ABSTRACT
To be properly human, in western eyes, is thus to be a person with a unique, named identity and to occupy a specific, named place in accordance with certain principles of tenure. It is, in short, to have a name and an address. A human being without name or address is a vagrant or fugitive, a ‘wild man’, excluded from society and reduced in effect to an animal existence. Conversely, by attributing names and addresses to animals we introduce them into our homes as quasi-human companions. Outside of the domestic domain, in the wild, animals are but ‘living things’. Sandwiched in between persons and places, between the plane of humanity and the surface of the earth, there lies a whole universe of things, both animate and inanimate, which are distinguished neither by name nor by address. My body, for example, is considered a thing, which both divides the person-I-am (corresponding to my interior self ) from the place where I reside, and mediates the relations between them. I and the place have names, but my body does not. Nor do the clothes I wear, the tools I use, or the furnishings of my house. But when it comes to the house itself, though it is – in one sense – a house like any other, it is also my home. Thus it is one thing to say ‘I live in a house’; quite another to say ‘I live at Number Eighteen’. As a place, the house is uniquely specified by a number, which functions in just the same way as a proper name and forms part of my address. But as a thing, it is just a building of a particular kind. As with buildings, so with artefacts or organisms: things are invariably identified as belonging to one or another category, or species, each known by an appellative or ‘common’ noun. Thus it seems that the designation of things, unlike that of persons and places, is governed by a logic of classification. And this logic, in turn, rests on an order of knowledge entirely contrary to that underlying the name and address. My hypothesis is that the grammatical distinction between proper and common nouns is based, more fundamentally, on a distinction between these orders of knowledge. Let me spell this distinction out more precisely.
