On The Margins

Sunday March 13, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Heidegger's Hammer, the Handy and the Revolution to Come

In Being and Time (section 15, "The Being of Entities Encountered in the Environment," under the Analysis of Environmentality and Worldhood in General), Martin Heidegger says something quite simple about that simplest of tools, the hammer:

[The] less we 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 … If we look at Things just 'theoretically', we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thing character …

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that cricumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in order to be ready-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work—that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered.

Now, there are quite a few technical words here. To understand them, fully, we need to read one of the introductory books on Heidegger, such as the ones by Hubert Dreyfus or Richard Polt. Ideally, we need to know enough of the language of Being and Time to comprehend it. (So, sitting in lectures by Polt and Dreyfus may be a start.)

Nevertheless, I think the passage I've selected here is relatively self-contained for the purposes I have. Not just philosophers or carpenters but any programmer or office worker today should be able to relate to it.

Just think of your favorite office or programming environment (my favorite examples of programming tools would be the simple ones like emacs or vi) and think about how you interact with it. When you can use it competently, it recedes in its theoretical aspects (what it is made of, how it looks, how it works, etc.) and becomes part of the referential totality of the work environment, enmeshed in the purporse and meaning that helps us make sense of it and of our involvement with it.

Now, the same referential totality that applies so naturally to a hammer (for a carpenter) or vi (for a skilled programmer) or a glove (for someone who wants to use it to keep warm, not Dr. P. case of the neurologist Oliver Sacks) begins to also apply to the mobile phone, or as people like to call it in Germany, the handy.

The interesting thing is that the handy has not even begun to become the "equipment" it can become in the referential totality of our mobile lives. The problem is that most infrastructure for it to become even more effective is lacking. It is "equipment" mostly for allowing us to communicate with others in voice. Its utility in our other interactions with the world that surrounds us has not even been fully disclosed or released into our environment. So, we are yet to see the real revolution that it can bring in helping us better scaffold our surrounding, just like hammers have helped us do for thousands of years.

Heidegger, Philosophy, Handy, Technology, Mobile, Environment.

2005-03-13 22:49:26.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.