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đź“™ Being-In-The-World

Author: Hubert L. Dreyfus

Full Title: Being-In-The-World

Highlights from September 7th, 2020.

Heidegger claims that the tradition has misdescribed and misinterpreted human being. Therefore, as a first step in his project he attempts to work out a fresh analysis of what it is to be human.
The traditional misunderstanding of human being starts with Plato's fascination with theory.
Basically he seeks to show that one cannot have a theory of what…
Heidegger followed Wilhelm Dilthey in generalizing hermeneutics from a method for the study of sacred texts to a way of studying all human activities. Indeed, Heidegger introduced the hermeneutic method into modern philosophy through his elaboration of the necessity of interpretation in the study of…
Heidegger countered that there wasa more basic form of Intentionality than that of a self-sufficient individual subject directed at the world by means of its mental content. At the foundation of Heidegger's new approach is a phenomenology of "…
Heidegger shows that this subject/object epistemology presupposes a background of everyday practices into which we are socialized but…
Heidegger questions both the possibility and the desirability of making our everyday understanding totally explicit. He introduces the idea that the shared everyday skills, discriminations, and practices into which we are socialized provide the conditions necessary for people to pick out objects, to understand themselves as subjects, and, generally, to make sense of the world and of…
As Heidegger says in a later work, "Every decision ... bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else…
Heidegger calls this nonexplicitable background that enables us to make sense of things "the…
Heidegger questions the view that experience is always and most basically a relation between a self-contained subject with mental content (the Inner) and an independent object (the outer). Heidegger does not deny that we sometimes experience ourselves as conscious subjects relating to objects by way of intentional states such as desires, beliefs, perceptions, intentions, etc., but he thinks of this as a derivative and intermittent condition…
From Plato's theoretical dialectic, which turns the mind away from the everyday world of "shadows," to Descartes's preparation for philosophy by shutting himself up in a warm room where he is free from involvement and passion, to Hume's strange analytical discoveries in his study, which he forgets when he goes out to play billiards, philosophers have supposed that only by withdrawing from…
Heidegger, along with his fellow student Georg Lukacs, quite likely was exposed to American…
In his emphasis on the social context as the ultimate foundation of Intelligibility, Heidegger is similar to that other twentieth-century critic of the philosophical tradition, Ludwig Wittgenstein. They share the view that most philosophical problems…
The best way to understand what Heidegger means by Dasein is to think of our term "human being," which can refer to a way of being that is characteristic of all people or to a specific person-a human being.
The way to do justice to the fact that Dasein is Heidegger's name for us and yet avoid the centrality of human individuals is to see that what is to be studied in Being and Time ultimately is not Dasein but Dasein's way of being.
Human beings, it will turn out, are special kinds of beings in that their way of being embodies an understanding of what it is to be.
Heidegger calls this self-interpreting way of being existence.
For Heidegger, existence does not mean simply to be real. Stones and even God do not exist in his sense of the term. Only self-interpreting beings exist.
Cultures as well as human beings exist; their practices contain an interpretation of what it means to be a culture.
"Language is not identical with the sum total of all the words printed in a dictionary; instead ... language is as Dasein is ... it exists"
A great deal of cultural learning has taken place by three to four months of age ... babies have learned by this time to be Japanese and American babies.'
In sum, the practices containing an interpretation of what it is to be a Person, an object, and a society fit together. They are all aspects of what Heidegger calls an understanding of being.
Such an understanding is contained in our knowing-how-to-cope in various domains rather than in a set of beliefs that such and such is the case. Thus we embody an understanding of being that no one has in mind. We have an Ontology without knowing it.
Distance-standing practices are simply something that we do. Of course, learning to do it changes our brain, but there is no evidence and no argument that rules or principles or beliefs are involved. Moreover, this is not an isolated practice; how close one stands goes with an understanding of bodies, intimacy, sociality, and finally reflects an understanding of what it is to be a human being.
Our most pervasive interpretation of being masculine and feminine, for example, is in our bodies, our perceptions, our language, and generally in our skills for dealing with the same and the oppositesex. We can to some extent light up that understanding, that is, point it out to those who share it, but we cannot spell it out, that is, make it understandable even to those who do not share it. Moreover, what we can get clear about is only what is least pervasive and embodied.
These practices do not arise from beliefs, rules, or principles, and so there is nothing to make explicit or spell out. We can only give an interpretation of the interpretation already in the practices.
