On Reading Being and Time:

So firstly the unreadiness to hand allows us to appreciate (albeit negatively) that entities within the world are not things, and secondly (in a more positive sense) it grants us a way into thinking about the world as a phenomenon.

105

We already know that the structure of the Being of the ready-to-hand is determined by references or assignments and we understand that this is a way of understanding a general readiness-to-hand, although not thematically yet. Nevertheless, when equipment cannot be used, what is revealed is that the equipmentality of equipment is not in its thingness, but in what it is used for. Thus the object which we call a hammer is merely a means to an end (the assignment), and this is revealed because when a hammer is not 'to hand' we will make use of another object to serve as a hammer. Heidegger makes use of this truism about equipment by reversing it. For when something is unusable for the assignment it was designated for, only then does that assignment becomes visible to us. When the tool is broken the assignments themselves are not so much observed; they are simply 'there.'

Similarly, when something ready-to-hand is found missing, though its everyday presence may have hitherto been taken it for granted, the absence makes a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers and we see for the first time what the missing article was always ready-to-hand for. For example, when your car breaks down, you suddenly realise the huge distances involved in making your journey. Furthermore you realise that a car is, in fact, a device that collapses distance (and space and time also), so that you now realise that the assignment for which the car was created, is shrinking the world.

Formulating a Thematic Understanding

Even now, of course, the theme of our inquiry has not become explicit as an ontological structure. In the above example of the car we have merely intimated an ontological understanding of a world made smaller by the car. But the notion of the unready-to-hand has made it explicit ontically, in the sense of revealing the circumspection which comes up against a broken or badly performing tool.

When an assignment to some particular "towards-this" has been thus circumspectively aroused, we catch sight of the "towards-this" itself, and along with it everything connected with the work-the whole 'workshop'-as that wherein concern always dwells [ref. ¶15, page 98]. The context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but rather it is lit up as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection.

And in this totality the world announces itself.

What is thus lit up is not itself just one thing ready-to-hand among others; still less is it something present-at-hand upon which equipment ready-to-hand is somehow founded: it is in the 'there' before anyone has observed or ascertained it, but it is itself inaccessible to circumspection. Because circumspection is always directed towards entities.

 

The previous paragraphs showed how our pre-ontological understanding of the world forms, because the worldly character of the ready to hand is already disclosed for in taking up any object as something ready-to-hand. In fact this is the very "pre-ontological understanding" that Heidegger referred to somewhat enigmatically in the introduction of Being and Time [¶4, page 32]. Note also that 'disclose' and 'disclosedness' are be used as technical terms here to signify the concept of 'laying open.' Heidegger uses the term disclosed to get away from the idea that these facts are obtained indirectly by inference - for this is not an operation of cognising but of perceiving [see phenomenological method, ref. ¶ 7, page 49 - 51].

That the world does not 'consist' merely of the ready-to-hand shows itself in the fact that whenever the world is lit up in the modes of concern where ready-to-hand becomes present-at-hand.

If we still have not appreciated how the world is lit up for us by considering a broken tool, remember that Heidegger defined the term worldly and worldhood, not as a new way of seeing, but as a way of seeing simultaneously different things in the same object. Worldly allows us to view something through the ontical frame as a entity in the world, and also through the ontological frame as an entity whose being is intimately interconnected with other entities because of Dasein's concernful dealings with the world. Now the task here is to realise that the presence of the world as a phenomenon--which was hitherto either considered to be a spiritual aspect or simply dismissed as not being there at all [ref. ¶14, page 91]--is in fact an expression of Dasein's concernful dealings with entities. Therefore the world as a phenomenon is both formed in Dasein's concern and the world is also the basis on which that concern is grounded. This almost paradoxical sounding statement in fact defines Dasein's pre-ontological understanding of the world. In the light of this understanding, we can see that the world is truly "there," but that it is only disclosed as being there when we disrupt the habitual mode of circumspection in which Dasein sees entities only as 'things.'

Summing up

The world has already been disclosed beforehand whenever what is ready-to-hand within-the-world is accessible for circumspective concern. In the example of the car, the world was already 'big,' in our pre-ontological understanding, in order that it could be made smaller by the car.

(107)

But moreover, the world is therefore something 'wherein' Dasein as an entity already was, and if in any manner it explicitly comes away from anything, it can never do more than come back to the world.

This pre-ontological understanding can now be explained with reference to equipment and resource structures and assignment (namely that which is ready-to-hand). The ready-to-hand constitutes the ontological character of tools and forms a tension with that which we call present-at-hand. By holding both sides of this tension in view (in other worlds by seeing the worldly character of things) we will be able to disclose the phenomenon of the world.

