Being And Time

The discussion of the “ready-to-hand” in Chapter 3 is one of the most intuitive, and accessible, elements of Being and Time. After all, we all have encounters with types of equipment every day, and Heidegger’s phenomenology allows us to see these habitual, but often unconsidered, experiences in a new light. However, for Heidegger, such insight is not an end-in-itself. He is pursuing a project of phenomenological ontology. As such, his goal is not just to give phenomenological descriptions, but to draw ontological conclusions in connection with them. Specifically, he is looking with phenomenology to problematize the “ontology of presence” that dominates our thinking about the world. Chapter 3 does this in a variety of ways.

For one thing, it gives concrete form to an alternative way of apprehending the world that does not involve seeing a present-at-hand object. As Heidegger says, “No matter how sharply we just look at the ‘outward appearance’ of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to hand” (98). That is, the “ready-to-hand” cannot be grasped by a detached subject just staring at it. It can be understood only in our immersed dealings with it. To use Heidegger’s example, we only discover the hammer, properly speaking, in the activity of hammering. This has ontological implications for the nature of the ready-to-hand, for it is constituted then, in its being, by its relations. It is its relations, and in a way that means it can never be ontologically self-sufficient or self-identical.

We have already touched on the nature of these relations in connection with the “equipment complex” and other Dasein; similarly, the ready-to-hand is also its relation to the specific Dasein using it. Conversely, Dasein is a relation to the ready-to-hand in that instance. When we are cooking, for example, the sense of a distinct self and distinct objects recedes. Instead, we have an emerging unity between self and world, constituted by our absorption in the task. This equates to what Heidegger calls “the public world” (100). The ready-to-hand is not merely related to the specific equipment of its task; it is also ontologically connected, albeit in a more indistinct way, to the broader world that provides the context for the task taking place. For instance, the activity of producing a tire makes sense only in a world where there are cars, roads, and a need for fast transportation. The activity of tire-making must implicitly exist as a relation to all of this.

The challenge to the ontology of presence in Chapter 3 does not end there. In the manner that the ready-to-hand is explicitly revealed, important indications about the nature of non-being are also given. In the breakdown of equipment, which discloses the otherwise inconspicuous relations of the ready-to-hand, important departures from “present” ways of thinking are found. This is a question of what is disclosed, for on initial appearances it seems that Heidegger has a problem. If equipment as a set of relations exists in our absorbed use of it, then the very interruption making this explicit seems to destroy its character as equipment. In other words, Heidegger appears to be caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, we can have an awareness of the ready-to-hand as relational, but this must remain implicit. On the other hand, there is a break in the task, which makes the “equipment” explicit but as now out of joint with the fluid relations that defined it. It is then made explicitly available to understanding, but it is so now only as a set of present-at-hand objects.

Closer inspection, though, reveals that something more subtle is going on. As Heidegger says about the ready-to-hand, when it breaks down, “It does not vanish simply, but takes its farewell, as it were, in the conspicuousness of the unusable” (104). What this means is that it is in fact possible to explicitly grasp equipment after our absorption in it has ended, but what we apprehend is not the re-emergence of the present-at-hand. Nor is there a present-at-hand awareness of equipment. This would amount to an “observing” of a set of equipment relations as if it were a distinct object. Rather, what we apprehend is the disappearance of something. We apprehend the set of equipment relations precisely in its vanishing. That is, we grasp it in and through its sudden absence in relation to ourselves. It is like, by way of analogy, the apprehension of a friend’s death. This is not accomplished by viewing a present-at-hand corpse, nor by looking at photographs or reminiscing. Instead, their death, and their relation to you, is revealed by noticing a bench on which they used to sit. They are revealed precisely through and as their absence from that which used to indicate them.