When are Things Persons and Persons Things?

In his Meditations, Thomas Traherne asks, ‘Can you take too much joy in your father's works? He is himself in everything’ (Italics mine).

It is a truism that good human relationships involve treating other people generally as persons rather than as things to be made use of. This paper originated in my clinical observations over many years that the same applies to things. I mean that, in successful relationships with things, they are generally felt to be persons. I am in no way referring to the mere sentimentalisation of things.

For example, if a craftsman is to be a good craftsman he has to know his tools and his materials intimately in their every ‘mood’ and in their good and bad aspects as they are, rather than as he hopes they are or wishes they were. He has to know these things as multidimensional wholes and not as wishful projections of himself. Thus, respect and caring, also of course mixed with ruthlessness when appropriate, are sentiments just as appropriate to things as to people. Knowledge, letting the object talk back to him in a real dialogue, give and take, loving union at times … all these considerations apply to the creative craftsman and artist as much as to the successful parent or friend. Furthermore, just as there is often something less than healthy about using people for one's own ends, there is a similar failure in a craftsman or an artist or even in a business man who uses his craft or his art or his business in that way, merely as a means to an end, however justified that end may appear to be.

Furthermore, I have found that people treat things in the same sort of way as they treat people. There are notable exceptions to this rule: for example, some schizoid and autistic people may treat things more like persons than they treat people. I am of the opinion that in the natural, primitive, way of psychic functioning, things are in fact persons. Primitive animism is not the name of a peculiar religion that Stone Age people follow. It is a basic truth