Thing

The word that began as an assembly

The matter at hand

Imagine a hand. It is a perfectly ordinary hand, extended in a perfectly ordinary room, and it is pointing at a small carved bird on a windowsill. The person attached to the hand says: Hand me that thing. You understand immediately. You reach for the carved bird, and the transaction is complete. No confusion arises. No clarification is needed. And yet, if you pause to ask what the word thing contributed to that sentence, the answer dissolves. The pointing finger did the work. The word that did the work. The word thing merely dressed the gesture in the clothing of a noun.

This is the strange case of a word that can mean almost anything and yet says almost nothing. It is the most useful noun in English, and it is useful precisely because it says so little. We reach for it when we cannot name what we mean, and we reach for it when we need not name what we mean. But there is a stranger fact buried in the word's history, and it changes what we thought a thing was.

The assembly

The word descends from the Old English þing, and before that from what we infer as Proto-Germanic *þingą.^[1] Its earliest recoverable sense was not 'entity' or 'object' or 'any bounded unit of reference'. It was 'assembly'. It named a gathering, a council, a deliberative body convened to settle matters. In Old Norse, the þing was the proto-parliament, the place where free men gathered to argue, judge, and decide. The Icelandic Alþingi still bears the name, though it was suspended for nearly half a century in the nineteenth century, and it is not unambiguously the oldest surviving parliament.^[2]

This is the first surprise. The earliest thing was not vague. It was intensely particular. It was a social event, a legal procedure, a political institution. It was the opposite of a placeholder. And it was not a static object. It was an event of gathering, a coming-together of people around a matter, constituted as a body by the very act of convening. The word did not begin as a name for something that sits there. It began as a name for something that happens when parts are held together.

The drift

From that concrete social meaning, the word began to slide. The steps I trace are a reconstruction, not an attested sequence, since Old English þing already carries the general sense of 'thing' in its earliest records. But the direction of the drift is not in doubt, and the parallels in other languages confirm it.

The first step is almost imperceptible. 'The assembly' becomes 'the matter before the assembly'. A þing was not only the gathering but the business conducted there, the case, the dispute, the question at hand. I have a thing to bring before the council meant 'I have a matter, a business, a case'. The word had detached itself from the room and attached itself to the content of the room's deliberation.

The second step is larger. 'The matter before the assembly' becomes 'any matter at all'. A thing is now an affair, a concern, a piece of business. 'I have things to do' preserves this sense. You do not mean objects. You mean matters, tasks, obligations. The word has generalized from the legal to the practical, from the deliberative to the everyday.

The third step is the one that changes everything. 'Any matter' becomes 'any entity whatsoever'. The word has shed its social meaning. It no longer implies an assembly, a deliberation, a case, or even a task. It implies only this: something is being referred to as a unit. A bird is a thing. A glass is a thing. A star, a number, a feeling, a government, all things. The word has become a count noun of maximum abstraction.

This is not a peculiarity of English. Latin had res, which began as 'property, affair, matter' and became the most general word for thing. Greek had pragma, which began as 'deed, affair' and became the same. French chose and Spanish cosa descend from Latin causa, 'case, lawsuit', and widened into the general noun. Hebrew had davar, which began as 'word, matter' and widened into thing.^[3] In each of these languages, the general noun for 'entity' grew out of a practical, social, or legal concept. The pattern recurs often enough that it is unlikely to be coincidence. And in each case, what the word began by naming was not a bare unit but a matter of human business: a case, an affair, a deed, a gathering.

Two uses, one word

Here is where the word reveals its strangest property. Thing can point at the unfamiliar and the familiar with perfect indifference. The first: What is this thing? You are holding an object you cannot identify. The word marks a gap in your knowledge. It says: there is something here, and I do not know what. The second: Remember that thing we were talking about yesterday? You are invoking a shared understanding. The word marks a closure of knowledge. It says: you and I both know what, and I am trusting you to retrieve it.

At first glance, these uses are opposites. One is ignorance, the other intimacy. But they are the same move. In both cases, thing refers without specifying. The specification is either unavailable or unnecessary. The word is identical; only the reason for its emptiness differs. In the first case, we cannot say more. In the second, we need not say more. It simply holds the place open.

