Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner. Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand.
Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).
Heidegger, then, denies that the categories of subject and object characterize our most basic way of encountering entities. He maintains, however, that they apply to a derivative kind of encounter. When Dasein engages in, for example, the practices of natural science, when sensing takes place purely in the service of reflective or philosophical contemplation, or when philosophers claim to have identified certain context-free metaphysical building blocks of the universe (e.g., points of pure extension, monads), the entities under study are phenomenologically removed from the settings of everyday equipmental practice and are thereby revealed as fully fledged independent objects, that is, as the bearers of certain context-general determinate or measurable properties (size in metres, weight in kilos etc.). Heidegger calls this mode of Being presence-at-hand, and he sometimes refers to present-at-hand entities as ‘Things’. With this phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes a corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein becomes a subject, one whose project is to explain and predict the behaviour of an independent, objective universe. Encounters with the present-at-hand are thus fundamentally subject-object in structure. — SEP
The final phenomenological category identified during the first phase of the existential analytic is what Heidegger calls un-readiness-to-hand. This mode of Being of entities emerges when skilled practical activity is disturbed by broken or malfunctioning equipment, discovered-to-be-missing equipment, or in-the-way equipment. When encountered as un-ready-to-hand, entities are no longer phenomenologically transparent. However, they are not yet the fully fledged objects of the present-at-hand, since their broken, malfunctioning, missing or obstructive status is defined relative to a particular equipmental context.
Thus a driver does not encounter a punctured tyre as a lump of rubber of measurable mass; she encounters it as a damaged item of equipment, that is, as the cause of a temporary interruption to her driving activity. With such disturbances to skilled activity, Dasein emerges as a practical problem solver whose context-embedded actions are directed at restoring smooth skilled activity. — SEP
The for-the-sake-of-which seems crucial here. It lights up one world, forecloses others. We use "present-to-hand" entities like subjects and objects in an absorbed ready-to-hand way. SuchCrucially, for Heidegger, an involvement is not a stand-alone structure, but rather a link in a network of intelligibility that he calls a totality of involvements. ... Such totalities of involvements are the contexts of everyday equipmental practice. As such, they define equipmental entities, so the hammer is intelligible as what it is only with respect to the shelter and, indeed, all the other items of equipment to which it meaningfully relates in Dasein's everyday practices. This relational ontology generates what Brandom (1983, 391–3) calls Heidegger's ‘strong systematicity condition’, as given voice in Heidegger's striking claim that “[t]aken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” (Being and Time, 15: 97). And this radical holism spreads, because once one begins to trace a path through a network of involvements, one will inevitably traverse vast regions of involvement-space...
Heidegger points out that involvements are not uniform structures. Thus I am currently working with a computer (a with-which), in the practical context of my office (an in-which), in order to write this encyclopedia entry (an in-order-to), which is aimed towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy (a towards-this), for the sake of my academic work, that is, for the sake of my being an academic (a for-the-sake-of-which). The final involvement here, the for-the-sake-of-which, is crucial, because according to Heidegger all totalities of involvements have a link of this type at their base. This forges a connection between (i) the idea that each moment in Dasein's existence constitutes a branch-point at which it chooses a way to be, and (ii) the claim that Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible. This is because every for-the-sake-of-which is the base structure of an equipment-defining totality of involvements and reflects a possible way for Dasein to be (an academic, a carpenter, a parent, or whatever). ..[This] puts further flesh on the phenomenological category of the un-ready-to-hand. Thus when I am absorbed in trouble-free typing, the computer and the role that it plays in my academic activity are transparent aspects of my experience. But if the computer crashes, I become aware of it as an entity with which I was working in the practical context of my office, in order to write an encyclopedia entry aimed towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy. And I become aware of the fact that my behaviour is being organized for the sake of my being an academic. So disturbances have the effect of exposing totalities of involvements and, therefore, worlds. — SEP
Yes, I had a sense that I was moving against Heidegger, but that's almost to be expected. He was a Nazi. Where did he go wrong?
;)So we try to restore smooth operation, via assimilation or abandonment of the broken tool. My hunch is that homeostasis rules.......I think life is about getting back into smooth operation...perhaps for-the-sake-of an endless self-enlargement and pursuit of greater authenticity.....
