And surely the thing is one of the main philosophical concepts that must be regarded as metaphysically contaminated.
Being and Time, as is well known, is an attempt to outgrow the tradition of metaphysics in Western Philosophy. And surely the thing is one of the main philosophical concepts that must be regarded as metaphysically contaminated.
The ontological counterpart of this concept is the ‘utensil’. According to Heidegger, the concrete beings in the world which we are usually by are ‘ready-to-hand’ entities. There are no things at all, as long as we understand their mode of being as presence. It is true that Dasein is in the world only by being engaged with things, but every thing that Dasein is engaged with must be related to an equipmental nexus of the various meanings of being.
But Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysical understanding of what things are does not mean that Heidegger holds the concept of the thing to be ontologically meaningless. In fact, the opposite is the case. Heidegger regards the thing as an important indicator of the fundamental facticity of Dasein that it can exist only in a relationship with transcendent beings. The thingness of worldly beings shows us that they cannot be identified with equipmental totalities and therefore should be regarded as irreducible to the phenomenal world in which the pragmatic understanding of beings is dominant. The fundamental way of being in the world as a Da-sein is the ‘transcending’, which means that for Dasein, the meaning of being is more than the being in the world. Every being in the world shows itself in its unpenetrable thingness on which its usability as a utensil is grounded. And as a ground, the thingness indicates that the original meaning of being of worldly beings keeps concealed from being seen by Dasein.