The Meaning of ‘A Thing’: Six Books, Two Questions

I've written five books. Only late in the course of writing my sixth one— Beautiful Particulars: How AI’s Attention to the Smallest of Differences Is Reshaping Our Biggest Ideas—did I realize that every book I’ve written has been about the same two intertwined questions I explored in my 1979 doctoral dissertation: What is a thing, and where does it get its meaning as that thing?

My dissertation’s title was “Heidegger’s Ontology of Things.” For the philosopher Martin Heidegger—whose despicable devotion to Nazism had not yet been uncovered—“ontology” meant the most basic account of what a thing is. Both of the external reviewers liked the dissertation, but both had the same criticism: I didn’t actually talk about “being,” which was Heidegger’s lifelong topic. I was surprised, because I thought I had— by talking about things in terms of what makes them different from one another. I didn’t care about “being” as an overarching concept. It struck me as the ultimate generalization, so general as to be empty. (Only a handful of Heidegger scholars agree with this dismissal of “being.”)