Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things

Abstract

Wordsworth poetically realizes an ecological ethics grounded on the self's non-assimilative encounter with the otherness of nonhuman things. Engaging the etymological force of the word thing, Stoic and Spinozan philosophy, and a poetic tradition of assigning a “face” to natural things, Wordsworth arrives at a lyric apprehension of the “life of things,” a life that human beings share with other thinking and insentient, substantial and circumstantial things. Instead of anthropomorphizing things, Wordsworth “thingicizes” ethics. This aspect of Wordsworth's poems is illuminated when they are read alongside the “ethics of things” developed by Silvia Benso in philosophical dialogue with two major figures of the continental tradition: Heidegger, who conceives of things without ethics, and Levinas, who advances an ethics without things.

Reclaiming Romanticism

“…But Wordsworth's things are not fantasized as speaking English: they are, so to speak, doing their own thing, in excess of whatever we might have to say about them. According to Adam Potkay (2008), 'thing' or 'things' occur no less than 439 times in Wordsworth's corpus.…”