The Malice of Inanimates

By Charles Harvey

Human being has been delivered over to beings which it needs in order to be as it is. – Martin Heidegger

I lost my car twice. And though I was drunk both times that it vanished, it wasn't my fault. The first time, when I walked out of the bar, it just wasn't there. It wasn't where I parked it, nor was it anywhere near where I had been. So I walked home. Then, I was like you. I blamed myself. I'd find it tomorrow. I'd walk over to campus, stroll through the halo of bars that fringed the university, and I'd find the car where I left it. When I did, I'd remember leaving it wherever I found it. "Stupid me." I'd say, "what a drunk fool."

But I didn't find it. I looked all around. I checked the lots of the pubs philosophers frequented, I checked the campus spots where I usually parked, I asked friends who had been with me that day. They didn't know. I had appeared at "Bullwinkles" alone. I'd said nothing about how I'd got there.

After two days of searching, reluctantly, I called the police. They found it, of course, after a couple more days. It was uptown Tallahassee, near some jazz bars I patronized. The keys were in the ignition, the car was undamaged. It was locked, with no sign of having been vandalized. My girlfriend hadn't been happy about the car disappearing (it was really her car). And she never believed (doesn't today, even as my wife), that I didn't lose it. The police thought the same way. "Nobody stole it," they said. "No evidence of that."

For weeks, however, I had not been in that section of town. I had had the car yesterday. So while I acquiesced in the common view of these things‑‑"blame the person, not the thing"‑‑I sheltered my suspicions. One more bit of evidence for a conclusion I subconsciously held but could not admit consciously: the inanimates were going away.

The second time there could be little doubt. When I awoke in the morning and walked out to my car, it just wasn't there. I was late already. I had my class to teach shortly. So I walked fast to campus. My subject that day was David Hume's argument concerning "skepticism with regard to the senses." I had a ready example of his thesis that there is no evidence and there cannot be any to show that inanimates persist when we don't perceive them.

Lecture over, I called the police. They were skeptical with regard to my senses. They listened, however. A few hours later, Dot, the philosophy secretary, sent a message. "The police say that your car is in front of your house. I don't ask questions anymore, Harvey; I only take messages."

They blamed me, of course. I had even made the mistake of calling Jeanne to see if she had taken the car. "I didn't take it," she said. "You'd better find it."

I went home. There it was. Not exactly where I usually parked it. One house down, right of my front door. But there's no way I could have missed it when I walked out of my door, and no reason I would have parked it there. The two houses were part of a four‑some arranged in a square. Each of us parked right in front of our respective doors. The cars couldn't be missed when we stepped outside.

Once again, I swallowed the common view as if it were fact‑‑"blame the person, not the thing"‑‑but now I knew in my heart that the car had popped‑out, gone right out of being. And it had done so deliberately‑‑to get me. Once the inanimates get you on the ropes‑‑and what better candidate than a drunken philosopher?‑‑they show you no mercy. I had to be cautious. These were bold moves on the part of my enemies. Until now only small entities had popped‑out. In that way they had kept me blaming myself. The fact that a large being such as a car had twice popped‑out on me, gave me reason to worry‑‑and to think. Here is my story, my evidence, and my thesis about our reluctant war with inanimates.

* * *

David Hume was, to my knowledge, the first to provide philosophical grounds for what we have always known but have been afraid to admit: inanimates are not to be trusted, they are unpredictable, they are obstinate, they are ornery and sometimes downright malicious‑‑and, they are out to get us. Hume didn't say exactly this, but he provided the reasons to believe it just might be so. He was the first to admit that it is mere animal prejudice to believe that inanimates persist when no one perceives them. But even he didn't conceive just how malicious inanimates are.

In an anxious episode in The Centaur, John Updike shows us: George Caldwell and son, Peter, are returning from school, late. Foolishly, stubbornly, in an automobile unfit for the task, Caldwell has decided to get home before the Pennsylvania blizzard bars access. Their automobile fails in its attempt to climb an icy hill. At the bottom of the hill‑‑snow on the ground already deep, snow in the air still swirling‑‑Caldwell and son must put chains on their tires; if they cannot, they will die.

They must jack up the car. First try: the automobile spits the jack from under itself. "Jesus," says Caldwell, "this is a way to get killed." They try again, but it is too dark for their eyes to see, too cold for their numb fingers to feel. The father tries. The son watches the father fail. "With a sob or curse blurred by the sound of the storm Caldwell stands erect and with both hands hurls the tangled web of iron links into the soft snow. The hole it makes suggests a fallen bird." Peter tries next. But "as he drapes the cumbersome jacket of links around the tire, the tire lazily turns and shucks its coat of mail like a girl undressing." He tries again. A little catch is the secret to life. "Only a tiny gap remains to close. . . . He prays; and is appalled to discover that, even when a microscopic concession would involve no apparent sacrifice of principle, matter is obdurate. (My emphasis.) The catch does not close. He squeals in agony, 'No!'"

