for the good of the thing

Of all of the things that seem intuitive and immediate to us, the "thing" is a choice example - so choice, in fact, that it has just slipped into our language in the form of colloquial vernacular consciously unbeknownst to us, a surreptitious answer to an implicit question not yet posed in the form of quod erat demonstrandum. Each object manifests before our gaze as something apparently wholly given, readily accessible, and with no opaque shroud of mystery to interfere with our ability as subjects to engage with it for our private means. This is not to say that objects are declarative for us. Part of our common sense understanding of the object is its fundamental inertial quality - a characterizing passivity and reactivity that precludes the possibility of vocality and thus firmly entrenches the ontic in a domain cleanly divided from the ontological. Furthermore, there is a way in which this absence of vocality is taken up by us, the subject, as a testament to the veneer of ineffability that adorns the object, lending it an air of reticence or even intractability that is at odds with the open transparency described above. However, this reticence or intractability is the same quality that spurs the spirit of natural investigation to which the object, with little protest, yields - a fact wellcorroborated by the many-limbed and densely populated enterprise of scientific inquiry. Quiet though it may be, the object is generous in its offerings. In its natural state as something ready-to-hand, it is always an answer and never a question; it is never expressively complex, only materially (compositionally) so.