The Thing by Martin Heidegger
by: Kristen Pavle
Related:
"Has the thing never yet come near enough for man to learn how to attend sufficiently to the thing as thing?" - Martin Heidegger
Context
During a Buzzard sync (see related above), CJ noted that the concept of "thingness" had come up a few times during the call. This triggered a connection to Heidegger and his conceptualization of "thing".
I went back to track down a piece Heideger wrote, called "The Thing", a chapter from the book Poetry, Language, Thought.
Additional Thoughts
Heidegger thinks, and writes, in ways that will break your brain. Or so I've found. My tips are:
- Don't endeavor to understand what he's expressing in a linear, 1:1, fashion
- Let the content wash over your mind, look for connections and any bright spots of clarity that you can find
- Don't worry when your brain ties in knots
- When in doubt, read with others and compares notes/discuss
If anyone is up for reading and then talking/comparing notes, I'm game! There's some cool shit in here about nearness vs distance of information in regard to media that might be useful for Buzzard.
Heidegger also hits on some fascinating concepts in seemingly related works about technology, namely: "The Question Concerning Technology" (Only the first section of the first part, pages 3-36.) This reading was extraordinarly eye-opening for me, although it is pretty "heavy", because... Heidegger. I'm also up for discussing this one with anyone interested, there's definitely application to Buzzard/relational OS.
My interpretation of this piece is the brilliance of focusing on the inherent difference in the inertness of tech (e.g. as a standardized entity) compared to the aliveness or movement of art (e.g. as flow). My question and driving force has thus become: how can tech be used as a tool to create art, how can a standardized entity flow?