To sum up, an explication of our understanding of being can never be complete because we dwell in it-that is, it is so pervasive as to be both nearest to us and farthest away-and also…
Heidegger may well be the first philosopher to have had a critical sense of the inevitability of unknowable limitations on his own enterprise-the first…
It makes no sense to ask whether we are essentially rational animals, creatures of God, organisms with built-in needs, sexual beings, or complex computers. Human beings can interpret themselves in any of these ways and many more, and they can, in varying degrees, become any of these things, but to be human is not to…
In Heidegger's terminology, we can say that Homo sapiens can be characterized by factuality (e.g., male or female), like any object, but that, because human beings "exist," have Dasein in them, they must be understood in their facticity as…
Being essentially self-interpreting, Dasein has no Nature. Yet Dasein always understands itself as having some specific essential Nature. It grounds its actions in its understanding of human Nature, and feels at home in belonging to a certain nation or a certain race. Thus Dasein's everyday preontological…
Understanding itself thus as an object with a fixed essence covers up Dasein's unsettledness and calms the anxiety occasioned by recognizing that Dasein is interpretation all the way down. Dasein's tendency to cover up its own preontological understanding accounts for the traditional misinterpretations of Dasein as some sort of object with a fixed nature. Heidegger calls this motivated…
Heidegger says that Dasein always belongs to someone.…
For Heidegger, Dasein's mineness is the public stand it takes on itself-on what it is to be this Dasein-…
The owned mode, the third way of relating to ones own existence, is the subject of much of Division II of Being and Time. (See Appendix.)In this mode Dasein finally achieves individuality by realizing it can never find meaning by identifying with a role. Dasein then "chooses" the social possibilities available to it in such away as to manifest in…
"The question of being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-being which belongs toDasein itself"
Heidegger, in investigating the question of being, in seeking to understand the understanding of our practices, sees himself as doing thematically what every human being does unawares all the time.
According to Heidegger, the world and Dasein's absorption in it, the subject of Division I, are so obvious as to be unnoticed in the course of our everyday activity; Dasein's way of being, however, is so unsettling that, just because it is constantly sensed, it is constantly covered up. This unsettling way of being and its disguises are the subject of the first half of Division II.
Hermeneutic phenomenology, then, is an interpretation of human beings as essentially self-interpreting, thereby showing that interpretation is the proper method for studying human beings.
In general, the so-called hermeneutic circle refers to the fact that in interpreting a text one must move back and forth between an overall interpretation and the details that a given reading lets stand out as significant. Since the new details can modify the overall interpretation, which can in turn reveal new details as significant, the circle is supposed to lead to a richer and richer understanding of the text.
Dasein's kind of being thus demands that any ontological Interpretation which sets itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality, should capture the being of this entity, in spite of this entity's own tendency to cover things up. Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violencewhether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquilized obviousness.
Not only is human being interpretation all the way down, so that our practices can never be grounded in human nature, God's will, or the structure of rationality, but this condition is one of such radical rootlessness that everyone feels fundamentally unsettled (unheimlich), that is, senses that human beings can never be at Home in the world. This, according to Heidegger, is why we plunge into trying to make ourselves at home and secure.
The peculiar `neutrality' of the term `Dasein' is essential, because the interpretation of this being must be carried out prior to every factual concretion"
When someone calls our attention to the fact that "in" also has an existential sense which expresses involvement, as in being in love, being in business, or being in the theater, we tend to think of this as a metaphorical derivation from physical inclusion. This is just what one would expect if Heidegger is right that Dasein always (mis) interprets itself in terms of the objects with which it deals.
Heidegger notes that, strictly speaking, objects cannot touch each other because they cannot encounter each other.
Dwelling is Dasein's basic way of being-in-the-world. The relation between me and what I inhabit cannot be understood on the model of the relation between subject and object.
Heidegger holds that human experience (Erfahrung) discloses the world and discovers entities in it-and yet this does not entail the traditional conclusion thathuman beings relate to objects by means of their experiences (Erlebnisse), that is, byway of mental states. This view defies common sense and a long philosophical tradition.
Rather than first perceiving perspectives, then synthesizing the perspectives into objects, and finally assigning these objects a function on the basis of theirphysical properties, we ordinarily manipulate tools that already have a meaning in a world that is organized in terms of purposes.
An extreme version of the attitude Heidegger is opposing appears in Sartre's novel Nausea, where the main character, Roquentin, succumbs to traditional "disinterestedness" to the point of psychosis.
