The bike with which I go to school. While cycling, completely absorbed in my own thoughts, I don't consciously perceive it anymore. It becomes invisible and an extension of myself.
A paintbrush in the hand of an artist used to create the perfect stroke through its feel of the canvas and, if not perfect, over an over until it is. The eye controls both the touch and feel of the brush. The artist touches the form and feels the color at the same time.
You would have to have a status /class of beings that are "potentially ready-to-hand" in the sense that they have a well understood place in the overall culture at large. Even if the hammer is in a dark cupboard --but this is kind of peripheral.
Around 1:14:00 At the end of the lecture: hammers I think always have the potentiality to be ready at hand in our home when they are unconcealed. In epistemological terms the conceptual hammer on the table is ready at hand, but ontologically even without sight, or if it was stolen without our notice, it is ready to hand. Its hammerness is hammery and ready. When it escapes our notice entirely is when it withdraws from our Being-in-the-world. Presence-in-the-world and ready-to-hand are modes of being, and I think ready TO hand feels appropriate, it's not ready AT hand. The recognition of a substance as a tool ("Ah shit, need my mop") is the important part - or more accurately, our activity of using tools is important. Maybe a hammer joins my collection of tools, and my hammer doesn't merely become classified as a tool. The difference being structural: I think it that we go after activities with tools. We can recognize them as present but they are also ready, our goal in seeking them was for their readiness. My description leaves a structural place (like how Kant's transcendental object is for objects?) for object usage, which I think includes the body, for tools at all times. Trying to ascribe permanent "a tool is ready at hand" definition seems to beget the definition of "tool" and whether it always is a tool or always exists or subsists or w/e. It is very Heideggerian to describe the active "how" but not describe their passitivity, I feel. Perhaps a failure in this is being so objective driven... We see things ready-at-hand as part of a process, whether we are using them immediately or even just seeing them while passing by. Substances have being, but only ontologically as part of our Being, as part of Dasein's Being-in-the-world with tools and such. Therefore tools don't die when uninspected, and they don't necessarily withdraw when all of our senses show no indication of their presence. I'm thinking out loud, but if anything, the tool exists as an extension of ourselves, and we take our body for granted as always being there. When we find the tool we are searching for, it was always ready-to-hand, but now we found it and we recognize it as a tool that indicates it is literally ready at hand. Possibly as much a part of us as the body. The physical existence and muscle-memory-idealisticness are not separated ontologically, I think. Maybe I am going too far into introspective thought and have left the realm of Heidegger's being and time with this, but I feel like if the statement that we recognize a thing as X more than see that a thing is X is true, it should logically flow that finding a tool is like a unification of being, my body has lost a limb I have now found and have reattached, and I am ready. Maybe this is too close to dualism, maybe it's an accurate depiction of presence-at-hand. I could be entirely wrong here, I am a novice. Either way I am now very intrigued with what Merleau-Ponty had to say.
The hammer in the desk question/debate is kinda puzzling. Hammers in a drawer are no different than a car in my garage. If I'm not going for it, it's ready to hand at some point. The system is an archetype, permanence seems unimportant. I could see why someone would be interested in exactly when it becomes ready to hand but I don't know if that is precisely knowable. I'll have to read back on equipment before I comment much on whether a tree is equipment but I feel like it is. Is everything ready to hand equipment? Dreyfus seems to not think so. I don't know.
From my own thoughts, equipment is used on things that might become equipment the moment I combine them. It seems like the point was to open the discussion for more compounded activity - building a toolshop to store your tools and build more hammers. From what Dreyfus said while I was typing this, equipment's point isn't just for certain desires but for the compounded stuff I described, so then how is a fork equipment? I might disagree, just on how he presents it
This was a wasted lecture because of so many stupid questions. A hammer in a drawer is not a question because it is trying to grasp Heidegger objectively precisely when his point is the opposite: things and beings can be understood only against a background, only as part of a totality of beings which make sense only in relation to one another. What is a hammer in a drawer, is it in a culture which has no use for hammers or is it in a drawer in the evening after the workshop has been closed only to be picked up again in the morning for another day of hammering? You need to have a context for your questions. What is a cat on a spaceship, is it still a cat? My god...
Thank you so much for having this. Really helps with getting through the text.
The bike with which I go to school. While cycling, completely absorbed in my own thoughts, I don't consciously perceive it anymore. It becomes invisible and an extension of myself.
