The same holds for the fact that the jug must be produced. Obviously, without humans the jug would never have been built in the first place. But this does not mean that the thinghood of the jug is something human. Once it has been produced, the jug is free of its producer and stands in itself; even the producer who built it no longer has full control of it, and of course the jug continues to exist even when the producer is dead. In Heidegger’s words, the jug is not a jug because it was produced, but rather is produced because it is a jug. The producer who builds the jug is only concerned with the thing’s outward appearance, not its independent thinghood—after all, it is the jug that holds water or wine, not the potter. 

Heidegger now makes a radical claim about the history of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, and all later thinkers failed to think the true independent thinghood of the thing. All of them reduced things to something produced, or represented from the outside. Insofar as Heidegger sees his notion of the thinghood of things as a decisive rupture with the entire history of philosophy, it clearly deserves to be more central to the interpretation of his writings than it has been so far. In some ways, the thing is Heidegger’s most important idea, one that encapsulates all the insights of his long career.

Graham Harman - Heidegger Explained, 129-30

I really enjoyed the Bennett reading and was intrigued by one of the passages on pg. 4:

“The story will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world. The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology.”