In such privative expressions as "inconspicuousness", "unobtrusiveness", and "non-obstinacy", what we have in view is a positive phenomenal character of the Being of that which is proximally ready-to-hand. With these negative prefixes in mind we have a view of the character of the ready-to-hand as "holding itself in."

To flesh this out a little more, imagine a thirsty man in a desert who encounters a sealed container made of some unbreakable transparent material containing a generous amount of water. The man is thirsty and he can see the water, but he cannot drink. He tries to break the container, but every strategy he thinks of ends in failure. The situation is hopeless and in his despair, the man reflects upon all the times in his life when he had access to water and he drank and bathed so freely that he took the existence of water for granted and never stopped to consider how essential it was for his survival. Thus it only when the man is deprived of water, in a situation where water is literally 'holding itself in,' that he can discern the true worldly character of water.

Being-In-The-World - As I Understand It Thusfar

Question: 'Where does Dasein's concern for the world come from?'

Answer: 'From its Being-in-the-world.'

Question: 'Where does Dasein's Being-in-the-world come from?'

Answer: 'From Dasein's concern for the world

Any concern is already as it is, because of some familiarity with the world. In this familiarity Dasein can lose itself in what it encounters within-the-world and be fascinated with it.

Question: What do we understand by the term Being-in-the-world?

Being-in-the-world (as we have understood it up to now) amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment.

Heidegger calls his analysis so far "non thematic," because at the moment it has not been generalised into a principle or set of principles we can apply thematically (generally) - here the metaphor of a theme is employed as something which allows us to guess where the work is heading. The is most overtly apparent in music where the central theme of a composition sets the tone, for instance by being played in the minor or major key or in a fast or slow tempo.

In this section Heidegger has disclosed the worldly aspect of the world. In the next will be able to describe with more precision what exactly this world is that Dasein is so familiar with?

The peculiar character of signs as equipment becomes especially clear in the circumstances when a sign is first established. For example a sign may be established because people local to a rural area notice that large animals such as deer have a habit or bolting across a newly build busy road. This is not to say that a sign is necessarily established immediately. Say, for instance, this observation is not acted upon until a car driver is badly injured or killed in a collision with a deer. So, much in the spirit of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, it is then decided to put up a sign to warn other drivers of the danger. This sign consists of a red triangle (the convention for a warning signal) with an image of a running deer inside. However the sign is not there to announce a fact--a deer will bolt across the road here. Rather, the sign explicitly refers to the drivers circumspection dealings with the world, because it depicts, in symbolic shorthand, a possible incident that a diver may encounter in that particular area at that particular time. Thus the sign councils the driver to 'take care,' specifically be being aware of the aroundness of the world, in the sense of keeping and eye open for bolting deer.

But even when signs are thus conspicuous ' one does not let them be present-at-hand at random. It is importance to realise that context is crucial for signs (another reason why they are so revealing of the world)

Signs depend upon context and, thus, upon the existence of the world. If the deer road sign is stolen and ends up as a trophy in someone's bedroom, one does not look under the bed to check for the presence of running deer.

Signs always get 'set up' in a definite way with a view towards easy accessibility. The Being of what is most closely ready-to-hand within- the-world possesses, the character of holding-itself-in and not emerging, [¶ 16, p106] and this is precisely why the sign is employed, in a manner of speaking to us that enables that which is holding itself in to free itself.

This is the importance of the sign of referral, because its job is to reveal that which is most primordially ready to hand. Thus the warning sign of the deer is not announcing itself as a red triangle with a drawing of a deer inside, but alerting us to a real world danger. So that when we see the sign, we immediately look around us - (thus reading through the present and hand and letting the ready to hand be seen).

One does not necessarily have to produce the sign that significes the ready-to-hand. Signs arise when one takes some naturally occurring thing to be a sign. For instance, the south wind is taken by the farmer to be a sign of rain. In this mode, signs "get established" in a sense which is even more primordial.

(112)

In fact it is only by the kind of circumspection with which one takes account of things in farming, that the south wind is discovered in its Being. This incidentally is another example of how nature is discovered in the ready-to-hand - ref. [ref. ¶15, page100]

And yet we might argue, that signs cannot truly reveal what is yet to be, because that which gets taken up as a sign must first be accessible in itself, and must therefore become apprehended before the sign can be established. Heidegger answers, certainly a sign must be established in some way so that we can come across it. But the question remains as to how entities are discovered in this previous encountering, whether as mere Things which occur, or as equipment which has not been understood-as something ready-to-hand yet. It is a fact that the origins of things is kept veiled from the purview of circumspection. In some cases the existence of entities is discovered by merely revealing what has hitherto been invisible in our circumspection (a paradigm shift). A sign does not have to miraculously appear to tell of things which are yet to happen. Even though, on a very literal level, that is precisely what a sign appears to do (for example the running deer sign foretells an unfortunate incident with a car and a running deer which can be assumed to be a possibility otherwise why would the sign be there?). We are not astonished by prophetic qualities of a sign, because we know that a sign can only alert us to possibilities that others are already fully aware of.