For Heidegger, unlike Descartes, Husserl, and Sartre, the object of mere staring, instead of being that which really is, is an impoverished residue of the equipment we directly manipulate. The bare objects of pure disinterested perception are not basic things we can subsequently use, but the debris of our everyday practical world left over when we inhibit action.
Heidegger does not want to make practical activity primary; he wants to show (pace Husserl) that neither practical activity nor contemplative knowing can be understood as a relation between a self-sufficient Mind and an independent world.
Everything, then, turns on Heidegger's critique of Husserl's theory of Intentionality. As Heidegger says:Here again we have a term and concept taken so much for granted that no one lingers with it for long and, even in a preparatory stage, assumes it is the solution to the problem, as if it were surely the key to all doors. On the contrary, we should make what is itself meant by the term into the problem. (MFL, 132)
The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences merely Inside its own sphere and is ... encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are.
In whatever waywe conceive of knowing, it is... a comportment toward beings. ... But all practical-technical commerce with beings is also a comportment toward beings.... In all comportment toward beings-whether itis specifically cognitive, which is most frequently called theoretical, or whether it is practical-technical-an understanding of being is already involved. For a being can be encountered by us as a being only in the light of the understanding of being.
Being and Time seeks to show that much of everyday activity, of the human way of being, can be described without recourse to deliberate, self-referential consciousness, and to show how such everyday activity can disclose the world and discover things in it withoutcontaining any explicit or implicit experience of the separation of the mental from the world of bodies and things.
Heidegger proposes to demonstrate that the situated use of equipment is in some sense prior to just looking at things and that what is revealed by use is ontologically more fundamental than the substances with determinate, context-free properties revealed by detached contemplation.
Equipment-in accordance with its equipmentality-always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: inkstand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room.
The specific thisness of a piece of equipment, its individuation ... is not determined primarily by space and time in the sense that it appears in a determinate space-and-time position. Instead, what determines a piece of equipment as an individual is its equipmental character and equipmental nexus.
Where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the "in-order-to" which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is-as equipment.
The peculiarity of what is primarily available is that, in its availableness, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be available quite authentically.
Since equipment is in no way derivative, and since involvement is as genuine a mode of access as theory, we can say that equipment in use is equipment as it is in itself.
Self and world belong together in the single entity, Dasein. Self and world are not two entities, like subject and object ... but self and world are the basic determination of Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.
"Dasein ... is nothing but ... concerned absorption in the world."
The above description of the skilled use of Equipment enables Heidegger to introduce both a new kind of Intentionality (absorbed coping) which is not that of a Mind with content directed toward objects, and a new sort of entity encountered (transparent Equipment) which is not a determinate, isolable substance.
Being-in-the-world, according to our interpretation hitherto, amounts to a nonthematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the availableness of an equipmental whole. Any concern is already as it is, because of some familiarity with the world. In this familiarity Dasein can lose itself in what it encounters within the world. ... The occurrentness of beings is thrust to the fore by the possible breaks in that referential whole in which circumspection "operates". .. (107, my italics) [76]
Although he concentrates on the special case of breakdown, Heidegger's basic point should be that mental content arises whenever the situation requires deliberate attention.
The switch to deliberation is evoked by any situation in which absorbed coping is no longer possible-any situation that, as Heidegger puts it, requires "a more precise kind of circumspection, such as `inspecting,' checking up on what has been attained, [etc.]"
Whensomething goes wrong with my hammer, for example, I am forced to attend to the hammer and the hammering.
Heidegger claims that when things are functioning smoothly, "the assignments themselves are not observed; they are rather `there' and we concernfully submit ourselves to them. But when an assignment has been disturbed-when something is unusable for some purpose-then the assignment becomes explicit"
When there is a serious disturbance and even deliberate activity is blocked, Dasein is forced into still another stance, deliberation. This involves reflective planning.
The scheme peculiar to [deliberating] is the "if-then"; if this or that, for instance, is to be produced, put to use, or averted, then some ways and means, circumstances, or opportunities will be needed.
Heidegger does not, however, want to deny that when skillful coping reaches its limit and requires deliberate attention, a subject conscious of objects emerges; he wants, rather, to describe this subject accurately, and interpret it anew.
Holding back from the use of equipment is so far from sheer `theory' that the kind of circumspection which tarries and "considers" remains wholly in the grip of the available equipment with which one is concerned.
These ceteris paribus conditions never capture, but rather presuppose, our shared background practices. These practices are an aspect of our everyday transparent ways of coping. Thus, understanding is not in our minds, but in Dasein-in the skillful wayswe are accustomed to comport ourselves.
