Heidegger

continued

The power of the Cartesian extortion lies in its ability to keep us in

line by telling us that doubts about the mind lead inevitably to crude

materialism. Heidegger sidesteps this move by suggesting that not

only mind but matter as well is a theoretical construct with no
indispensable

role to play in making sense of the everyday life-world. To

get this point across, he undertakes a description of how things show

up for us most “primordially” in the course of our everyday dealings

with the world. In his now-well-known example of hammering in a

workshop, he suggests that what we encounter when we are absorbed

in such an activity is not a “hammer-thing” with properties to which

we then assign a use value. On the contrary, what shows up for us

initially is the hammering, which is “in order to” nail boards together,

which is “for” building a bookcase, which is ultimately “for

the sake of” being, say, a person with a neat study. As Hall’s essay

shows, the ordinary work-world as a whole — the light in the room,

the workbench, the saw, the glue — all of these show up in their
interconnected

functionality in relation to our projects.

It follows, then, that what is “given” in average everyday dealings

with the world is a holistic “equipmental totality,” a web of functional

relationships in which things are encountered in their interdependent

functions and in terms of their relevance to what we are

doing. The hammer is what it is by virtue of its reference to these

nails and boards in hammering on this workbench under this lighting

for this purpose. In Heidegger’s vocabulary, the world of average

everydayness is not an aggregate of “present-at-hand” objects, things

that just occur, but is a holistic contexture of relations, the “readyto-

hand,” where what something is — its “ontological definition” —

is determined by its role within the projects under way within the

workshop.9 The totality of these functional relations — the general

structure of “in order tos,” “by doing whichs,” “for whichs,” and

“for the sakes of” as laid out in our culture’s practices — Heidegger

calls the “worldhood” of the world. His claim, as I understand it, is

that the present-at-hand items taken as basic by traditional theorizing

(for instance, physical objects and their causal relations) are derivative

from and parasitic on the world understood as a context of

involvements directed toward accomplishing things. To think that

there are “at first” mere present-at-hand things “in a space in general,”

which then get concatenated into equipmental relations, is an

“illusion” (BT 421), according to Heidegger (though it may be useful

to assume that such things exist for the purposes of certain regional

inquiries). 10

The description of average everydayness leads us to see that what is

most basic is a world of “significance” in which things show up as

counting or mattering in relation to our practical affairs. This meaningful

life-world is inseparable from Dasein’s future-directedness, its

being “for the sake of itself” in the various self-interpretations and

roles it picks up from the public “we-world” into which it is thrown.

Dasein is said to be a “clearing” or a “lighting” through which entities

can stand forth as such and such. In other words, it is because we

take a stand on our being in the world — because we are “understanding,”

in Heidegger’s special use of this word — that we engage in familiar,

skillful practices in everday contexts, and we thereby open a leeway

or field of free play (Spielraum) where things can stand out as

counting or mattering in some determinate ways. Given my selfunderstanding

as a cook in the kitchen, for example, I handle things

there in such a way that the spatula and pan stand out as significant

while the linoleum and wainscotting recede into insignificance.

This projection of possibilities opened by understanding is realized

and made concrete in “interpretation” (Auslegung, literally

“laying out”). Interpretation is our way of “explicitly appropriating”

the world “in preparing, putting to rights, repairing, improving [and]

rounding out,” that is, in our familiar activities within ordinary

contexts. Interpretation seizes on the range of possibilities laid out

in advance by the “fore-structure” of understanding and works it

over into a concrete “as-structure” of uses — using the pan to boil an

egg, for instance, rather than to simmer a white sauce (BT §§31-2).

Given this description of everydayness, we can see why Heidegger

claims that the being of everyday equipment in use — its readiness

to-hand — is defined by our ways of using things in the course of our

prereflective activities.

It should now be clear why Heidegger tells us that being-in-theworld

is a “unitary phenomenon.” On the one hand, the being of

everyday functional contexts is inseparable from the specific uses

we put things to in the course of our shared practical involvements

in the world. On the other hand, who I am as an agent is determined

by the equipmental contexts and familiar forms of life that make up

the worldly “dwelling” in which I find myself. Since there is no

ultimate ground or foundation for the holistic web of meaning that

makes up being-in-the-world, Heidegger suggests that the meaning

of being (i.e., the basis of all intelligibility) is an “absence of ground”

or “abyss” (Abgrund) (BT 194) 11

What must be explained given such a picture of being-in-theworld,

as Hoy points out, is not how an initially worldless subject

can get hooked up with a pregiven collection of objects “out there”

in a neutral space—time coordinate system. Rather, what we need to

show is why the tradition has overlooked this unified phenomenon,

and how the disjunction of self and things ever arises in the first

place. To explain the appeal of the substance ontology, Heidegger

describes how the spectator attitude and the objectifying ontology

result from a “breakdown” in average everydayness. When everything

is running smoothly in the workplace, he suggests, the readyto-

hand and the surrounding work-world remain unobtrusive and

unnoticed. The ready-to-hand must “withdraw” into its usability,

Heidegger says, “in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically”

(BT 99). As Hall points out, we see through it, so to speak, in zeroing

in on what we are out to accomplish.