The Being-ready-to-hand of signs in our everyday dealings, and the conspicuousness which belongs to signs and which may be produced for various purposes and in various ways, do not merely serve to document the inconspicuousness constitutive for what is most closely ready-to-hand; the sign itself gets its conspicuousness from the inconspicuousness of the equipmental totality, which is ready-to-hand and 'obvious' in its everydayness.

The sign of the running dear gets its meaning from the context of the busy road (the world in other words). The context allows the sign to signify beyond itself and foretell of a possible dangerous scenario in order to warn drivers. (A sign of a running deer out of context, say, in a bedroom, or at a discotheque would be incongruous and surreal, precisely because of the lack of worldly applicability for the sign in those places).

A sign which references context explicitly (albeit without precision) is the knot which one ties in a handkerchief I as a sign to mark something is another example. What such a sign is to indicate is always something with which one has to concern oneself in one's everyday circumspection. Such a sign can indicate many things, and things of the most various kinds. The wider the extent to which it can indicate, the narrower its intelligibility and its usefulness - it can even become inaccessible. In this instance, the knot does not lose its sign-character, but it acquires the disturbing obtrusiveness of something most closely ready-to-hand. Hence the frustrating experience of tying a knot in a handkerchief and not remembering what the knot is for

(113)

This interpretation of the sign should merely provide phenomenal support for our characterisation of references or assignments. The relation between sign and reference is threefold.

1. Indicating, as a way whereby the "towards-which" of a serviceability can become concrete, because it is founded upon an equipment-structure and an assignment.

2. The indicating that the sign does is an equipmental character of something ready-to-hand, and as such it belongs to a totality of equipment, and to a context of assignments or references.

3. The sign is not only ready-to-hand with other equipment, but in its readiness-to-hand the environment becomes in each case explicitly accessible for circumspection.

Two Criticisms

Magic, Fetishism and 'Primitive Dasein'

On page 112 and 113, Heidegger indulges in what today would be regarded as very politically incorrect speculation about the sign use of 'primitive Dasein' in magic and ritual.

One might be tempted to cite the abundant use of 'signs' in primitive Dasein, as in fetishism and magic, to illustrate the remarkable role which they play in everyday concern for and understanding of the world (B&T, p 112).

Heidegger argues, in this case the establishment of signs which underlies this way of using them is not performed with any theoretical speculation. And so this way of using signs always remains completely within a Being-in-the-world which is 'immediate'. But on closer inspection it becomes plain that to interpret fetishism and magic by taking our clue from the idea of signs in general, is not enough to enable us to grasp the kind of 'Being-ready-to-hand' which belongs to entities encountered in the primitive world (B&T, p 112-113).

The first reason is that primitive man regards a sign as a substitute for the thing it signifies, "for primitive man, the sign coincides with that which is indicated." Thus a voodoo doll is the person, it signifies, rather than being abstracted from its referent and its function does not deviate from this.

The second reason is bound to the first. Primitive Dasein lacks the power of abstracting the sign away from its signify and thus also lacks the power to objectify things. Therefore what Heidegger calls the "coinciding of the sign" is completely embedded in the immediate apprehension of the world, rather than a reflexive understanding.

This "coinciding" consists in the fact that the sign has not as yet become free from that of which it is a sign. Such a use of signs is still absorbed completely in Being-towards what is indicated, so that a sign as such cannot detach itself at all. Thus the coinciding is based not on a prior Objectification but on the fact that such Objectification is completely lacking.

 

The point Heidegger is making is that signs do not signify for primitive Dasein in the same way as they do for civilised Dasein. Heidegger says that a sign's portability derives from the fact that it can be applied mutatis mutandis to multiple situations. Civilised Dasein can make a sign portable because it has the ability to abstract and isolate certain aspects of a sign to apply them in various contexts. For example the sign of the sun can stand for heat or brightness (qualities of the sun), roundness (its shape) and yellowness (its colour). All of these metaphorical abstractions can in turn be applied to other things and serve as points of departure for new ways of thinking about the world. However, Heidegger claims that for primitive Dasein signs only signify in a very concrete way: referring only to a particular thing, and consequently having no portability. No evidence is cited to back up this claim, which cannot be derived from direct access to the phenomena, since, to my knowledge, Heidegger never visited any primitive societies. Therefore these remarks seem to be grounded on the phenomenon of Heidegger's prejudice towards 'primitive Dasein'.