If, then, philosophical investigation from the beginning of antiquity ... oriented itself toward reason, soul, mind, spirit, consciousness, self-consciousness, subjectivity, this is not an accident.... The trend toward the "subject"-not always uniformly unequivocal and clear-is based onthe fact that philosophical inquiry somehow understood that the basis for every substantial philosophical problem could and had to be procured from an adequate elucidation of the "subject."
Just as temporary breakdown reveals something like what the tradition has thought of as a "subject," it also reveals something like an "object," and just as the "subject" revealed is not the isolable, self-sufficient mind the tradition assumed, but is involved in the world, so the "object" revealed is not an isolable, self-sufficient, substance, but is defined by its failure to be available.
There are one-place predicates, like heavy, and relational predicates, like heavier than, but no set of fixed logical relations captures situational characteristics like "too heavy for this job." Indeed, although we spend a great deal of our lives dealing with things in terms of the characteristics they reveal when there is a disturbance, there is no philosophical term for these characteristics.
When in the course of existential ontological analysis we ask how theoretical discovery "arises" out of circumspective concern.... we are asking which of those conditions implied in Dasein's being make-up are existentially necessary for the possibility of Dasein's existing in the way of scientific research. This formulation of the question is aimed at an existential conception of science.
It is important to note Heidegger's derivation of the theoretical attitude and the scientific entities and relationships it reveals, because it is often mistakenly said that he has no account of theoretical knowledge. In fact, Heidegger provides a sophisticated account of science which, like Kuhn's, emphasizes the role of scientific skills and theory in producing data, but, unlike Kuhn's, still leaves room for scientific realism.
Indeed, Heidegger would probably claim that his hermeneutics is a special form of involved deliberate attention-an authentic response to anxiety, a special form of disturbance.
Thus the work on expert systems supports Heidegger's claim that the facts and rules "discovered" in the detached attitude do not capture the skills manifest in circumspective coping.
The description of theworld as having a distinctive structure of its own that makes possible and calls forth Dasein's ontic comportment is the most important and original contribution of Being and Time.
There is no such thing as my world, if this is taken as some private sphere of experience and meaning, which is self-sufficient and intelligible in itself, and so more fundamental…
The world as already unveiled in advance is such that we do not in fact specifically occupy ourselves with it, or apprehend it, but instead it is so self-evident, so much a matter of…
The concept of world, or the phenomenon thus designated, is what has hitherto not yet been…
The best we can do is point out to those who dwell in the world with us certain prominent structural…
An involvement is itself discovered only on the basis of the prior discovery of an involvement-whole. So in any involvement that has been discovered . . . , the "worldly character"…
According to Heidegger, to explain everyday transparent coping we do not need to introduce a mental representation of a goal at all. Activity can be…
In general, it is possible to be without any representation of a near- or long-term goal of one's activity. Indeed, at times one is actually surprised when the task is accomplished, as when one's…
Many instances of apparently complex problem solving which seem to implement a long-range strategy, as, for example, making a move in chess, may be best understood as…
The "for-the-sake-of" always pertains to the being of Dasein, for which, in its being, that very…
A for-the-sake-of-which, like beinga father or beinga professor, is not to be thought of as a goal I have in mind and can achieve. Indeed, it is not a goal at all, but rather a…
Only at the occurrent level, however, does one observe, from outside (so to speak), roles. These are context-free features of people's lives corresponding to function predicates describing objective features of equipment, and just as function predicates, as we shall soon see, cannot capture the holistic character of equipment, role predicates cannot capture what one simply knows how to do…
Human organisms do not have Dasein in them until they are socialized. Dasein needs "for-the-sake-of-whichs" and the whole involvement structure in order to take a stand on itself, i.e., in order to be itself. That is why Heidegger saysDasein has always already…
The upshot of that analysis was that the referential whole of significance (which as such is constitutive for worldliness) has been "tied up" with a "for-the-sake-of-which. "The fact that this referential whole of the manifold relations of the "in-order-to" has been bound up with that which is an issue for Dasein, does not signify that a "world" of objects which is occurrent has been welded together with a subject. It is rather the phenomenal expression of the fact that the basic makeup of Dasein ... is primordially a whole.
Dasein itself, ultimately the beings which we call men, are possible in their being only because there is a world.... Dasein exhibits itself as a beingwhich is in its world but at the same time is by virtue of the world in which it is.
