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55 Fateful Images ALPHONSO LINGIS the Pennsylvania State University Fateful Images ALPHONSO LINGIS The Pennsylvania State University Reality and its Appearances Phenomenology, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, reduced the reality of things to the totality of their appearances. It is because something appears that we can assert that it exists. It belongs to the essence of a real thing to generate appearances. And the appearances are appearances of things. Appearances do not flow by, a drifting fog of tones and hues; they separate into identifiable units, gestalten. To be outside our minds belongs to the things, and their appearances are outside. We do not see patterns suspended in the inner space of the mind, but the colors, sizes, shapes of outside things. The real thing itself-the chair or the building caught sight of in its fragmentary appearances- is not something invisible, or conceptual, not an identity-term posited by the mind; it is the totality as sketched out in any of its appear- ances. Any of its appearances implicate further appearances: we see how the surface exposed in front of us implicates and is continued by a back side, an underside. The chair or a building exists in a wave of duration across which it evolves perspectival profiles of itself. Yet not all the appearances a thing generates show it as it really is. Natural perception itself, Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out, distin- guishes between the real properties of things and their perspectival deformations, appearances distorted by the intervening medium or obscured by the distance, colors seen in dim or colored light, shapes 55 56 set askew. The real properties appear in the thing when the thing itself is within reach, set at the right distance and position, accessible to our multiple sensory and motor powers. Other appearances appear not as false or illusory (or mentally fabricated) but as transitional: they lead to the real thing and its real characteristics, and disappear when they appear. The flattened oval shape of the dinner plate seen on the shelf leads to and merges into the circular form which spreads out all the patterns of the plate equally before our view, as monocular images fade out before the integral appearance of an object set at explorable distance from our eyes. Formal and Substantial Appearances of Real Things The apprehension of the real features and natures of things is an ac- tion. It is when we position ourselves before a thing, and position it before us, such that its surfaces are visible throughout and their colors and textures observable, and its overall structure is surveyable that the thing appears to be a unit that holds together. This positioning, this manipulation is a primary form of understanding. The construction of a scientific representation of the universe proceeds out of an action of isolating substances and discovering their properties by putting them in reaction with other substances; and it is predictive; it issues in tech- nological transformations. Since we uncover and discover things by manipulation, are the things anything but manipulanda? Things are not only forms but also forces- their forms are dynamic forms. The hammer's form is the ways its force of resistance or drive fits in with other things-with the grip of the hand of the user and with the other things movable, breakable, or assemblable with its force. A thing thus reduces to the unity of its "properties"-which are in fact modes of appropriateness; and phenomenological ontology establishes a relational conception in place of the ancient substantive definition of things, taken, since Hume, to be metaphysical. But, Emmanuel Levinas points out, things do not momentarily take form in the unarticulated elements, in the flow of light and shadow, heat and damp, along the ground, with the specific function the ma- nipulating hand simultaneously outlines and makes use of. It is be- cause they are already there, detachable substances, in themselves and at our disposal, that we can envision uses for them. Use presupposes possession. The clearly delimited contours that constitute a piece of reality as a thing mark out the way it is separate from or detachable from other things. Because a thing's form, its closed surfaces, makes .
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