User:Ruben/TP3/Heidegger
Martin Heidegger: The Thing
Martin Heidegger is a phenomenologist: "A philosopher of existence as it is perceived" by a subject. About the relation between the perceived & the 'real'. What is a thing? Instead of: how does a thing appear to us (whether it's visually, temporally or tactility)?
[is this indeed its existence, or is it how we perceive it, when ridding it of its medium?]
Heidegger "sneaks up on this backward" by stating that it is constituted by the void inside it. Similar to how we perceive time: "a continuous unfolding of presence, framed the absences of past and present."
There are ways of making that connect us to existence (crafts) and those that distantiate us from it (ie. factory production) [1]
All distances in time and space are shrinking. Yet the absence of distance does not bring nearness, for nearness does not consists in shortness of distance. If all distance is abolished, everything becomes uniform in its distancelessness.
"The terrifying is unsettling" [?]
It seems we can only get to nearness by looking into what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things.
A thingness of a thing is independent and self-supporting. It may become an object when we place it before us - whether it is physically or in our minds.But a jug remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not.
When something is produced (a process of setting) it has been brought to stand and has become self-supporting. We're therefore apprehending it - so it seems- as a thing and never as a mere object. This self-supportness does not suffice as the definition of a thing though, as it is all thought of in terms of objectness.
What is the thing in itself?
... what and how the jug is as this jug-thing, is something we can never learn [...] by looking at the outward appearance, the idea.
That what a jug consists of - the sides, the bottom - do not do the holding of jug as a container. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel's holding.
That what a jug consists, is what make the jug stand on it own; make it self-supporting. It is this which is shaped by the maker - who therefore strictly speaking does not make the jug.[2]
The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.