![]() Dasein is its world.ĭasein is the being whose being is a concern/issue for itself. Heidegger points out that the phenomenology of “dasein” destroys any coherent distinction between self and world. This kind of mineness / being-in / familiarity mostly goes unnoticed and comes to our attention only by its absense - when I go places I am not familiar with and feel the consequent sense of disorientation. If I take my iPad to work in the Borough Gardens I experience the gardens as my local park… not because I legally own the park, but because I am familiar with it. My computer is in my office, but it doesn’t experience the office as “my” office in the way that I do. Heidegger says we experience ourselves as the world in which we are living - we are always already in-the-world, familiar with our world and being that world.īeing-in-the-world is not the relationship of one object being inside another object - rather it is simply familiarity. For most of us, most of the time, we find ourselves out in the world and engaged in activities. You only get to have that kind of experience when you go somewhere unfamiliar. The experience of being ourselves is typically not the “me in-here / external world out-there” conception that the philosophical tradition likes to assume. No, not if we want to genuinely and adequately capture the phenomena of equipment as equipment actually is for us in our day-to-day experience. And this equipmental totality is only significant because it meshes with human activity.Ĭouldn’t we just add function-properties to substances to get equipment. So Heidegger wants us to consider that the being of equipment is an equipmental totality in which all equipment has its place, only by virtue of all other equipment. And none of this would have any kind of significance if you didn’t want to go places. So the first phenomenon to notice about equipment is that it becomes transparent as our compentence increases.Īnother thing to notice is that the clutch pedal is significant only in respect of its role in driving your car, and your car is only useful because there is a road network to drive it on. Now when you drive to the shops and back it is barely something you even notice. When you were first learning how to drive, it was a big deal pushing the clutch down at the right time, and releasing it to engage the gear. Those of us who drive manual geared cars, know that we use the clutch pedal every time we change gear. But you can use just about any piece of equipment that you like. My favourite example to illustrate how equipment occurs in a way that is quite distinct from substances, is the clutch pedal on a manual geared car. In other words, we assume that being is self-sufficient substances, and everything we think is consistent with that. It could just be that everything thinkers think is consistent with this conceptualisation of being. Thinkers don’t necessarily need to think this for Heidegger’s assertion to be valid. What it is to be a being is to be a self-sufficient substance. (2) The properties of substances are themselves thought of as being somehow self-sufficient / self-contained / independent of other properties.Īt least according to Heidegger, the philosophical tradition conceptualises all being as self-sufficient substances expressing self-sufficient properties. A lump of gold could presumably still be what it is, even if the rest of the world was suddenly deleted from the universe. A lump of gold sitting on my desk contains all of its properties and does not depend for anything outside itself to have those properties. Everything that it means to be a given lump of gold is supposedly contained within that lump of gold. Returning to the question of being, the philosophical tradition either says or assumes that to be is to be a substance and two things determine what it is to be a substance: (1) The being of substances is self-sufficient - independent of circumstances, environments and human contexts.
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