Jamsque

Jamsque

@Jamsque

He's just this guy, you know?

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Jamsque
@Jamsque

When is a fallen tree a seat?

A tree with a smooth trunk falls due to some natural process of weather or erosion, and comes to rest in a nicely horizontal orientation with its top surface a convenient two feet or so above the ground. As long as it persists in this state unobserved, it remains a fallen tree trunk and cannot be anything else.

When observed by a human being, it continues to be a tree trunk, but in casting the physical reality of the trunk into a metaphysical representation of a trunk in their mind, the human may think to themselves "that fallen tree would be a nice place to sit". Thus, human observation gives the trunk the potential to become a seat. It is only a seat in fact when someone is sitting on it, and it reverts to being a trunk with the potential for seat-hood once the sitter rises to their feet.

A constructed bench, on the other hand, is always a seat, even when un-sat-upon and unobserved. Unlike the trunk, which becomes a seat temporarily because of the metaphysical manner in which humans interpret the physical world, the constructed bench is a product of human beings intervening in the physical world, and all such interventions consist of the imposition of metaphysical concepts upon the physical.

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bilgerat
@bilgerat

i was with you up until the final paragraph; where does the seat-ness of the bench persist if it is not in use, or if the idea of the seat is not held in the mind as a potential seat? when considered ontically, the bench has no abstract being; it is not a bench but an arrangement of matter, and acquires abstract being only in practice, only in the role endowed upon it by activity. the 'bench' alone is neither a seat nor a bench, and acquires its character by means of its material affection of the one for whom it possesses such character. here, however, it would be easy to make a fatal error, reducing abstract being to the subjective idea or to a transcendent category only realised by human action; it is not the idea that gives a thing its character, but the actual (in the sense of actuality) material processes set to work through the subject - i.e. the mediation of actuality through the relation between the object and the subject, the sensuous human activity (see marx, theses on feuerbach) which engenders it

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Jamsque
@Jamsque

The constructed bench is if you like 'contaminated' by human action and thought. In its construction the bench is imbued with human concepts of e.g. ergonomics, aesthetics, material science, and so on. As long as it continues to exist in the form of a bench it is continually expressing those concepts. It is certainly true that 'bench' is not a natural category, it is human-centric and human-created, but benches are not naturally occurring objects. One may consider every built object to be a sort of text, although its base material form may be very similar to that of some naturally occurring entity, it nonetheless encodes ideas and information as a result of deliberate human intervention.

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