The etymology does not explain this, and I should not pretend it does. Other placeholders manage both uses without any such ancestry: stuff, something, whatchamacallit. But the etymology offers a resonance. The original þing was the assembly, the place where matters were held in common. Before the assembly, a matter was open, unsettled, a question. After the assembly, it was closed, settled, a shared understanding. Both conditions were things. In the old word and in the modern one, a thing is a matter put between people, held open or held settled. The drift to 'any entity whatsoever' is what happens when the social frame falls away from the word's meaning, though, as we will see, not from its use.

What a thing is

The history cannot prove what a thing is. It shows what the concept was first made to do: name a matter held together by a convening. But look at what we actually call things, and the older sense fits better than the newer. A glass is a rigid network of atoms held in a stable arrangement. A bird is cells, feathers, and instincts, held as one living whole for as long as the holding lasts. A person is a body, a memory, a set of relations, a history, together for a while and then not. In each case the unity is not one more part. It is something done.

The Latin under our words has a name for it. To confer is to bear together; to differ is to bear apart.^[4] A thing is a conference of difference: a bearing-together that holds what would otherwise be borne apart. Philosophers in the process tradition, Whitehead among them, built a whole metaphysics on the idea that relating comes first and what is related comes second.^[5] I do not need that much here. I only suggest that the old word had it right, and that we lost it when thing became a name for something that simply sits there.

The thing in itself

Immanuel Kant gave the word its most famous philosophical burden. The Ding an sich, the 'thing in itself', is the reality that exists independently of our perception.^[6] Kant's claim is that we can never know it. We can think it, and we can know that it must be posited, but we cannot know what it is. The thing in itself is the referent that can be indicated but never specified.

The history of the word has a rough parallel. Thing began as a specific social practice, was extended until it could refer to any entity, and became the word we use when we can say that something is but not what it is. Kant's choice of Ding for the unknowable remainder is fitting, whatever he intended.

Martin Heidegger issued a warning about this. He argued that the history of Western metaphysics had tended to treat everything that is as a being-thing, and in doing so had forgotten the question of what it means to be at all.^[7] For Heidegger, thing is not a neutral word. It can level all distinctions, treating a person, a poem, a god, and a rock as equally things. But Heidegger's later work turned back toward the older sense. In 'Das Ding', he retrieved the gathering meaning of the thing: the way a thing gathers a world around it, what he called the fourfold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities.^[8] The word can flatten, or it can convene. Which one it does depends on how we use it.

The achievement

Ludwig Wittgenstein taught us that the meaning of a word is its use.^[9] He was careful to say this holds for a large class of cases, not for all, but thing is squarely within that class. By that measure, thing means what it does: it refers without specifying.

But the etymology adds something Wittgenstein's account alone cannot: a reminder of what the word was for. The generality of thing is not a primitive feature of language. It is an historical achievement. We did not begin with a vague word and gradually sharpen it. We began with a specific word and gradually extended it. And what it began by naming was not a substance but a gathering.

This is the paradox the article's sub-title points to. Thing can mean almost anything because it has been extended to everything. But I do not think the extension emptied the word so much as hid what it was for. The oldest sense of thing is not 'object'. It is 'assembly'. And if we take that older sense seriously, the word was never meant to name a static unit at all. It named a holding-together.

A thing is not a thing. A thing is a bearing-together.

The place held open

Return to the hand. The finger is pointing at the carved bird. The word thing has done its work, and no one has noticed it. It was holding a place open. It was saying: there is something here, and I will not name it, because naming is either impossible or unnecessary. It trusted the gesture, the context, and the shared history to do the referential work, and supplied little more than the shape of a noun.

But it was also doing something older. The word began as an assembly, the place where matters were held in common. When we say thing, we are still convening, not in what the word means, which has long since left the room, but in what we do with it. We put a matter between us, open if we do not know, settled if we do. And the matter itself, the bird, the glass, the star, is also an assembly, a bearing-together of parts, persisting only as long as the bearing lasts.

There is a political edge to this that is easy to miss. The first things were made by people deciding together what to do. We took the word for that, spread it over the whole world, and in doing so taught ourselves to see a heap of objects that simply sit there, when each of them is a gathering that holds together for as long as it holds.

We began by convening assemblies to settle our matters. We ended with a word for anything at all, and somewhere along the way we forgot what it was a word for. We forgot that everything is an assembly of other things. The word has kept the memory for us. Every time a hand points and says that thing, it is still doing what it did at the assembly: putting a matter between us, and asking us to hold it together.

Gospel of being

All existence is a conference of
difference

Discover the process

From bosons to the cosmos and beyond.