I'm trying to reduce the present-to-hand to the ready-to-hand. — Hoo
I'm trying to reduce the present-to-hand to the ready-to-hand. I think life is about getting back into smooth operation, disappearing joyfully into the finite projects life is made of, perhaps for-the-sake-of an endless self-enlargement and pursuit of greater authenticity. — Hoo
I love Heidegger, don't get me wrong, but Division II has all the seeds, especially in this climactic paragraph: "Resoluteness implies handing oneself down by anticipation to the "there" of the moment of vision; and this handing down we call "fate".This is also the ground for destiny, by which we understand Dasein's historizing in Being-with Others. In repetition, fateful destiny can be dis-closed explicitly as bound up with the heritage which has come down to us."The fact that Heidegger was, for at least a brief moment, a Nazi, cannot be relevant to the philosophy of Being and Time, as I see it.
I don't mean to be dramatic about it, but we're talking about the same guy. I get the "prophet" vibe from Heidegger. "Only a God can save us." I'll gladly take from him what I can use. But what was his myth of himself? Was the modern world all f*cked up in his view? Did he have the diagnosis if not the cure? I can only follow Rorty so far, too, since there's still politics at the center. Thinkers propose themselves as leaders of humanity as a whole rather than as tool-makers for a certain kind of sufficiently similar individual. It's a bringing of stone tablets down from the mountain. I'd be surprised if Heidegger wasn't wired this way from the beginning, considering his theological roots. (I've been wired away from duty and politics almost from the beginning, so philosophy was a flaming sword against being swallowed by guilty solidarity.)The fact that Heidegger was, for at least a brief moment, a Nazi, cannot be relevant to the philosophy of Being and Time, as I see it. — John
Maybe I'm trying to show the instability of this distinction. We makes things present-to-hand in order to fix them and finally to lose ourselves in "the seriousness of a child at play," or "maturity" for Nietzsche. "Evil is burned up when we cease to behold it." (Blake)It seems more like you're trying to reduce the ready-to-hand to the present-at-hand, to be honest. :P — John
This presupposition comes straight from the modern materialistic scientistic paradigm that we all inhabit more or less as fishes-in-water, and it forgets the fact that the greatest philosophies-as-transformation used precisely the opposite kinds of concepts to any presumptions of finitude to achieve their transformative power. Without the infinite the possibility of radical transformation shrinks to a dimensionless point. — John
I get the "prophet" vibe from Heidegger. "Only a God can save us." — Hoo
Maybe I'm trying to show the instability of this distinction. We makes things present-to-hand in order to fix them and finally to lose ourselves in "the seriousness of a child at play," or "maturity" for Nietzsche. "Evil is burned up when we cease to behold it." (Blake) — Hoo
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d: ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded, and remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.
Then I asked: ‘Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?’
He replied: ‘All Poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.’
Then Ezekiel said: ‘The philosophy of the East taught the first principles of human perception. Some nations held one principle for the origin, and some another: we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests and Philosophers of other countries, and prophesying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours and to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius.
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The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
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Some will say: ‘Is not God alone the Prolific? I answer: ‘God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men.’
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I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books.
A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceiv’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg: he shows the folly of churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods.
And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.
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One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.
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— Blake
I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.
Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.
What is the Divine Spirit? is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain? What is
the Harvest of the Gospel & its Labours? What is that Talent which it is a curse to hide? What are the Treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves, are they any other than Mental Studies & Performances? What are all the Gifts of the Gospel? Are they not all Mental Gifts?
Is [not] God a Spirit who must be worshipped in Spirit & in Truth and are not the Gifts
of the Spirit Every-thing to Man? O ye Religious, discountenance every one among you who shall pretend to despise Art & Science! I call upon you in the Name of Jesus! What is the Life of Man but Art & Science? What is Mortality but the things relating to the Body, which Dies? What is Immortality but the things relating to the Spirit, which Lives Eternally! What is the Joy of Hea- -ven but Improvement in the things of the Spirit? What are the Pains of Hell but Ignorance, Bodily Lust, Idleness & devastation of the things of the Spirit?
Answer this to yourselves, & expel from among you those who pretend to despise the labours of Art & Science, which alone are the labours of the Gospel: Is not this plain & manifest to the thought? Can you think at all, & not pronounce heartily! That to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem: and to Despise Knowledge, is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders.