Updike's insight: One mistake from minded‑beings and unminded ones take charge of their destiny. Not only do inanimates refuse human request, they scorn human endeavor. The image of the fallen bird in the snow mocks Caldwell's overly‑ reflective, other‑world values; it submerges that which would fly (a bird, the winged horse, Caldwell himself) into that which has fallen and stuck fast to Earth. And Peter, who, along with most of the male species, will have his share of difficulties undressing girls, can't, to save his life and that of his father, keep this rubber maiden dressed in her chain‑mail belt.

One time or another, though usually in circumstances less dire than these, we have all had this kind of experience. A catch, a latch, a microscopic concession of matter, and our problems are solved. But does matter consent? Virtually never. And when it does, it is usually too late. The pants are bepissed when the zipper unlocks, the TV mystery solved when electricity returns, the human being is dead when, all by itself, the catch drops into place.

Again and again, great literature recounts this experience. Think only of the inanimate snow that kills the fire whose absence kills the man in Jack London's "To Build a Fire." A person dies because of the malice of matter. And here, too, the author gives an "objectivistic" explanation of the event. He blames the man. Or think of Ivan Illich's horrified disbelief when he looks at the window knob that ruptured his liver that ruptured his life. "Is it really so!", Illich says to himself. "I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort. Is that possible? How terrible and how stupid. It can't be true! It can't but it is."

Literature has, in these cases, described a region of being where metaphysics has not dared to tread; a region in which philosophical metaphysics has followed daily belief and fled true explanation. But in spite of its many heart‑rending accounts, literature, too, has failed to save the phenomena; it has chosen to explain it away‑‑quite in spite of the evidence of each minded‑being.

Are inanimate objects merely stupid and obdurate, as these writers suggest? Merely blind non‑actors, automatons of cause? Or perhaps, are even the great authors to whom I've referred afraid of a deeper, darker, more sinister truth? A truth so sinister, in fact, that neither artists nor philosophers have been able to mouth it, perhaps not even to think it? Might it not be that inanimates are inimical towards human aspirations and hopes? As we will see, it wasn't merely "an imperceptible agitation to the tree," that brought from the boughs a load of snow that doused the man's fire. Nor should Ivan Illich have felt unheroic and stupid about the cause of his death. He died a warrior in a guerrilla war that has paralleled, moment by moment, the history of humankind.

* * *

Updike's preferred word, "obdurate," is really too passive for the phenomena we want to describe. Webster defines "obdurate" as "hardened, not given in to persuasion, unyielding." It defines "obstinacy" as "stubbornness, the quality or state of being difficult to remedy, relieve, or subdue." Certainly, these are characteristics of the inanimates. But these are their quiet, less aggressive features‑‑the one's we can bear to acknowledge. "Orneriness" gets closer to the phenomena. It is described as "tending towards an irritable disposition, cantankerousness." "Malice," is the best word of all: "the desire to harm others, or to see others suffer; ill will; spite." And add "inimical" to this: "having the disposition of an enemy; hostile; being adverse by reason of hostility or malevolence." These last, I think, reveal the essence of inanimates. Consider examples.

The most common experience with the inimical ways of inanimates occurs with socks and with underwear. These inanimates are malicious most often because they can be. They can be because they are small and usually mixed with other inanimates. They can pop‑out without giving away the plot of inanimates to make miserable the lives of the animates. Repeatedly I (and you) have placed socks or underwear into the wash, and they've been gone when the washing was done. I am well aware of the common hypotheses here: "Oh, you must have forgotten to put them in the wash in the first place," says my wife. "Well, where are they now"?! I ask. "If I didn't put them in the wash, they should at least be somewhere!" Of course, they are usually nowhere, until a day or two later‑‑most likely, the day after I buy a new set of socks or of underwear.

"They were stuck to some other clothes," you are probably thinking. Well, I, at least, haven't been accused by students or colleagues of having underwear stuck to my shirt or my trousers. Nor do I know of anyone who has been so accused. Indeed, knowing how common this explanation is, I have kept a vigilant eye on colleagues, students, and strangers, in cities the world over. Not once have I seen underwear or socks clinging to trousers, shirts, dresses, blouses, hats, or even to sweaters. The reason is clear if you'll only admit it: the socks or underwear simply popped‑out of Being.

