This is an exploration of ‘thinginess’, in fact, two specific aspects of thinginess. The first looks inward and asks what is a thing? The second looks outward and asks, once more, what is a thing?
Most philosophical treatises concern themselves, in one way or another with meaning. Whilst I hesitate to call this a treatise, more correctly, a few scribbled notes, it is different. It really does not care about meaning, it asks but one question, “what is it that makes anything a thing at all?”
The boundary is the boundary of the thing. And this is the only point where one gets close to the concern of meaning. Looking inward from this boundary is everything that is contained within the context of the particular thing. One might think of this as the meaning of the thing, but this is not the whole story.
Take as an example, a cupboard. Let us assume the boundary of its “cupboardness” is its outside surfaces. Then, looking inward, the cupboard likely contains wood, perhaps clothes and so on. One might argue that we can encapsulate all of these contained things within the word “cupboard”.
But what, if, from the outside the cupboard cannot be seen. Without any external context, of it being placed or seen or used or felt and so on, what actually is it?
Anything that you can think of consists of an inner, its content, and an outer, contextual, aspect. Furthermore, the content of any thing is made up of other ‘things’. And since things are made up of other things, we can ask the same question of each of those until such time as we reach, if we ever do, those things that are atomic.
Thus we could look at any thing from without in order to assess its context, or inward to assess its content.
These notes are concerned primarily with the contextual aspect and ask the question “What would it mean to be a thing that is connected to nothing else, absolutely nothing else? That is, completely without any context.”
Such a thing would experience nothing else and nothing else would experience it. One might be tempted to say that such a thing would not for all practical purposes, exist. It is certain that it is unknown, unknowable and irrelevant to us. Here one stumbles on the knotty problem of existence. What do we mean by the word ‘exist’. For example, that which is beyond the visible universe (because light from such a place would take longer than the age of the universe to reach us) is unknown and unknowable. It is really only relevant to us in a ‘there be dragons’ sort of way. Can we talk of the existence of things beyond the boundary of the visible universe, does existence encapsulate those things as well as everything within the visible universe.
If context is essential to existence, and whenever one looks into a ‘thing’ one only finds other things that interrelate to each other, perhaps it is time to ask whether the universe is not really made of ‘things’ at all but only of connections and that what we refer to as a thing is no more than a nexus of connections. It could be said that the thing itself is simply an emergent property of its connections.