Heidegger had a lifelong concern with the nature of working and producing. He manifested this concern in what may be the most famous portion of Being and Time: the analysis of the workshop. Knowing what we do about Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism and its pre-1936 critique of industrialism, we may not be surprised at his focus in the mid-1920s on the nature of handicraft. In addition to suggesting his dissatisfaction with industrial modes of production, Heidegger’s analysis of equipment and the workshop was threefold: (1) to provide a starting place for understanding human existence as being-in-the-world; (2) to reveal the primacy of the equipmental-instrumental understanding of the being of entities as opposed to the objective-scientific understanding; (3) to lay the groundwork necessary for revealing that the unifying “meaning” (Sinn) of the being of entities is grounded in temporality. He prefaced his workshop analysis with the following considerations. To understand being as such, and its relation to time, Heidegger argued, we must choose a particular entity in order to investigate its mode of being. We must choose wisely, so that our analysis of the mode of being of the chosen entity will provide insight applicable to the modes of being of other entities as well. Given that the human entity, Dasein, is the entity characterized by its understanding of its own being and that of other entities, Heidegger concluded, the human entity would be an excellent choice to be the subject of the initial ontological inquiry.
Heidegger used his version of the phenomenological method for his “existential analytic” of human Dasein. He defined phenomenology as ontology: that kind of interpretation which allows an entity to show itself in the way appropriate to that entity itself. Every interpretation involves a fore-conception, a fore-having, and a fore-sight. This “fore-structure” is at work not only in theoretical interpretation but in the interpretation involved in my using a tool. How is it that I can so readily use tools? Because “any interpretation which is to contribute understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted.” [SZ: 152/194] My prior understanding of the being of tools enables me to use them appropriately. Heidegger argued that even if I am in a workshop about whose products or procedures I am wholly ignorant, I nevertheless recognize that it is a workshop. And in every activity in everyday life, I am always engaged in interpreting things. Heidegger expressed this ongoing interpretation as the ‘’as-structure.” I can make use of a doorknob as a doorknob because in advance of my encounter with the particular doorknob I am operating in accordance with the fore-structure that reveals entities as instruments or tools for my purpose. To take a tool as a tool requires that I know that it is a tool. But my everyday understanding or interpretation of entities is non-theoretical, or “pre-ontological.” Heidegger sought to make explicit the ontological structure of this pre-ontological understanding of being.
Adhering to the phenomenological call to return “to the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), he chose to ground his analysis upon a description of what people actually do in everyday life. Thus, he eschewed traditional definitions of humanity, e.g., “rational animal,” which he believed were loaded with unexamined presuppositions, including the idea that theoretical cognition was basic to human life. He did presuppose, however, that practical activity was more basic than theory. In light of this presupposition, he hoped to disclose the basic feature of human existence: “being-in-the-world.” In everyday being-in-the-world, things show themselves as instruments or tools conducive to human needs and purposes.
Consider the cobbler in his shop. He uses tools to make shoes. How is this possible? Because the cobbler understands in advance the equipment and supplies with which he works in terms of the network of relationships and possibilities that constitutes his world. He understands what his tools and his products “are for.” In reaching for his hammer, he has already interpreted it. He understands his hammer as a tool, not just as an object lying around. It is possible for the hammer to be interpreted as a mere thing, to be denuded of its equipmental character so that it appears as an object present-at-hand.
Philosophers have traditionally presumed that entities are really first present-at-hand and can become tools under certain circumstances. Heidegger insisted, however, that this reverses the true situation. The fundamental way in which entities “are” for us is as ready-to-hand. Only by an act of abstraction can Dasein remove itself from its involvement with the activities of everyday life and adopt instead the attitude of a passive spectator or observer, for whom what was once a useful device now becomes a mere “object” with certain properties analyzable by specific scientific procedures, and so on.