Similar experiences often occur with pencils, pens, shoes and glasses. How many times have you placed one of these objects beside or directly in front of yourself, turned away for a moment, looked back, reached for the object and found it was gone? And what did you do? Blamed yourself! But why blame yourself? Again, the answer is clear. The slight embarrassment of seeming stupid is psychologically and metaphysically less disturbing than is the gnawing fear that arises with the truth about inanimates.

Inanimates are ornery, malicious, inimical towards the life‑plans of animates. And really, you already knew this. Recall only how many times you have retaliated against malicious inanimates. How many times have you smashed a door after it slammed on your face? How often have you kicked hell out of an end‑table after it gouged one of your shins? Don't college students even today burn their math books after a semester of one‑way harassment? Don't be ashamed or embarrassed about the revenge that you've taken. In the war of ontological kinds, pay‑back is always fair game.

* * *

The fundamental virtue required to acknowledge the malice of inanimates is courage. Courage, because understanding the metaphysics of malice requires that we acknowledge the sinister intents of the seemingly benign material webwork that girds our lives‑‑and quite often ends them as well.

Inanimates s[d]eek revenge.

(Take note of this very sentence as an example! I'm leaving the "d" here because I wrote this word correctly a half‑dozen times. Each time I printed the document it said "deek" instead of "seek." The inanimates don't want my case intelligibly made. I'll compromise. We'll have it both ways.

For two full years a former colleague and friend‑‑a theologian mind you‑‑had a lower case "m" that appeared in the margin of everything he wrote. He never knew why. Could it have stood for "malice," or "mischief," or even "Mephistopheles"? He finally printed his essays with the "m" in them and whited‑out the little sucker once the papers were printed. And for years, too, whenever I have written the word "sold"‑‑sorry, "soul" (damn!)‑‑in philosophical essays, it has appeared as "sold" when I printed the essay. I accept this. The battle goes on.)^[1]

As I was saying, there is a passive but persistent ferocity at the heart of inanimate Being. This ferocity, perhaps generated from resentment at the animation of animates, is aimed at all and any unsuspecting animates‑‑just because they are animate. And the more the animate creature refuses to acknowledge the evil workings of the inanimates, the more the poor creature is victimized. So let this essay serve as an edifying, as well as an ontological and metaphysical one‑‑let it serve as warning and guide.

Here are two general rules about what not to do when encountering malice in objects. Do not blame yourself and do not blame others. Note how even fellows as courageous as Freud and Jack London still felt the need to blame humans for all of their mishaps. Here is how London blamed the man for his own death: "Each time he had pulled a twig he had communicated a slight agitation to the tree‑‑an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was concerned, but an agitation sufficient to bring about the disaster." (My emphasis.) Why "imperceptible"? Because there was really no "agitation!" The snow dumped, plain and simple, because the opportunity arose. No other humans around, no explanation required. Written from the proper metaphysical perspective the story could be called "To Kill an Animate" rather than "To Build a Fire." But even London hesitated before this intolerable truth.

So, do not say "I didn't see it," when you have spent hours searching for a key that you finally find in a place you have looked a dozen or more times. Don't blame yourself, because it wasn't there when you looked. Inanimates can hide; they work together so the table somehow covers the key, makes it blend in, so that no animate being can see it. Sometimes, I suspect, an inanimate entity pops‑out, de‑ontologizes, only to re‑ontologize just when the animate will look and feel the most idiotic. Or, even worse, it re‑ontologizes at the very moment its usefulness has passed; useless by a few seconds, and there, suddenly, it is. The young man whose condoms appear just after his laborously prepared date storms out the door is one tragic instance of such daily deceptions.

Don't blame other when inanimates befool you. Inanimates like nothing better than causing strife between animates. When your daughter says, "I put your keys right there when I was done playing with them!", believe her. Don't punish her when she is merely a victim. Stay calm, pretend you don't need the keys, say so aloud. The keys will reappear that much more quickly.

The clinching experience in my life, the one that finally forced to conscious awareness the gruesome truth about things, occurred in relation to a copy of Nietzsche's Antichrist and a pair of nun's underwear. Jim Garrison, my graduate school buddy, had found in a back‑street bookstore in Baltimore, an old, rare, hard‑covered edition of Nietzsche's The Antichrist. Purchasing it, he drawered it with his clothes in the room of our big Baltimore hotel. When we returned from our day of sparse interviews, he decided to page through it before we went off to drink and to dine. I was in bed.

A pair of women's underwear hovered above my face, landed there. I jumped up ready to wrestle. "Okay, Harvey, where the hell is my book! And why'd you put a pair of Jeanne's underwear in my drawer! Damned pervert!"

