Heidegger and the Thing

To his credit, Heidegger went out of his way to develop a highly singular understanding of the thing in contradistinction to the modern concept which invariably places the latter-as-object in a subordinate relationship vis-à-vis a human subject who represents and determines its nature.

I like it, for example, when he tells us that there is something solid in a work of architecture, coloured in a painting, or sonorous in a musical composition. Such statements may seem trite, or pseudo-profound, but it's important to be reminded of the self-evidently (but nonetheless frequently overlooked) thingly element in art works.

However, I don't like it when Heidegger begins to discriminate between things and mere things; with the latter described somewhat pejoratively as the lifeless beings of nature. He might mean to simply suggest that clods of earth and pieces of rotten wood are things in their purest state, but you can sense the contempt (just as when he tells us the stone is without world).

And when he hesitates to call God a thing, or to consider man as a thing, it profoundly disappoints.

Ultimately, Heidegger is a correlationist. And so, whilst not anthropocentric in the traditional sense, he continues to assign Dasein a special role and insist that it be taken as the final standard of reference. Thus, for all his talk of hammers, jugs, bridges, and shoes etc, Heidegger fails to provide the thingly-oriented ontology that he teases us with.

Whether his somewhat unorthodox disciple Graham Harman will succeed in this - or whether he'll become entangled in his own fourfold project and polypsychism - remains to be seen.