technology might be in any way adequate. She doesn’t get upset. She sees the love intended even if the gift is unthingly. She quietly puts those false hands away because there is no substitute for real things.
Then, one day, she encounters a man who tells her to wrap her arms around a tree nearby. “Get as close to that thing as you can,” he says. “Hug the tree, love it, and let some of its soul into your soul.” She does what he suggests and, wondrously, her hands grow back. After so many years, so many years of being handless, she can feel the world again. She touches the face of the real. The lesson is simple: the only way to get your hands back is to recover a sense of things and thinghood. Unthings—information, bureaucracy, cellphones, and the like—need to become subordinate to our contact with reality. Unthings need to know their place. Things should become primary. Abstractions must be subordinate to our felt sense of the whole. Get a grip and learn to feel.
The key is appreciation. “Appreciation,” writes Desmond, “is an ontological opening.” Through appreciation, through apprehending the world with absolute honesty, we can begin to tell the difference between symbolical things, which put the real back together, and diabolical unthings, which rip reality apart. And we can start to attend to things. I mean we can start to really pay attention. In the process, reality can become solid again. It can cease to be, for us, a mere ghostly hallucination and pixellated projection. “When we appreciate something, we value it for itself,” writes Desmond, “and not with the ulterior purpose of turning it into a mere means to an end, or something useful for us. We value it for itself because it is a value in itself. Such appreciation is a vigilance to things that celebrates the value of their ambiguous, plurivocal presence.” If you want to regain your sanity, I recommend coming to your senses. Hold out your hands. Touch. Taste and see. We can know that being as such is good when we pay attention to things.