The world, i.e., the interlocking practices, Equipment, and skills for using them, which provides the basis for using specific items of Equipment, is hidden. It is not disguised, but it is undiscovered. So, like the available, the world has to be revealed by a special tech- nique. Since we ineluctably dwell in the world, we can get at the world only by shifting our attention to it while at the same time staying involved in it.
A sign is something ontically available, which functions both as this definite equipment and as something indicative of the ontological structure of availableness, of referential wholes, and of worldliness.
A sign is not a thing which stands to another thing in the relationship of indicating; it is rather an item of equipment which explicitly raises an equipmental whole into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly character of the available announces itself.
[The environment] is itself inaccessible to circumspection, so far as circumspection is always directed towards entities; but in each case it has already been disclosed for circumspection. "Disclose"and "disclosedness" will be used as technical terms in the passages that follow, and shall signify "to lay open" and "the character of having been laid open."
My encounter with the room is not such that I first take in one thing after another and put together a manifold of things in order then to see a room. Rather, I primarily see a referential whole ... from which the individual piece of furniture and what is in the room stand out. Such an environment of the nature of a closed referential whole is at the same time distinguished by a specific familiarity.
Notice first that Heidegger is rejecting the Kantian idea that in order to see the whole room I have to synthesize a "manifold" of things, perspectives, sense data, or whatever.
Being-in-the-world... amounts to a non thematic circumspective absorption in the references or assignments that make up the availableness of an equipmental whole.
Any specific activity of coping takes place on the background of more general coping.
This familiarity with the world ... goes to make up Dasein's understanding of being.
Now that we have described the world, rather than passing it over as the tradition has done, what implications do our results have for how we deal with traditional philosophical questions?
In Being and Time Heidegger subscribes to the instrumental understanding of nature: "The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind `in the sails"' (100) [70]. Later he criticizes this stance for treating nature as "a gigantic filling station."2
Scientific observation can thus reveal a universe unrelated to human for-the-sake-of-whichs. This is the nature whose causal powers underlie equipment and even Dasein itself insofar as it has a body.
The work-world bears within itself references to an entitywhich in the end makes it clear that it-the work-world, what is of concern-is not the primary entity after all. Precisely when we are led from an analysis of the work-world, in following its references to the world of nature, finally to recognize and to define the world of nature as the fundamental stratum of the real, we see that it is not ... care which is the primary worldly presence, but rather the reality of nature.
Even if [traditional] Ontology should itself succeed in explicating the being of Nature in the very purest manner, in conformity with the basic assertions about this entity which the mathematical natural sciences provide, it will never reach the phenomenon that is the "world."*
Nature by itself obviously cannot explain significance. Therefore, to account for the Equipmental whole in terms of occurrent elements, traditional Ontology, as developed by Descartes and still found in Husserlian phenomenology, information processing psychology, and Artificial Intelligence research, must supplement the bare things in Nature that serve in the explanations provided by natural science, with function or value predicates.'
Heidegger criticizes this position by claiming that there is no reason to think that one can arrive at an understanding of the available by adding together occurrent function predicates.
Heidegger could spell out his implausibility claim in two ways. First, there is the argument from holism. Just adding to the representation of a table the fact that it is to eat at or sit at barely scratches the surface of its involvement with other equipment and for-the-sake-of-whichs that define what it is to be a table. Such function predicates would not be sufficient to enable a person from traditional Japan to…
Second, there is a related argument from skills. Computers programmed as physical symbol systems, that is, using rules and features, do not have skills; they do not come into a situation with a readiness to deal with what normally shows up in that sort of situation. Such a computer can only process occurrent elements. So when we program it, we must feed it the…
Since our familiarity does not consist in a vast body of rules and facts, but rather consists of dispositions to respond to situations in appropriate ways, there is no body ofcommonsense knowledge to…
Both arguments implied in Being and Time can be put in the form of a dilemma. Facts and rules are, by themselves, meaningless. To capture what Heidegger calls significance or involvement, they must be assigned relevance. But the pred Cates that must be added to define relevance are just more meaningless facts; and paradoxically, the more facts the…
To use Heidegger's favorite example, to understand a hammer a computer should not follow out all pointers in the data-base to nails, walls, houses, people, wood, iron, doorbells, strength-testing machines in circuses, murder instruments, etc. It should access only facts possibly relevant in the current context. But how could the programmer define the current situation for a detached theoretical subject like a cognitivist mind or a digital computer? Since a computer is not in a situation, the Al researcher would…
Winograd saw that "the problem is to find a formal way of talking about ... current attention focus and goals."8 His "solution" was to limit the time that the computer could use to search the…
As Heidegger's analysis would lead one to expect, Winograd's solution to the relevance problem did not work out. Winograd now recognizes "the difficulty of formalizing the commonsense background that determines which scripts, goals and strategies are relevant and how they interact." He has subsequently abandoned the search-limitation approach and…
Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus Al research has called…
The phenomenological account of how scientific facts are arrived at by leaving out significance shows why, once we have stripped away all meaningful context to get the elements of theory, theory cannot give back meaning. Science cannot reconstruct what has been left out in arriving at theory; it cannot explain significance.
