2.10
Things demand attention. We’ve become used to seeing nature as backdrop and landscape, so often the things that demand attention are the things designed to call attention to themselves: signs, automobiles, buildings, etc. But if you’re walking in a forest or on a quiet residential street, you’ll find your attention drawn to particular plants and trees — not to all or just any, but certain ones beckon.
Different phenomena have different ways of capturing our attention. Signs are tasked with breaking through the circulation of the everyday so they can be noticed. Some signs, such as stop signs, are part of the everyday, yet each must grab our attention. — On the other hand, trees, for instance, aren’t ‘designed’ to break through this circulation. And yet, sometimes they do break through.
Plants are taken up in the circulation of the everyday. Be it as houseplants, garden plants, landmarks, scenery, backdrop, and so on, plants tend not to be considered as beings in their own right; they get taken up as things we pass by.
When a plant gets noticed, it can grasp us, changing the space of encounter for us. In the encounter, time slows down, and the tree takes up a broader sense of space; this is why it seems to hover beside you (§1.10). This is based on observation: encounters with others bring with them a distinct sense of space and time. Space and time are found (only) in encounters with things; they’re that within which encounters occur. More specifically, encounters occur only within places.
Places are always specific instantiations of space and time: space and time, when understood in an absolute or universal sense, are abstractions or reductions from places.[1] Places are wherein particularities—you, tree, and all other things around you—encounter. Particularities encounter within particular instantiations of space and time; we can arrive at absolute or universal space and time only by taking ‘what is common’ and disregarding what is different and unique.
Even if our being is spatial and temporal, our placeness is even more primordial:[2] it’s because we can be placed that we can open to spatiality or temporality and hence to space and time; space and time do not spring forth merely from our being but result from encounters with other beings. Our placeness, which is always a specific placedness (i.e., we’ve always already been placed), enables particular inflections of time and space.
The tree hovers beside us because our placedness—how we’re placed—has changed. Its placedness has changed too: hence the dialogic quality of the encounter.
[1] Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 151–4 (on space and place).
[2] This is influenced by Heidegger. On spatiality, see Heidegger, B&T, 105–8/139–43; see also 110–3/145–7 on how this makes possible something like Cartesian space. On temporality, see Heidegger, B&T, 326/374.