“A traditional Zen story speaks of a temple novice who hoped to attain enlightenment by chopping a cat in half with a sword. Witnessing the preparations for this atrocity, the head monk cried out and asked the newcomer to explain himself.
“I am cutting the cat in two with one sword,” was the young man’s reply.Outdoing this supposed paradox of duality and unity, the monk countered with the following remark: “It is easy to cut the cat in two with one sword. What is difficult is to cut the cat in one with one sword.”
“But what is ‘cutting the cat in one’?”
“The cat itself”
Hearing this reply from his master, the novice attained enlightenment
* * *
As if to one-up the Zen master in this anecdote, Heidegger cuts the cat in one with two swords.
Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects by Graham Harman, p. 87-8.
The two swords are two dualisms: (1) the dualism of tool-being (the subterranean texture of being that every object exists in) and of broken-tool (the present-at-hand moment an object undergoes when it is wrested from the shadowy domains of tool-being into an object that can be encountered) and (2) the dualism of an object regarded as something in particular and as regarded as something at all. The interrelations between these dualisms make up the entirety of Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics: they form what he later calls the ‘Quadruple object’ - that is, those quadratic qualities that every object displays at all times. The quadruple object is every object.
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