"What?!", I exclaimed. "What are you talking about?!"

"There's a woman's underwear in my drawer and no Antichrist!", he shouted.

I looked at the underwear. They were too big to be Jeanne's. "Look at this," I said, stretching the underwear as is done in the Haynes' underwear ads. "These can't be Jeanne's, these are size 60 or there'bouts."

"They are pretty big," he grudgingly admitted. "I don't care where you got 'em from Harvey. I don't care what kind of kinky tricks you're into these days. Just give me The Antichrist!"

"I don't have your damned Antichrist! Maybe the devil took it! Or maybe you left it somewhere like you did all your clothes when we came here to interview."

This one stung Jim into silence. He had to admit, standing there in my too‑small clothes, hairy arms dangling far below the cuffs of the shirt, pants ready for flood‑waters, that he might have lost it. "Where the hell is it?" he asked of the room. "Damn! I know I put it here." And I knew so too. I had seen him.

We tore through everything, my stuff and his (little that he had), but there was no sign of The Antichrist. It was gone, the fat lady's underwear mocking us both. It was time for some drinking. For reasons like these the long love affair between Philosophy and Bacchus hasn't proved fungible. Perhaps Bacchus would speak to us; tell us the truth. We'd by‑pass the dining.

As we walked from the room, a group of nuns was exiting the elevator. They cackled like an electric storm, voices big with revealed metaphysical truth. Jim and I walked past them, then stopped in the corridor, stunned. The nun at the center of the astonished discourse held Jim's copy of The Antichrist. Why were they so excited? Why were they all focused on the book held by the stout nun in the center? Jim and I boarded the elevator, metaphysically punch drunk.

If we had not both had lives and beliefs that made us uncomfortable in the presence of nuns, we might have done something. But what could we have done? If the nuns had said the book appeared to them suddenly, out of the blue, what would we have responded? That Jim's copy had vanished, and we had the nun's underwear? What might this have done to the old nun's career? And where did the book appear when it appeared to the nun? Did it simply shift in space‑time with the abode of her underwear? What would it have been like to be a nun, feel something sharp and bulky between your thighs, reach down and pull out an old battered copy of The Antichrist? And then what about us? Two young, jobless philosophers, away from big‑treed Tallahassee, in the big city, looking for philosophical futures anywhere, gifted suddenly with a fat nun's underwear in exchange for The Antichrist?! What omen was this? What could we possibly say?

Instinctively, each of us knew it was best not to talk. We couldn't have if we had wanted. Inanimates had de‑animated our voices. Made us like them.

* * *

That night we formulated the basics of the thesis I'm here putting forth. On a few technical points I remain stymied,^[2] but the phenomenology of the whole thing, the descriptive ground for the paradigm shift, is clear. Hume had been right when he argued that there is no evidence of "real" or "necessary" connection in any causal relation. It was mere animal prejudice‑‑desire, fear, expectation‑‑that made us posit causal consistency, object persistency. No more than Bertrand Russell's chicken, who waits for the farmer to feed it each morning, until one morning the farmer wrings its neck, do we know what morning will bring. The sun might be a fried egg tomorrow, your mustache a twitching caterpillar stuck to your face. Bread might no longer nourish us, rain might sizzle our flesh and burn to our bones. But here there is nought we can do. We are nourished at the bosom of inanimates; birth unto death. They are always around us, we need them for our animation. But lest you wish to end up like old Bertie's chicken, note well my concluding advice.

* * *

Here are eight tactics concerning what you should do to foil inanimates before they foil you. First, whenever moving an inanimate from one place to another, take conscious note of it. Say to yourself, "I am placing the pen on the desk", "I am putting my shoes in the closet," "these green socks are going into the wash," "into the drawer," and so on. Better, write these things down. Make notes to yourself about the slightest things possible. If you write the word "soul" and see it there on your monitor, write a note to yourself: "I wrote the word 'soul' and it said 'soul'‑‑s‑o‑u‑l‑‑on page 10 of the essay on inanimates." At least in this way, if it comes out as "sold," you'll maintain confidence in yourself, know that you did it right. Best of all, if there are others about, say these things aloud so the others can hear you and can later publicly confirm your behavior‑‑you don't want them to think it is you who are crazy when things go astray. Put numbers to use: whenever you can, count things, say "there are five apples in the refrigerator," when you eat one, say "there are now four apples there." Do this with big things and small. If you own a car lot, number the cars just as you number the cans in your cupboard at home, as you number the eggs in your 'fridge, or the socks in your drawers. A fifth tactic is to surprise the inanimates whenever you can. Yank open the drawer just after you've closed it, double‑check to see that nothing is changing or has already changed; pull open the dryer as soon as it's started, see if some particularly significant sock is still there. Or, like a close friend of mine, buy socks all of the same color and brand. (After reading my essay he collected them all and counted them. Naturally, there was an odd number. But in practical terms, he had outflanked the inanimates. The vanishing sock caused him no problem.) Some activities deserve special precautions, presenting a paper at a conference, for instance. Whenever I leave to give a paper I make what Jeanne calls the "paranoid check." As soon as I pull from the driveway, I stop the car and go through all of my luggage to see that everything, especially the paper I'll read, is still there. Of course, the paper could pop‑out as soon as I close my briefcase, but this would provide too much evidence in support of my thesis and that is why, I think, it has not happened yet. The inanimates lose much of their sadistic reward once we get wise to their workings.