And remember: He who despises & mocks a Mental Gift in another; calling it pride & selfishness & sin; mocks Jesus the giver of every Mental Gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving Hypocrite, as Sins. But that which is a Sin in the sight of cruel Man is not so in the sight of our kind God. — Blake
Truly, I've put some real time in with Blake, though it's been awhile. It's hard to parse "misunderstanding" away from assumption that a "real" meaning is accessible. Was Blake himself any more consistent thanI don't have much time Hoo, but I'll just say that I don't think cherry-picking is necessary, and certainly is not sufficient, for creative misreading. I think the latter consists in fruitfully misunderstanding the whole context (or at least the most substantial part of it) of a thinker's work. I think any misunderstanding that comes from taking isolated parts out of context would be highly unlikely to end up being creative or fruitful. — John
And, I don't know about personalities, but I don't believe philosophies are created by "driving over the bones of the dead". I rather think they are created by taking the living works of the departed into our own consciousnesses, and seeing the living truth of commonality there. For me it has nothing to do with heroism, but rather a combination of the cold fact of intellectual duty with the warm fact of spiritual passion, and compassion. — John
But would you go so far to say that you look around and see the average person as your intellectual equal? I'm sure we both strive to be kind and open-minded as much as possible. But do we not quietly prefer some minds to others? Do we not seek out the extraordinary?I agree with you that the notion of authority is not apt; in fact I think it is utterly useless. Our duty is not to any authority but instead to the genuine promptings of our own (better) instincts, imaginations, intuitions and intellects. I think there is nothing heroic or extraordinary about it; it is very ordinary, in fact very humdrum and everyday. — John
In a generalized sense of the word, I doubt anyone is godless. But I know that there are strains of egoism that work pretty well as generalized religions. There's the notion that every man is his own priest and his own king. He owns himself. He holds nothing sacred but his own mind. This is monstrous is "sacred" isn't understood in terms of spiritual authority. It feels bad to be petty and cruel. We truly want community, love, mutual recognition. It's just that I envision the mutual recognition of liberated and potently self-possessed "kings."I cannot make any sense at all of the notion of a "godless man", I'm afraid. — John
Truly, I've put some real time in with Blake, though it's been awhile. It's hard to parse "misunderstanding" away from assumption that a "real" meaning is accessible. Was Blake himself any more consistent than — Hoo
Does it necessarily presuppose that meaning to be accessible, though? — John
If the meaning is not accessible, would it follow that all understandings be misunderstandings, and all readings misreadings? I think this is related to the idea of truth being independent of us; and some (pragmatists, most notably) simply won't have that. — John
The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material or spiritual? – here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. — James
I really don't think so. Death is huge, of course. But don't we reason with ourselves about it? I've got this candle/flame analogy. We're melting candles, but the flame is passed on. I think the highest and best in us is universal. Others will replace me. The high thoughts and feelings that light my life will light theirs. Why do I love life? I love a woman. I love philosophy. I love math. These loves will just wear a different face. Don't get me wrong. I'll take another thousand years. But there is something beautiful in laying down 'soldier' and picking up a new one. I mentioned that shrooms experience. Intense death terror, steered via Christian myth as myth into a river of love running through my chest. That was a peak experience, but this is roughly how I deal. And there's also a sense of having completed the primary mission. It may not compute for others, but I feel like I'm at the end of certain journey of once-alienated self-consciousness.Yes, but isn't death the (elephant's arse)hole in the room of the concept system? ( Phew!!! talk about mixed metaphors!!!) — John
I get that. It's very much "earth and fire." But what if one can't really make sense of correspondence at high levels of abstraction? What else is there but coherence? I think I can embrace pragmatism because I'm getting the real juice elsewhere.I confess I heartily dislike pragmatism. The pragmatist dissolves the very coherent and useful distinction between truth and belief, conflates the two. — John
The essential feeling in all art is religious, and art is a form of religion without dogma. The feeling in art is religious, always. Whenever the soul is moved to a a certain fullness of experience, that is religion. Every sincere and genuine feeling is a religious feeling. And the point of every work of art is that it achieves a state of feeling which becomes true experience, and so is religious. Everything that puts us into connection, into vivid touch, is religious. — D H Lawrence