A paintbrush in the hand of an artist used to create the perfect stroke through its feel of the canvas and, if not perfect, over an over until it is. The eye controls both the touch and feel of the brush. The artist touches the form and feels the color at the same time.
55:50 crucial line … more absorbed
1:13:11 present at hand : isolated substance with properties
1:13:51 unready to hand … circumspection of dealings
1:19:02 zuhanden: no ready… it means “to hand”
You would have to have a status /class of beings that are "potentially ready-to-hand" in the sense that they have a well understood place in the overall culture at large. Even if the hammer is in a dark cupboard --but this is kind of peripheral.
Around 1:14:00 At the end of the lecture: hammers I think always have the potentiality to be ready at hand in our home when they are unconcealed. In epistemological terms the conceptual hammer on the table is ready at hand, but ontologically even without sight, or if it was stolen without our notice, it is ready to hand. Its hammerness is hammery and ready. When it escapes our notice entirely is when it withdraws from our Being-in-the-world. Presence-in-the-world and ready-to-hand are modes of being, and I think ready TO hand feels appropriate, it's not ready AT hand. The recognition of a substance as a tool ("Ah shit, need my mop") is the important part - or more accurately, our activity of using tools is important. Maybe a hammer joins my collection of tools, and my hammer doesn't merely become classified as a tool.
The difference being structural: I think it that we go after activities with tools. We can recognize them as present but they are also ready, our goal in seeking them was for their readiness. My description leaves a structural place (like how Kant's transcendental object is for objects?) for object usage, which I think includes the body, for tools at all times. Trying to ascribe permanent "a tool is ready at hand" definition seems to beget the definition of "tool" and whether it always is a tool or always exists or subsists or w/e. It is very Heideggerian to describe the active "how" but not describe their passitivity, I feel.
Perhaps a failure in this is being so objective driven... We see things ready-at-hand as part of a process, whether we are using them immediately or even just seeing them while passing by. Substances have being, but only ontologically as part of our Being, as part of Dasein's Being-in-the-world with tools and such. Therefore tools don't die when uninspected, and they don't necessarily withdraw when all of our senses show no indication of their presence.
I'm thinking out loud, but if anything, the tool exists as an extension of ourselves, and we take our body for granted as always being there. When we find the tool we are searching for, it was always ready-to-hand, but now we found it and we recognize it as a tool that indicates it is literally ready at hand. Possibly as much a part of us as the body. The physical existence and muscle-memory-idealisticness are not separated ontologically, I think. Maybe I am going too far into introspective thought and have left the realm of Heidegger's being and time with this, but I feel like if the statement that we recognize a thing as X more than see that a thing is X is true, it should logically flow that finding a tool is like a unification of being, my body has lost a limb I have now found and have reattached, and I am ready. Maybe this is too close to dualism, maybe it's an accurate depiction of presence-at-hand.
I could be entirely wrong here, I am a novice. Either way I am now very intrigued with what Merleau-Ponty had to say.
52:13 p. 97 reference ( ) and assignment ( bearing )
The hammer in the desk question/debate is kinda puzzling. Hammers in a drawer are no different than a car in my garage. If I'm not going for it, it's ready to hand at some point. The system is an archetype, permanence seems unimportant. I could see why someone would be interested in exactly when it becomes ready to hand but I don't know if that is precisely knowable.
I'll have to read back on equipment before I comment much on whether a tree is equipment but I feel like it is. Is everything ready to hand equipment? Dreyfus seems to not think so. I don't know.
From my own thoughts, equipment is used on things that might become equipment the moment I combine them. It seems like the point was to open the discussion for more compounded activity - building a toolshop to store your tools and build more hammers.
From what Dreyfus said while I was typing this, equipment's point isn't just for certain desires but for the compounded stuff I described, so then how is a fork equipment? I might disagree, just on how he presents it
👌👌👌👌👌
This was a wasted lecture because of so many stupid questions. A hammer in a drawer is not a question because it is trying to grasp Heidegger objectively precisely when his point is the opposite: things and beings can be understood only against a background, only as part of a totality of beings which make sense only in relation to one another. What is a hammer in a drawer, is it in a culture which has no use for hammers or is it in a drawer in the evening after the workshop has been closed only to be picked up again in the morning for another day of hammering? You need to have a context for your questions. What is a cat on a spaceship, is it still a cat? My god...
It is his job as a teacher to try to teach, but it does make for a worse lecture when a student hasn't done their task of learning.
Many of the questions are distracting and irrelevant. Regrettably, professor Dreyfus's fumbling and meandering also do not help.