Here is a seventh strategy: be prepared to out‑wait the vanished inanimates‑‑they usually return. To this day, for instance, Jim Garrison keeps the nun's underwear right in his bookcase, among his Nietzsche books, where The Antichrist would have been placed. We are convinced that someday it will return‑‑suddenly, there it will be, and the underwear will have returned to its rightful abode.

Eighth, and finally, do not relax your guard when things start going well. This is precisely the opportunity for which inanimates wait. As soon as your guard goes down, you will once more blame yourself. You will say, "how did I miss those shoes in the middle of the floor!?" "How embarrassing that I did not know my glasses were right on my face! I must be going insane." Don't be deceived. And don't be embarrassed. Such occasions are inevitable in a guerrilla war, where one party tries to hide from its very existence, while the other party is constantly vigilant. Should Ivan Illich have thought his death from a knob ignoble and stupid? Much less so than dying while storming a fort? Not at all! His death was heroic, as have been so many others. He died in a war which neither he nor Tolstoy could admit to exist. Knobbed down by sniper fire to the liver in the prime of his life, killed dead on life's ontological battlefield. And is it any surprise that precisely Ivan Illich died in this way? Not in the least. Was he not constantly vigilant that things remained where he put them? Was he not inordinately upset when things went astray? He noticed‑‑that is the secret to his untimely demise. Without knowing it, Ivan's behavior spawned powerful enemies. All things in his home were against him. I can almost hear it now. The curtain rod says to the knob, "With such vigilant powers of observation, Ivan Illich might soon comprehend. Finish him off before he does." The knob did the deed.

And what about me? Shall I soon go the way of Illich, or Jack London's man in the snow? Possibly so. Indeed, I have fretted continually since I started this essay about when the garage door might suddenly fall (a curtain wouldn't be heavy enough), when the knob might lash out at my kidneys, or when the lawnmower might roar into action. But perhaps it has been precisely my precautions based on my cognizance that has protected me. And now that I have made my thoughts public, I will, if I must, take my place next to Giodorno Bruno on history's torched stake of truth. I'll take my position next to the many seekers‑of‑truth who have sacrificed themselves for the good of the many. And I'll take strength from Pascal's magnificent words: "Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I [the thinking reed] grasp it." I, at least, have, and will always have had, the gift of an animate's awareness. You have it too. Be(a)ware of those beings without it.

© Charles Harvey, originally published in Phenomenological Inquiry, Vol. 19, October 1995. Republished in Philosophy and Everyday Life (Seven Bridges Press, 2002).

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^[1]I need not be reminded of the Freudian explanation of such events. Freud's doctrine of parapraxes‑‑slips of the tongue, and so forth‑‑is a prime example of the extremes to which we will go in order not to recognize the truth about inanimates. Freud, too, it seems, was afraid to admit what was obvious. Hence, he conjured a fantastic theory about our tricking ourselves, albeit unconsciously, of course. For all of his courage, he too displayed what Nietzsche called the "aescetic's need": the need to maintain security by denying the brutal truths of the universe and by blaming ourselves for all that goes wrong. It is precisely the ontology that grounds this metaphysics of self‑blame that I would like most to overcome with this essay.

^[2]For instance, while my ontological paradigm is the first to show that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle holds for macro as well as microscopic objects, the full physics of malicious inanimates is still undetermined. Do the objects pop‑out of being entirely? Or do they simply change locations in space‑time? While the later hypothesis preserves the law of the conservation of energy, it would have to function as a regulative ideal (as does Galileo's doctrine of free fall in a vacuum), because it could never be verified; there are simply too many places inanimates might pop to‑‑to Venus, to Peoria, on the roof, or under the bed. But I will leave the physics of the thing to others. I will be satisfied in this work if I establish the research paradigm‑‑the sweep‑up work can be left to puzzle‑solvers who come after me.