#1Aug 23rd, 2010
In his book Being and Time1 (1962) Martin Heidegger discusses “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment.” He describes the dynamics surrounding our relationship to tools in our environment as we encounter them in our everyday experience. He notes that in our everyday dealings we encounter equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement, etc.; and that at the most fundamental level equipment is “something in-order-to”. In this “in-order-to” structure resides an assignment or reference of something to some-thing else within a referential whole. The oft-quoted example he gives is the use of a hammer for hammering. In discussing this example Heidegger points out the extent to which “putting-to-use” “in-order-to”, constitutes the type of being that equipment possesses as a “readiness-to-hand.” And furthermore, that the more one grabs hold of the hammer and puts it to use, “the more primordial does our relationship to it become.”1

Hubert Dreyfus in his commentary on Being and Time2 notes that: “When we are using equipment, it has a tendency to “disappear”. We are not aware of it as having any characteristics at all.” In what Dreyfus calls absorbed coping, the awareness of equipment recedes into transparency as one becomes absorbed in the task at hand with the skilful implementation and smooth functioning of that equipment.

Heidegger goes on to point out that, when equipment breaks-down or is somehow found to be unusable, it is at this precise moment when the equipment in relation to the entire situation is made conspicuous. We are made aware of our relationship to the equipment and its relationship to the referential whole, an awareness that had receded into the back-ground in the skilful implementation and smooth running of the equipment. “When equipment cannot be used, this implies that the constitutive assignment of the “in-order-to” to a “towards-this” has been disturbed,” he writes,” and “when an assignment has been disturbed—when something is unusable for some purpose—then the assignment becomes explicit.” Dreyfus, in further characterizing this process, writes: “Temporary breakdown, where something blocks ongoing activity, necessitates a shift into a mode in which what was previously transparent becomes explicitly manifest. Deprived of access to what we normally count on, we act deliberately, paying attention to what we are doing.”2 –Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson, SCM Press, 1962(1927); and 1Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Hedger’s Being and Time, Division 1, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990.

I was just about to begin my study
of philosophy, Martin, when your
book was finally translated. But I
was fully occupied with studies in
other areas—just trying to survive
and get that BA & hopefully avoid
all those menial…seemingly trivial
jobs that had occupied me…..every
summer beginning between 57 & 60.

I was not very handy with the tools
of my environment, Martin….but I
did encounter the Baha’i Faith and
in ’62 went travelling-pioneering in
the hope that others might find that
it was a tool to use in their own lives.

Ron Price
23 August 2010