The Thrower and the U-Haul Box

 Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

I am moving—again. If you have read this newsletter before, you will know that this is not the first time, nor the fifth, nor the fifteenth. I am moving across the country, from New York City to California. My living room—that is, the living room of my mother’s apartment, where my things have been stored through my time in university and the past year I spent in Peru––has become a prodigious archipelago of thumping indigo bags, packed and weighing with objects I have decided to take with me. 

Objects are always a good thing to write about, philosophically––or at least that’s what Marianne says. I think it’s because objects are unavoidable; even the world in which I encounter objects seems itself an object. Thus, objects merit investigation. 

Object derives from the medieval Latin compound of ob meaning “in the way of” or “against” and jacere meaning “to throw.” So, an object is a thing in the way of another thrown thing. To consider “object” we must also contemplate what we naturally tend to see as its reverse: “subject.”  This word is composed of sub from “under” and jacere again: something brought, or thrown, under another thrown thing. 

These etymologies are surprising. They reveal how while the cultural consciousness takes the meanings of these words as quite disparate, favoring the understanding and use of “subject” for considerations of things alive––humans; animals; plants, perhaps––and object for the exhaustive rest, they are not so sharply separate. The etymological understanding of subject clearly relates to the verb “subjugate,” the political understanding of “subject,” such as the subjects of the Roman Empire, as well as the phrase “to be subject to something,” which does bring it closer to the common understanding of object. Because an object is something brought under our control––a laptop’s keyboard, a car, a chair. By contrast, the subject is “the do-er of the action” that acts upon the object. This is the structure of action we use to teach syntax to schoolchildren, yet it seems that experience and other linguistic uses might yield connection rather than partition between these terms. 

The shared other half of the etymology, jacere, is also interesting. It inspires images of lances or javelins and a subject being brought under as the enemy taken down, while the object in the way is the enemy’s javelin colliding with the thrower’s and preventing it from achieving its goal of subjugation. It may seem a violent interpretation, but doesn’t the etymological understanding bring us to an Gladiator-like arena prepared to think like that? To see two sides, warlike and ready to bring the other under its influence, scrutiny, to avoid objects and create more subjects?

Moreover, the agency that accompanied the intuitive understanding of human beings as subjects in a world now feels loose and fast. Now, I wonder: if I am a subject of the world, brought under its manifestation of existence, how much control over its objects do I have? How much power do wordly objects have on me if I must unavoidably submit to their states of affairs and conditions?  

And then we have to ask: who is the thrower? And what are they throwing?

Aristotle’s philosophy was focused largely on what he could perceive and extrapolations from observation. He monitored the cyclical motion of heavenly bodies and philosophized that, like inanimate earthly bodies which cannot move on their own accord, something must have set them in motion. However, then he came upon a paradox that St. Thomas Aquinas used as proof for the existence of God: if all things need some other thing to put it into motion, where does the motion start? That is, who is the unmoved mover? His answer: only God. 

And this original heavenly mover can’t help but remind me of the subject/object thrower. Admittedly, the throwing imagery as opposed to the moving imagery do endow the figures with different tones. Moving, to me, especially when it comes to picturing the spherical celestial bodies set in motion, always seems to be some sort of pushing––like Sisyphus with his boulder. The Thrower, on the other hand, brings to mind a Zeus-like figure creating world, subjects, and order/chaos with lightning bolts. 

In either case, the conceptualization of existence as something that comes about by being pushed or thrown unfailingly brings us to Heidegger. The metaphysical subject-object distinction I’m relating back to the ancients went steady in the Renaissance with Descartes and his quirky poetical wax waxing. Heidegger threw all those metaphysics into a rhetorical rubbish bin because he thought that that’s not at all how we experience the world and ourselves. 

Heidegger employs the concept of “thrownness,” which relates to our earlier etymological studies, to speak to the fact that our fundamental––and involuntary––existential condition inevitably occurs within a world that possesses a predetermined set of circumstances. We are thrown into this world as a gladiator is thrown into a colosseum and must exist within the physical and sociocultural boundaries of the game we have always already been a part of. Our relationship with the world cannot be extricated from the fact that we are constantly in it and cannot be objectively, abstractly, or calculatedly removed from it as much as we try. Descartes’ experience with his wax was not an abstract dualistic one; it was not ‘thinking subject’ merely observing and interacting with a distant ‘extended object.’ He did not think therefore he was; he was therefore he was, says Heidegger. 

And objects, like my big blue bags and the valued possessions inside them, always are. Even scientifically, we have the principle that no matter is created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed. So, although objects take on various manifestations––wood being a tree, a polished and sanded credenza, or a raw-edged bookshelf––that are available to humans in different degrees and capacities, they are always manifest and always there. 

However, the repercussion of following Heidegger and rejecting the subject/object opposition is that we must answer for the nature of the other side of the binary. For, in human perception of the world, things are necessarily defined by what they are not; the boundaries of any given object are necessarily defined by another object or a lack of the first object’s continuation.  That other side is emptiness. Zen philosopher Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki says that emptiness “is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness [when it] is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.” Emptiness is, then, potentiality. 

Aristotle broke objects down into form and matter where form is potentiality and matter is actuality. If potentiality is emptiness, then form is emptiness as well. Aristotle said only the Unmoved Mover is pure form, pure potential––pure emptiness. From something does something arise, for something can’t arise from nothing.  If we follow that logic, it means emptiness is, in fact, not nothingness, and we arrive at the seemingly paradoxical question: what constitutes the content of emptiness? 

Perhaps, fundamentally speaking, everything. Indeed, no thing is ever quite touching another because of the infinitesimal space between atoms. Even the atoms themselves are mostly empty, full of space rather than matter. Going back to an Aristotelian macro-consideration, however, I find that the image conjured by “form” is an outline, something waiting to be filled in. In this way, form itself conjures emptiness. But if the Unmoved Mover is form and form is emptiness, how can emptiness create motion?

Zen philosopher Alan Watts posits that we tend to see God or the creator as a supernatural individual watching from above, as if from a separate world than ours. That image is a misconstrual, he says; there is no outside of the universe. Therefore, God must be within it. Like Heidegger, however, he does not delve into separatism. Instead, he writes that God is the universe, all things contain It. It is the essential energy of the universe organized into different shapes and states. We can see “emptiness” just the word we use to call the shapeless version of this energy, quite separate from nothingness. And all subjects and objects, javelins and gladiators, me and you, happily show us various manifestations of energy that are necessarily part of the universal motion of all things. 

So I, too, am a subject in motion. And my U-Haul box, now a tall ocean of blue bags, is actuality, materiality, that I’m throwing into a future space of potentiality.