Well, yeah, that's part of it. James is a complicated case. But it is arguably just a twist on positivism, utilitarianism, empiricism in the light of Hegel and Darwin.I think at the heart of pragmatism is an hubristic unwillingness to admit that we cannot know the truth (in the discursive sense at least). "No truck with mystery" they seem to be crying. I see pragmatism, in this sense, as just another great leveller, no less than scientism, and in fact very much akin to it in spirit. — John
I really don't think so. Death is huge, of course. But don't we reason with ourselves about it? I've got this candle/flame analogy. We're melting candles, but the flame is passed on. — Hoo
But what if one can't really make sense of correspondence at high levels of abstraction? What else is there but coherence? — Hoo
We do reason about death, but we have no determinate concepts about it, just whatever we can imagine or intuit. It thus forms a gaping hole in our concept systems, along with origin, (which in a sense is the same question) for that matter. — John
Yes, I agree. Truth-as-correspondence in the physical part of "manifest image" is almost unshakable. At higher levels of science, it's already breaking down. We can be said to be relating measurements to to-be-expected measurements, with metaphors like "the point mass is a little stone" to aid us. (In the same way, mathematicians can retreat to formalism as a metaphysics, but it's hard to find formal proofs without an intuition of what's going on.)When it comes to the truth of scientific theories the isomorphic nature of any purported correspondence cannot be easily, or even at all, intuited. Also, if history is a guide, no scientific theory is likely to be true in the sense of final or definitive. We can easily imagine propositions like "i did not go for a walk today' being true in a final and definitive sense, because it seems that once the day is passed the fact that I did not go for a walk during it is immutably fixed, and we cannot even begin to imagine what it could mean for it not to be so. — John
I view that as a leftover of the stories of transcendent myth. Under those traditions, and the ones Heidegger longs for, human projects are understood to be finite all the way down. Nothing we ever do is good enough because it ends. For us to paint or move within infinite realm is considered impossible. Anything we do is just fishes pointlessly swimming in the water. We need to be transformed from anything we ever are or else amount to nothing. To be ourselves is to be separated from anything that matters, from any significance etched into the timelessness of logic. The delusion of nihilism, a characteristic of most human traditions and philosophises, which have no come to terms with the infinite expressed the world, particularly our own death.
We dance amongst the infinite every moment of our lives (and of our death). Within each moment, we mean something timeless, thinking, moving, feeling (or not) in ways which cannot be touched by anything to come or anything of the past. Every second we are present in way that does not depend on other logics or any finite part of ourselves. We are something, not a body or a mind, nor an atom or cell, but a presence all on its own-- Being in the world.
In this context, the infinite of possibility is incoherent. It is impossible for there to be anything other than Being in the world.To say that radical transformation shrinks to a dimensionless point is entirely true: there is no transformation. There can never be. Being in the world will never be given-up, no matter how much we pretend God, tradition or technology lets us transcend it. We are always etching into the infinite no matter how much desire to be meaningless wretches who are given Being from the outside.
Heidegger and the Modernist are cut from the same cloth.They both seek the tradition which brings utopia, which fills our absence of Being with a perfect Being which is never ours. A world in which meaning is entirely a question of the finite (e.g. practicing a tradition of transformation, living forever, having no problems, etc.,etc.) rather than of the infinite (our Being). — TheWillowOfDarkness
Death in this context does not refer to the death of the body, but to the continual death of what you are in what you become. To resist this transformation dying is to remain fossilized with abstract generalities and universal principles; to constantly have you eye, that is, on the "other world" instead of engaging with this one. — John
In the second part I underlined where you talk about "dancing amongst the infinite" are you referring to an actual experience or is that just a characterization of how you think, in abstracta, about our metaphysical relation to the world. If it is the latter do you see the importance of that vision to be of an inspiring nature to get us to feel our lives that way, or is it something else? — John
We can easily imagine propositions like "i did not go for a walk today' being true in a final and definitive sense, because it seems that once the day is passed the fact that I did not go for a walk during it is immutably fixed, and we cannot even begin to imagine what it could mean for it not to be so. — John
I'm trying to reduce the present-to-hand to the ready-to-hand — Hoo
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