When something goes wrong in the workshop, however, there is a

“changeover” in the way things show up for us. If the handle breaks

off the pot or the spatula is missing, the whole project grinds to a

standstill and we are put in the position of just looking around to see

what to do next. It is when things are temporarily unready-to-hand in

this way that we can catch a glimpse of the web of functional relations

in which they played a part. Thus, a breakdown makes it possible to

catch sight of the worldhood of the world. If the breakdown persists,

however, items can begin to obtrude in their unusability, and we can

look at things as brute present-at-hand objects to be investigated from

a theoretical perspective. As we adopt a stance in which things are

explicitly noticed, we can be led to believe that what have been there

“all along” are value-free, meaningless objects whose usefulness was

merely a product of our own subjective interests and needs. Heidegger’s

point, however, is that this conception of reality as consisting of

essentially contextless objects can arise only derivatively from a

more “primordial” way of being absorbed in a meaningful lifeworld.

I. Such contextless objects are by-products of the “disworlding

of the world,” and so cannot be thought of as the basic components

from which the world is built up.

According to Heidegger’s phenomenology of being-in-the-world,

what is most primordial is neither humans nor objects, but rather

the “clearing” in which specific forms of human existence along

with particular sorts of equipmental context emerge-into-presence

in their reciprocal interdependence. Entities in general — the tools in

a workshop, the unknown chemical. in the chemist’s beaker, even

the precise kinds of sensation and emotion we can have — these can

show up as what they are (i.e., in their being such and such) only

against the background of the interpretive practices of a particular

historical culture. Yet it is also true that we can be the kinds of

people we are in our everyday affairs only by virtue of the practical

contexts of worldly involvement in which we find ourselves. In the

kitchen I can be a culinary artist or a klutz, but not a world leader

signing a treaty. Thus, “Self and world belong together in the single

entity Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and

object; . . . [instead,] self and world are the basic determination of

Dasein in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world” (BP 297).

With its emphasis on our facticity, thrownness, and embeddedness

in a concrete world, we might think of Heidegger’s fundamental

ontology as moving toward something like a “Ptolemaic

reaction” to Kant’s Copernican revolution. Humans do not construct

the world. Rather, humans and things are constituted by the

totality of what Heidegger in his earliest writings called the “worlding

of the world.” And being is understood neither as an essential

property of things, nor as the mere fact that they occur, nor as something

cast onto things by humans. Instead, being comes to be

thought of as a temporal event, a “movement into presence” inseparable

from the understanding of being embodied in Dasein’s forms of

life. It is the event (Ereignis) of disclosedness in which entities come

to be appropriated into intelligibility.13

It follows from Heidegger’s account of average everydayness that

there can be no presuppositionless knowledge, no access of the sort

philosophers sought when they dreamed of getting in touch with

“reality as it is in itself.” We are always caught up in a “hermeneutic

circle”: though our general sense of things depends on what we encounter

in the world, we can first discover something as significant in

some determinate way only because we have soaked up a “preontological

understanding” of how things in general can count

through being initiated into the practices and language of our culture.

Of course, to say that we always encounter entities as counting in

such and such ways does not entail that, in some sense, a veil has been

pulled over things so that we can never make contact with the things

themselves. On the contrary, since the ways things show up — the

appearances — just are what those things really are, access to what

appears just is access to those things. Heidegger tries to clarify this

point by considering what is involved when a city “presents a magnificent

view” from the vantage point of a particular scenic overlook.

Here it is the city itself that offers itself “from this or that point of

view” (IM 104). It remains true, needless to say, that the city can

present this panorama only because we are viewing it from a particular

position. But this relativity to a standpoint does not entail that we

are cut off from the city, having access to, say, only a mental picture of

the city. It is not, after all, a representation of the city we encounter,

but a presentation of the city as it shows itself from this particular

point of view.

This example shows how Heidegger tries to undercut traditional

skepticism about the external world by undermining the representationalist

model that gets it going in the first place. The perspectival

modes of access to the city, far from being barriers between us and

reality, are in fact the conditions making possible any access to

things at all. They place the city before us, and they place us in the

setting, letting us be the observers we are. Thus, we can make no

sense of the idea of getting a “view of the city as it really is,”
independent

of all points of view and perspectives. For even aerial photographs

and street maps are just more points of view ; they are not

privileged, “purely objective” indicators of what the city is “really”

like. The idea of a pure, colorless, objective geographic or geological

locale, distinct from all possible modes of presentation, is an illusion

bred by the dominance of representationalism in our thinking. As a

result, Heidegger’s recognition of the Dasein-relativity of the being

of entities is consistent with a full-blooded realism that affirms the

reality of what shows up for us. The world just is the human world

in its various manifestations.14

[…]

Posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 6:03 am
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