The Philological Specificity of Things (For Gaza)

«لا وَطَنٌ ولا منفى هِيَ الكلماتُ»

“Neither a homeland nor exile is the word.”

– Mahmoud Darwish, “To Describe Almond Blossoms”¹

In his meta-commentary on critique, Bruno Latour dispensed with Heidegger’s treatment of the thing (Das Ding), as distinct from an object (Gegenstand).² The crux of the distinction is not just a matter of construction, but of timing – for a thing to be, first a human being(s) must conceive of it, presumably for some social purpose, and then it can be a thing as well as an object. However, timing is an insufficient mechanism for the emergence of things, let alone objects, and nostalgia clouds the distinction. Latour took gathering to be the real mechanism at play. As people gather around technologies, for example, they become more of a thing. This necessitates a shift about matters of fact and matters of concern, which really are the same. Now, as an ontic intervention, Latour’s essay has fallen flat. But in its spirit, I want to argue that, while all things share roots, specific languages mediate specific things – with a whole lot of code switching in-between. Should we remain too permissive of this code switching (and really, doubletalk), then objects will finally take precedence, at least over the lives of Palestinians.

The coincidence of matters of fact and concern is worth considering in most areas of our lives, not least in our relationship to technology. But I struggle to think up a method of coincidence, except to show how things are overdetermined – demonstrating polysemy in other words, or multiple realization. I would mainly use human language to do so. For example: Similarity is a property of people who share things in common, and it is also a property of points and vectors close by in a space. Machine learning systems are programmed to make content recommendations based on both kinds of similarity, with implications for both kinds of similarity. Maybe language is not required to put this point across. Latour borrowed Alfred North Whitehead’s example of a sunset being both physical and aesthetic,³ so I suppose I could sit silently and appreciate the beauty while blocking the rays with a pair of sunglasses. But I admire language in its many forms, and I am sure that we can do nothing without it, and we therefore must care for it.

Philological specificity refers to the thingness of different languages. It evokes the worst of Heidegger’s takes, but let me try to make it a thing, a gathering of love for the word and all it can mediate instead. I am, after all, following Latour’s suggestion to go “[n]ot westward, but so to speak, eastward.”⁴ The fact is that various human languages share expressions for gathering up objects and things, as well as concepts for bringing together nature and humanity, not to mention the divine. These are by nature idiomatic. Spanish has an appropriate turn of phrase: “Cada cosa es para lo que es.” Heidegger’s Das Ding⁵ is therefore limited by its specific etymology. To remedy this, the kinds of things I will now consider, in Arabic and Hebrew, are arguably more theological. Their metaphysics perspicuously contrast with Heideggerian objects and things, although Latour devoted a great deal to softening those edges, and code switching does more still.

To begin: Inshallah (إن شاء الله) is perhaps the most ubiquitous Arabic phrase, eliding three words together. It means: “If God wills (it into being).” Some secular approximations are “Hope so!” and “We’ll see.” The expression’s middle word, shaa’a (شاء), is a verb people can use to want or to wish, and it shares a three-letter root (ش ي ء ) with one of the Arabic words meaning “thing” (شيء ). Apart from grammar, this word for thing also means object. Thus, both things and objects can be about brought about through divine emanation. Even the definite article in Arabic, al (ال), is definite by virtue of its attachment to Allah’s Goodly Names (أسماء الله الحسنى) – The Most Merciful, for example. So, at least one translation into Arabic of the title of Heidegger’s essay “The Thing” would be doubly divinely inflected.

The point is that things in Arabic relate to monotheism in a way that complicates Heidegger’s metaphysics. With the word of God comes His metaphysics, and some Arabic conventions reinforce this. What does that mean for science? Well, if nature, humans, and the divine are gathered from the first word, then secularism of the kind abided by Latour indicates a poverty of conception. In his 11th century treatise tahaafut al-filaasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), al-Ghazali took issue with fellow Muslim intellectuals who worked in Arabic, like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and al-Farabi, because they were content to have God as a first cause and apply reason to everything that comes after. But al-Ghazali saw that God is always imminent, and he made an epistemic claim that faith in the divine was required for understanding and explanation. Never mind that he and many of his contemporaries were Persian and used other words for things too.

 al-Ghazali’s positions were extreme, and an Andalusian scholar named Ibn Rushd (b. 1126) critiqued them on Aristotelian grounds in a cleverly constructed reply, tahaafut al-tahaafut (The Incoherence of Incoherence). This act would be well received by European and Jewish scholars. For example, Ibn Rushd rejected al-Ghazali’s occasionalism – the idea that everything we do is in effect done by God.⁶ Ibn Rushd, whose Latinized name is Averroes, used the Arabic word to connote things as they are (pure being):

“[I]t is self-evident that things have essences and attributes that determine the special functions of each thing and through which the essences and names of things are differentiated. If a thing did not have its specific nature, it would not have a special name nor a definition, and all things would be one[.]”⁷

Here, Arabic things, objects, and the divine coincide with Aristotelian context. By code switching into a new set of connotations and allowing for new gatherings, all in the context of a critique, Ibn Rushd presaged my argument. But as it is, I must be careful – all I am arguing is that thingness has its specificity, and that specificity inheres in language. Ever since Babel, people have been capable of learning one another’s languages and being in one another’s gatherings. There have always been physical limits to doing things together, and even as new technologies facilitate this, things will remain specific until the tower has been rebuilt stone for stone.

