Jug's Thing Ness Analysis

I read this article twice and much of it was out of my editorial and commentary wheelhouse. I will attempt to enter into this text through a small crack that presented itself in the late part of section one and sporadically reared its head throughout the rest. The example of the jug’s thing-ness is where I started to understand more of Heidegger’s angle. If you analogize the jug with a human existence it makes a very good argument for everything owing its existence to the nothing-ness. The jug is an object to be sure, we can see it, touch it, break it, use it, and that is where its purpose comes; the nothingness of the interior of the jug is what gives complete purpose to the existence of the jug. In a human life, nothing is what can be translated
from idleness, solitude, or death and in that we feel dread from the nothingness. The natural inclination to not feel dread causes a person to seek out purpose. While the real purpose may get camouflaged in mundane activities or superficial endeavors they create experiences that constitute that existence making it into something when without all of that clutter it was nothing.
In chapter four of our book, it states; Locke’s assumption was the mind is tabula rasa and only gains knowledge from experiences and those “shape” the walls and sides of a mind. This now resembles a vessel and it has a purpose of housing these ideas that compound and become knowledge. Locke’s belief in primary and secondary qualities lays over the nature of things very well. In this sense a person looks at an orange and sees the spherical shape and yellow color. The orange has secondary qualities that give it purpose, enticing sweet taste that carries with it beneficial nutrients. But does this orange have value to all that experience it? A tiger doesn’t eat oranges, so does the orange lose its purpose and value if it existed in a tiger-only world? The orange can’t be “thought of properly” (Heidegger) by only taking in its primary qualities. This suggests that thing-ness is subjective and not an innate idea as Descartes stated.
On the subject of object versus thing does Kant imply that object carries a higher value than thing?
Looking into the text on Kant, I posit that a correlation can be made between a priori and thing; a posteriori and object. I support this suggestion by use of an example: a flower. In this case I will use a dandelion. A dandelion, upon first sight, can be broken down into its parts: petals, leaves, stem, etc. Or it can be broken down by its color and shapes: white, yellow, ovals, spheres. At this point, the dandelion is a thing. When we use the dandelion (as a gift, or in an arrangement, or for cooking) its value increases by perception. For example, when a child blows a dandelion’s seeds from its pistil and watches them carried away by the wind (causal). The dandelion becomes more than the sum of its parts, it becomes a moment and the object now carries more intrinsic value, making Kant’s theory apply
here.
Heidegger’s work was informed, to some degree, by Laozi’s writings.
I found the sections on Laozi to be the most illuminating on the subject of “thing” perhaps because his writings seem to make connections not only between object and viewer, but also to all things around the object. Laozi wrote about a balance between light and dark; yin and yang; being and not being. These ideas, which clearly connect to Heideggar’s “thing” and “no-thing”, represent the concrete and abstract aspects of life and our interactions with objects and concepts. Hegel’s absolute idealism ties in with Heidegger and Laozi theories. From the Alexander text, it states that in the ultimate reality, the absolute, is the only thing that is completely self-contained. Hegel, like Kant, had a system of categorization for his idea. Hegel balanced logic with illogic; the subjective with the objective. In particular, Hegel’s idea that there is a thesis and antithesis to objects that helps define one another, confirms what Laozi wrote: yin and yang. What stood out, even more so, was the implication that nothingness, or darkness, or the absence of some “thing” could be the origin or basis of
everything.