Ordinarily, equipment is so ready-to-hand, so “handy,” that we are not explicitly aware of it as such. For example, in hammering away at the sole of a shoe, the cobbler does not notice the hammer. Instead, the tool is in effect transparent as an extension of his hand. And for Heidegger the human hand plays a crucial role in the disclosure of entities. For tools to work right, they must be “invisible,” in the sense that they disappear in favor of the work being done. It is the peculiarity of what is chiefly ready-to-hand that, in order to be authentically ready-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in its readiness-to-hand. That with which the everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the work tools themselves; instead, what is primarily [the object oil concern and thus also ready-to-hand is the work, what is to be produced at the time. [SZ: 69-70/99]
Tools are useful because they are reliable. In their reliability they disappear in favor of the work to be done with them. Tools become visible, paradoxically, precisely when their reliability vanishes: when they are missing, when they don’t work, or when they get in the way. When the cobbler reaches for a tool and cannot find it, when a breakdown of some sort occurs in the work activity, the work world suddenly becomes illuminated in a way that it is not when he is engaged in working. The set of reference relationships that constitute his world becomes revealed precisely because the smooth functioning of the work that is a constitutive element in those relationships is now upset by the missing tool. The cobbler realizes that he cannot finish the shoe on which he is working without the tool; that fortunately the tool itself is sold by a local supplier who purchases it from a manufacturer in a distant city; that the tool is used to make the sole of a shoe; and that the shoe itself is one of a pair on order by a customer, who will use them for walking about.
All the elements in the work world are internally related. There is no such thing as an isolated tool; tools occur within an equipmental-referential context in terms of which a particular thing can reveal itself as a tool. Without this meaningful referential context, this familiar domain in which we have lived from the start, this “world,” tools could not be. As Heidegger notes,
Even the workshop of a handworker whose work is wholly unfamiliar to us is in no way encountered chiefly as a mere conglomeration of things all thrown together, but instead in the closest environmental orientation are shown handworking tools, materials, produced and ready pieces, unready pieces, those found still in the works. Primarily, we experience the world in which the man lives, however foreign, yet still as world, as the disclosed totality of references. [GA20: 255/188]
Tools are always assigned to some purpose or another, and hence are experienced as “in order to” (Um-zu). This relationship of assignments has the character of signifying, and the totality of relationships is called “significance” (Bedeutsamkeit). [SZ: 87/120] Significance, the meaningful totality of reference relationships constituting the world, is grounded in Dasein. Whereas other beings involved in the world are functional and instrumental, Dasein itself is that for the sake of which (Worumwillen) the referential totality operates. Without the world opened up by human existence, beings would not ‘’mean” anything. Hence, the phenomenon of “world” is not to be understood as the totality of natural entities or as the domain of creatures made by God, but instead as the structure of reference relationships constituted by and for human existence, a structure that enables entities to manifest themselves or “to be” in various ways.
Dasein exists in the world in such a way that its own being is an issue for itself. Heidegger said that because Dasein is concerned about itself, other people, and things, the very being of Dasein is “care” (Sorge). In other words, the human way of manifesting itself is to be engaged with things, in making and doing and using, and with others, in speaking and acting and sharing, and with oneself, in deliberating and thinking and choosing. Since an overriding concern in everyday life is maintenance of the social and economic structures necessary for survival, most things manifest themselves to Dasein in instrumental terms, as ready-to-hand for human ends. Some things show up as artifacts which have been produced, but non-artifactual natural things also reveal themselves instrumentally: “Accordingly, in the environment [an] entity becomes accessible which is not in need of producing, but is always already ready-to-hand. Hammer, tongs, and needle in themselves refer to they consist of steel, iron, metal, mineral, wood. In equipment that is used, ‘nature’ is discovered along with it by that use, ‘nature’ in the light of products of nature.” [SZ: 70/100]
By emphasizing the instrumental understanding of entities, Heidegger reversed the traditional priority of theory over practice, of thinking over doing. Although he interpreted human Dasein as the entity who understands entities as entities, then, Heidegger made clear that for him the practical understanding of a person engaged in work is prior to the theoretical understanding of a person looking on in a detached manner. He argued that the detached kind of “seeing” involved in philosophical reflection and scientific theorizing is derivative from the engaged kind of seeing-circumspection (Umsicht)that is involved with everyday practices. Pragmatic behavior, then, cannot be regarded merely as an inferior grade of theoretical knowing. Ever since Plato’s time, the goal of theoretical knowing has been to formalize and to make explicit all aspects of itself. Total self-transparency, however, turns out to be impossible, because human beings are thrown into a world of deeply imbedded, historical practices that can never be made fully explicit. A person begins theoretical inquiry only long after he or she has been involved with non-theoretical everyday practices. In principle, such inquiry comes “too late” to lay bare all the relational factors that constitute Dasein’s being-in-the-world. These relations, moreover, “resist any sort of mathematical functionalization ….” [SZ: 88/122]
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