On the matter of the Bible – in Jewish languages (and by no means exclusively), things are complex and subject to constant revision. Consider Moses ben Maimon (b. 1138), also called Maimonides and Rambam (רמב״ם), who was an influential Sephardic rabbi, philosopher, and contemporary of Ibn Rushd. His Guide for the Perplexed is a synthetic tour de force that plays at reconciling Aristotelian things as they are with multiple layers of philosophical, legal, and esoteric interpretation. Maimonides wrote the Guide in Egypt using Judeo-Arabic, a rendering of Classical Arabic into Hebrew script. This choice preserved the intertextuality and specificity of Hebrew, while also facilitating engagement with Arabic writings on Aristotle. Shalom Sadik (2022) states that subsequent interpretation of the Guide has come down to two major questions:

1.        “Is it justified for the philosophical interpreter to assume that Maimonides’ philosophical opinion is actually radical, i.e., naturalist, despite Maimonides’ explicit rejection of naturalism in the Guide (for example II:29)? “

2.        Does Maimonides think that humans can reach an unassailable knowledge of the secrets of religion and nature?”⁸

I humbly suggest that these questions are related to Maimonides’s use of different words for things, such as the Arabic ‘amar (أمر), also meaning issue, and the Hebrew davar (דָבָר), which connotes speech acts. He alternated between them in reference to al-Farabi’s and Avicenna’s transmission of Aristotle’s ideas, and the text of the Torah. Deeper kabbalistic meanings are things I will never know. Sadik argues that Hebrew translations of the Guide by Ibn Tibbon and al-Harizi went in different directions: al-Harizi inclined toward skepticism of the sufficiency of human reason, and Ibn Tibbon toward radicalism. Later translations have their roots.

Dealing with multiple meanings is a challenge for those who would use multiple languages, and not just. The problem persists across translations of all kinds to this day. One way to resolve some of these issues, would be to identify a family resemblance. The philologists who influenced Heidegger did a great deal of this, hence the etymological specificity of “things,” like dinge and alþingi and all that. But resemblances among families of languages can mean less than their differences. Maimonides’s negative theology suggests a different kind of resolution for things, which is to state (sometimes repeatedly) what they are not. We know from a history of palimpsests and fragments that there are still more final ways to deal with polysemy: through words, in the way of things, as well as through the application of objects.

I have so far neglected objects for things, mirroring Heidegger’s nostalgia for nature. It never went away. Still, objects make themselves known with force. Latour wrote at a time when “another extraordinary parallel event was occurring. This time a Thing—with a capital T—was assembled to try to coalesce, to gather in one decision, one object, one projection of force: a military strike against Iraq.”⁹ Before the WMDs were an object, I gather, they were a thing. Things can hardly be worse than they were during the Iraq War, responding to and responsible for terrible violence. But 20 years later, they are the same, and the object is just as terrible.

It was said that architecture would never be the same after Ground Zero,¹⁰ and now, because of Gaza, neither will machine learning. “Lavender” is the English code name given to an AI model and an algorithm trained by data and computer scientists embedded in the IDF, with the stated purpose of anti-terrorism.¹¹ To become an object, this system required the same kinds of assemblages detailed by Latour. In effect, it resembles prior objects, which may be automatic, but not to the same degree, and which are not probabilistic in the same way. The key difference is that deadly predictions are now made at the level of individuals based on personal information such as phone contacts, calls, texts, location, images, relations to lists of known targets, and other features that identify family resemblances. Sadly, false positives are a thing.

Stalin supposedly said that while the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic. The tragedies now number in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, and along with them their relatives’. I mentioned that machine learning systems are built to make recommendations according to mathematical proxies for similarity, corresponding for better or worse to real similarities, and with implications for both. What an awful relationship this is! The most inhumane part of the object is the ease with which it allows another human being to approve an act of oblivion, nonverbally and even alone, save now for a screen.

What is thing theory’s response to these issues, to this state of affairs? “Lavender” might be ponderable by the masses for the present moment,¹² but layers accumulate, and the matter is covered up by shatnez. Today, we are modern for using electricity to transmit things and power objects. But what has modernity done to Israel and Palestine? It will mean nothing if the movement is all ended. We therefore need something to pull us out from underneath the pile, and Latour was on the right track, in that Things must now seriously consider their enduring relation to the object. The consequence of thinking one-way like Heidegger is that no object is forbidden.

Arabic in itself is perfectly capable of describing coincidence: «أحدث حدثا» – the event was spoken about into being. Suzanne Marchand has argued in as many words that “orientalism helped to destroy Western self-satisfaction,”¹³ regarding the West’s position in History. This was for our own good. How else could we see that the object, now AI, has no philology, much less philia? Far more than liberal democracy, the priority of objects and objectivity brings about the End of History.

I am not sure that History necessarily progresses, but I am sure that words and ideas have been continually overloaded, because we continue to gather them up with all the things our languages can convey. This leads to a lot of dithering. It also leads to glut. Pruning is therefore always necessary – Ockham’s razor, yes, but really Stapledon’s cosmic division, or Borges’s garden shears, and lately in scientific fashion, “genetic scissors.” Because we all cherish the things we share through language, it saddens me just to write about them being cut away. But the roots will remain, Inshallah.

Personally, I have decided that there are things which precede objects, and that there are objects which predate things. But it would be naïve and perhaps even unholy to believe that precedence in conception absolves a thing of its responsibility.

Finally, I must go further East. Mono no aware (物の哀れ, ‘the pathos of things’ or ‘a sensitivity to ephemera’) is the most hauntingly beautiful idea I know. It means both object impermanence, and in our wistfulness at its passing, the transience of things. Sunsets and almond blossoms are beautiful things. We should all be so fortunate as to stay above the rubble and enjoy them. Blink and they disappear.

---