In the twenty first century, we live within an overwhelmingly complex international web of cultural conceptions and technologies. Our cultural artifacts are mostly electronic. They are noisy, brutal and addictive, designed for instant gratification, and they are ubiquitous; they are also largely based on photography (and variant moving-image derivatives of photography), which means that they consist of disembodied images. This disembodiment reinforces our materialism. As materialists, we do not seek out the work of art, our need is for the product. Unlike the work of art, which embodies physical being in the world, products are representations of ideas, ideas like ‘status’ and ‘power’. We are therefore unable to be present to the beauty (or otherwise) of things in the world, since we have no feeling for “the thingness of things”, only feelings and ideas about what things mean. To dwell in culture such as this, the nature of our own being is more than just hidden, it is entirely unknown to us.