#thinghood

[zelovinit]

Guess who texted.

Yep! The Revenge Porn guy

[sterwood]

What is a jug? It is not only a container, but a container that stands independently in itself. In other words, it is not our perception of a jug that contains liquid, but the jug itself. Heidegger draws a distinction between objects and things. “Object” is a negative term, used to describe entities only in their presence-at-hand. But “thing” is a positive term referring to entities in their proper reality. The jug is not just an object, since it remains a container whether we look at it or not. Although this was already true of equipment in Heidegger’s early writings, the emphasis in that period was on the need for human Dasein to be present for any reality to exist at all: without Dasein, there would be no truth and no world. By 1949, Heidegger’s thinking about things had shifted in a subtle way. He now emphasizes that the thinghood of the jug is not dependent on whether Dasein looks at it or not. 

The same holds for the fact that the jug must be produced. Obviously, without humans the jug would never have been built in the first place. But this does not mean that the thinghood of the jug is something human. Once it has been produced, the jug is free of its producer and stands in itself; even the producer who built it no longer has full control of it, and of course the jug continues to exist even when the producer is dead. In Heidegger’s words, the jug is not a jug because it was produced, but rather is produced because it is a jug. The producer who builds the jug is only concerned with the thing’s outward appearance, not its independent thinghood—after all, it is the jug that holds water or wine, not the potter. 

Heidegger now makes a radical claim about the history of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, and all later thinkers failed to think the true independent thinghood of the thing. All of them reduced things to something produced, or represented from the outside. Insofar as Heidegger sees his notion of the thinghood of things as a decisive rupture with the entire history of philosophy, it clearly deserves to be more central to the interpretation of his writings than it has been so far. In some ways, the thing is Heidegger’s most important idea, one that encapsulates all the insights of his long career.

Graham Harman - Heidegger Explained, 129-30

I know no one likes Harman, but if you’re having trouble with Heidegger’s ‘thing’ essay, he does break it down in a very understandable way. Which is nice, because the essay is difficult.

[leee787]

#TROT (The Realm Of Things) --- SynTalk by SynTalk http://ift.tt/1aDdawx

[iliveforschool-blog]

Thinghood

I really enjoyed the Bennett reading and was intrigued by one of the passages on pg. 4:

“The story will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world. The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology.”

I felt like this was a great summation of a lot of what she talks about throughout the rest of the reading. The first few lines got me thinking about the extent of “thinghood” and how it relates to us humans, especially when she says “we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world.” This reminded me of Varnelis and how he talks about MMORPGs; how “Even though they are still rather early in their development, MMORPGs seem to have the capacity to feed back into real culture.” The avatar of a MMORPG is an extension of the person or the player behind it, but couldn’t the avatar be considered just a thing as well? Would Bennett say that the avatar is a thing that makes us nonhuman, a thing that plays a role in the world as well but is still just a thing? Maybe somebody could help me understand this better?