p.47 perception generally has to be understood in terms of the presence to us of
the different kinds of objects and events that we see and hear and touch.
p.54-55 the conception of presence that I propose to introduce in this chapter... begins
with the perceptual object itself and draws attention to the ways in which that object shows itself and shows itself to
someone... the hypothesis I want to develop is that the things we perceive wear their character as perceptual
objects on their faces, so to speak, and that the ways in which they do so offer us our best clues to the nature of presence
itself.
p.111 What is clear is that an object... it is only as embedded in a state of affairs that we are
familiar with it at all.
p.122-123 There are, in other words, only certain ways in which actual entities
can change so as to bring about something that was previously not the case
p.123 imagination might well be viewed... as the kind of counterfactual cantilevering of the possible off
actual objects in the way suggested by the analysis of the causal relation... the possibility I imagine is
anchored in an actual entity and an actual situation. As a possibility associated with something actual, it can properly
be said to be both absent and present. It is in fact, in its own distinctive way, present in its absence.
p.124-125 if there is no way of eliminating the possibility that there are multiple possibilities
- many things that could happen - then it will make sense to envisage what might happen in a given situation
even if we are not at all sure about the conditions that would bring about a particular result.
p.181 To desire it is to project a change for it as a result of which the object will come to stand in a
new relation to me, and so, as Hegel points out, the desire for an object has a reflexive or self-referential character.
In other words, what I desire is, among all the possible modifications of which any given object is susceptible,
the one that brings it into a relation to a use that I can make of it or to an intention or purpose that
is mine.
p.184 to the extent that we are able to shape our lives at all, we want our lives as wholes to have some
overall character... What all this shows is that desire is not purely local and commensurate with its immediate object
but is, instead, reflexive in a more complex way than at first appears.. in wanting something... I also want myself
as a whole, and this means as having a life that as a whole has a certain character.
p.185 To desire something is thus to live for or toward it in the sense that it is the
possibility - the possible state of the world - that interests us and that we would, if given the opportunity, do
whatever we could to bring [it] about.
p.186 If one considers the unlimited variety of possibilities that might be present in absence to any given
individual human being at a given time, it becomes evident that only a desire or an interest deriving from desire
can account for the fact that one thing is present in absence rather than something else.
p.186 Indeed, in the absence of a desire that picks out one possibility rather than another,
our whole active relation to the future, as well to possibilities as such, would become deeply problematic. [footnote - ...The
idea is... that a desire brings with it a whole context of matters that have a bearing on its satisfaction or frustration.]
The conclusion to which all this points is that if anything can be said to orient us toward
the future - any future - and thus to possibility as such, it is surely desire. This is also to say that it
is desire that discloses such possibilities, and the polarities among them, to us in a primordial way
p.188 the fact that... an action orients itself within the situation in which it occurs has to remain
implicit - something that everyone understands but that there is no way of formulating explicitly in the terms made
available by the object ontology
p.188 The "can" that is relevant here is one that has to do with trying rather than succeeding;
and what I want to argue is that when something is present as something that could be otherwise, then the entity to
which it is present can either leave it as it is or try to alter it.
p.191In the account he [Heidegger] gives there, things are present to us as pragmata
- that is, as things in use or manipulanda, and not simply as res [things].
p.191 at a fundamental level, the things we encounter in the world have a
gerundive character, and that it is as something to be used or taken advantage of in some way or
other that they are present to us. They could not be what they are, in other words, unless they
were part of the world of an active being, of one who can do the kinds of things that they lend themselves to, whether
by design or not.
p.191 the Heideggerian treatment of these matters asks what kind of a world...
these things are in, and answers that it is an actional space of which possibilities of use constitute essential coordinates.
p.191-192 every object we encounter is understood not as the blank presence of a self-contained
something that simply wears its identity on its face but, rather, as embedded in a network of possibilities.
Generally, the way things in the world are present to an active being involves a context of possibility. The ability
to orient ourselves within that network is essential to our survival, and it turns on our grasp of the possibilities
implicit in our situation - possibilities that often remain just that because we have learned how to detour around them.
This modal character of the entities in the world of an active being is at the heart of the relationship
of action and presence. Comprehensively, things in the world have a character that is expressed when we say that they
could be moved or changed or preserved in one way or another. When we so describe them, the state in which these
things presently are in is contrasted (and thus paired) with another that would be the result of the action in question. Their
being what they are at this moment is thus conditional on that action's not having been undertaken or on its not having succeeded,
and the same kind of condition obtains prospectively in the case of the thing's remaining as it is now. It thus appears
that in the first instance the modal character that attaches to a thing's being as it is a function of my
- someone's - not doing (or having done) anything to change it.... the conditionality of a thing's being as it is
- a conditionality that is attributable to that agency - is highly distinctive.
p.194 the world I am in is a world of possibilities and not just of actualities.
p.196 As long as there is something that can either be done or not done in the world that a human being
inhabits, that individual will not be incorporable into a closed deterministic system. Possibility is what stands in the way
of all the attempts that have been made to achieve that end
p.221 The underlying consideration here is that if a function is to be performed intelligently,
it has to be constantly modifiable in the light of changing circumstances.
p.222 It is, of course, possible to construct complex machines that perform tasks involving feedback of
this kind. A thermostat linked to a furnace is a good example of a machine that registers the relevant features
of a situation and adjusts its functioning accordingly. "Register" here does not mean that the machine has to see or feel
anything. It means only that it has to be affected in some way of which it is susceptible by certain kinds of changes
in the situation in which it is operating, changes that have a bearing on the satisfactory performance of the function of
this machine. Those changes have to be anticipated by the designer of the machine,
and a causal link has to be provided for to alter the functioning of the machine in a way that is appropriate to some
change that has to be registered... It is limited to the capacity for response that was built into it by its designers,
who had in mind a certain function... and a certain kind of change to which it would respond.