As we have seen, no combination of properties can be used to pick out a chair-not even if we add thepredicate "for sitting on." But once we have picked out a chair, we can discover that it is made of wood or steel, etc. and that these natural kinds and their causal powers make possible the functioning of the chair.
Traditional Ontology has always sought to understand the everyday world by finding something on the level of the occurrent, such as substance, sense data, or representations in transcendental consciousness, that is supposed to be Intelligible without reference to anything else, and then sought to show how everything else can be seen to be Intelligible because it is built up out of these self-sufficient elements.
The world is what we directly understand and in terms of which one can see how Nature, Equipment, Persons, etc. fit together and make sense. Thus worldliness and Dasein's correlative understanding of being are the proper themes for Ontology.
We understand a phenomenon when we see how it fits in with other phenomena. Since one cannot make availableness intelligible on the basis of some combination of occurrent elements, one must turn the question around and seek to account for occurrentness by showing that the occurrent is revealed by selectively leaving out the situational aspects of the unavailable.
Dasein not only needs to be absorbed in using objects to take a stand on itself but also interprets itself as having a fixed and self sufficient nature like the occurrent in order to hide "the inessentiality of the self" (MFL, 140), and this in turn gives rise to an ontology based on the occurrent. Thus in Division II of Part One, traditional ontology will be criticized as part of a systematic cover-up motivated by Dasein's intrinsic inability to face the truth about itself.
We have seen that traditional Ontology in its modern form begins when Descartes takes bits of objective space (res extensa) as the elements in terms of which to explain everything in the world. Heidegger now turns explicitly to showing the limits of this Ontology and also to giving it its legitimate place.
each tool has a specific place in a workshop. Here again the whole determines what counts as the parts. The workshop as a region makes possible places for the saw, the lathe, the work bench, etc.
Something like a region must first be discovered if there is to be any possibility of allotting or coming across places for an equipmental whole that is circumspectively at one's disposal.
The regional orientation of the multiplicity of places belonging to the available goes to make up the aroundness-the "round-about-us"-of those entities which we encounter as closest environmentally.... The "above" is what is "on the ceiling"; the "below" is what is "on the floor"; the "behind" is what is "at the door"; all "wheres" are discovered and circumspectively interpreted as wego ourways in everyday dealings.
We must distinguish dis-stance from distance. Dis-stance has no degrees, but makes it possible to encounter degrees of nearness and remoteness, accessibility and inaccessibility. Once an object has been brought into the referential nexus, dis-stanced, it can be more or less available, i.e., more or less distant from particular individuals, more or less integrated into each individual's activities.
"Dis-stancing" amounts to making the farness vanish-that is, making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it near. Dasein is essentially dis-stancial: it lets any being be encountered nearby as the being which it is.
If Dasein, in its concern, brings something nearby, this does not signify that it fixes something at a spatial position with a minimal distance from some point of the body.... Bringing-near is not oriented towards the I-thing encumbered with a body, but towards concernful being-in-the-world.
One feels the touch of [the street] at every step as one walks; it is seemingly the nearest and realest of all that is available, and it slides itself, as it were, along certain portions of one's body-the soles of one's feet. And yet it is farther remote than the acquaintance whom one encounters .on the street" at a "remoteness" of twenty paces when one is taking such a walk.

Highlights from December 15th, 2020.

Another example that brings out the anticognitivism implicit in Heidegger's view even more strikingly is our distance-standing practices.
These practices are not taught by the parents. They do not know that there is any Pattern to what they are doing, or even that they are doing anything.
Heidegger's uses the term "the for-the-sake-of-which" to call attention to the way human activity makes long-term sense, thus…
When I am successfully coping, my activity can be seen to have a point, but I need not have any goal, let alone a long-range life plan as AI…
for-the-sake-of-whichs need not be intentional at all. I pick up my most basic life-organizing self-interpretations by…
Each such "role" is an integrated set of practices: one might say "a practice," as in…