According to Heidegger in his famous essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art", one of the most common understandings of a thing is, precisely, matter (hyle) that has form (morphe). "In this analysis of the thing as matter", says Heidegger, "form is already coposited". Heidegger argues in this essay first given as a lecture in the 1930s that this notion of what a thing is arises first and foremost from the notion of "equipment" as intentionally formed matter. Moreover, he claims that the "matter-form" structure of the thing seen as a piece of equipment has become in modern times the dominant way of understanding all things, and indeed all beings, both man-made and natural, but also human beings and their work:
the matter-form structure, however, by which the Being of a piece of equipment is first determined, readily presents itself as the immediately intelligible constitution of every being, because here man himself as maker participates in the way in which the piece of equipment comes into being. Because equipment takes an intermediate place between mere thing and work, the suggestion is that nonequipmental beings--things and works and ultimately all beings--are to be comprehended with the help of the Being of equipment (the matter-form structure).
Heidegger's account of this generalisation of the being of equipment so that it comes to determine the nature of all kinds of things anticipates the critique of modernity and modern technology that he was later to develop as a central theme of his writings in essays such as "Overcoming Metaphysics" and the "The Question Concerning Technology". In a similar vein to this argument about the extension of the thingness of equipment to all things, this critique stresses the way in which in the modern age there is an increasing tendency to view everything, both natural, man-made things and even humanity itself, as part of the potential resource pool for the systematic maximisation of an ever-expanding technological exploitation of materials. Samuel Weber has translated Heidegger's term for this tendency, "Bestellbarkeit", as "the susceptibility of being-placed-on-order".
