POST NO BEING: ALPS, AXIOMS & ONTOLOGICAL NAILS

Heidegger Hammers Out Meaning for the Council, One Tree at a Time

An Interdepartmental Memo from the Backward Scholar (B.S.) to the Editor of the COUNCIL-OF-CONCERNED-CONSERVATIONISTS Newsletter

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B.S.:

Boss,

I’ve snagged some footnotes I’m proud of this time—maybe the best work I’ve filed since the “Friedrich Hayek Oil Filter Incident.” You should have the book by now, assuming the mailroom girls have completed their circuit without being rerouted to the “Ceremonial Sorting Annex.”

I know what they say—you can’t judge a book by its cover—but this one makes the case for exceptions. I never imagined I’d start to lose my vision staring at a photo of Sartre and Beauvoir. But here we are. Do they even make spectacles with three lenses? The color saturation alone is a kind of metaphysical test.

I’ve only made it to the chapter on Heidegger. I keep getting pulled away to fix shortening pumps. That damn day job still funds our cause—ensuring the populace gets its processed fats with just enough filtration to feel modern. When their arteries clog, well, that’s Darwin’s territory. Not mine. I just keep das Ding running.

Anyway, I found a citation that finally puts the “CONCERNED” in Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists. It’s in the first footnote—long, but well worth the ink. The second quote might hit you sideways. I know you earned your M.O. (Master of the Obvious), but if you take Heidegger at face value, you might need a few night classes in Existential Perplexity.

The Editor:

Good work, B.S. I received the book—delivered, incidentally, by that new girl we hired. You know the one: ex-model, once featured in an Italian election campaign ad. (See broken link in the comment section, captioned: “Vote for Tomorrow. Love Today.” Good luck with that.)

She speaks just enough English to smile and say she likes her job. I’ve had her reassigned as my personal assistant and daily mail courier—even if it’s just real estate flyers and commemorative stamp offers. A well-run Council requires continuity in ritual.

Now, about your footnotes. Why are the Germans always philosophizing with hammers? With their reputation for precision, you’d think they’d favor a Wiha brand German made, chrome vanadium precision slotted 26008, or at least a torque wrench. Even in this age of pneumatic nail guns, they remain nostalgically blunt.

AnnaLisa has offered to help me modernize the metaphor, we Italians philosophize with something else (ahem). But she keeps going on proposing a pasta press or an olive oil decanter. We’ll test them all at lunch.

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FOOTNOTES

Filed by the Backward Scholar, Verified by the Editor

[1].

“Heidegger gives Dasein in its weekday clothes, as it were: not in its Sunday best, but in its ‘everydayness’.

Other philosophers have tended to start with a human being in an unusual state, such as sitting alone in a room staring into the embers of a fire and thinking— which was how Descartes began. Then they go on to use simple, every day terms to describe the result. Heidegger does the opposite. He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s every day Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein.

The main feature of Dasein’s every day Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something. I don’t tend to contemplate things; I pick them up and act on them. If I hold a hammer, it is not normally to stare at the hammer-Thing, as Heidegger puts it. (He uses the lovely word das Hammerding.) It is to go to work hammering nails.

Moreover, I do my hammering in service of some purpose, such as building a bookcase for my philosophy tomes. The hammer in my hand summons up a whole network of purposes and contexts. It reveals Dasein’s involvement with things: its ‘CONCERN’. (Hereafter, all caps are editorial—the editor.)

He cites examples: producing something, using something, looking after something, and letting something go, as well as negative involvement such as neglecting something, or leaving it undone. These are what he calls ‘deficient’ forms, but they are still forms of CONCERN. They show that Dasein’s Being in general is one of ‘care’. The distinction between ‘care’ and ‘CONCERN’ (Besorgen and Sorge) is confusing, but both mean Dasein is in the world up to the elbows, and it is busy. We are not far from Kierkegaard and his point that I don’t just exist, but have an interest or an investment in my existence.

My involvements, Heidegger continues, lead me to deploy ‘useful things’ or ‘equipment’ – items such as the hammer. These have a particular Being which Heidegger called Zuhandenheit: ‘readiness-to-hand’ or ‘handiness’. While I am hammering, the hammer has that kind of Being for me. If, for some reason, I lay down the hammer and gawp at it as a Hammerding, then it has a different kind: Vorhandenheit or presence-at-hand.

For Heidegger, the philosophers’ second biggest mistake (after forgetfulness of Being) has been to talk about everything as though it were present-at-hand. But that is to separate things from the everyday ‘CONCERNFUL’ way in which we encounter them most of the time. It turns them into objects for contemplation by an UNCONCERNED subject who has nothing to do all day but gaze at stuff. And then we ask why philosophers seem cut off from everyday life!”

—Sarah Bakewell, At the Existential Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Other Press, New York, pp. 63–64

[2].

“Of all the perplexing things about ‘being’, Heidegger goes on, the most perplexing of all is that people fail to be sufficiently perplexed about it. I say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘I am happy’, as if the little word in the middle were of no interest. But when I stop to think about it, I realize that it brings up a fundamental and mysterious question. What can it mean to say that anything ‘is’? Most philosophers had neglected the question; one of the few to raise it was Gottfried von Leibniz, who in 1714 put it this way: why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? For Heidegger, this ‘why’ is not the sort of question that seeks an answer from physics or cosmology. No account of the Big Bang or divine Creation could satisfy it. The point of asking the question is mainly to boggle the mind. If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in ‘Being and Time’ in one word, that word might be ‘wow’! It was this that led the critic George Steiner to call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’—the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the OBVIOUS’.”

—Sarah Bakewell, At the Existential Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Other Press, New York, p. 50

Filed Under:

Phenomenology of Mail Delivery Heidegger in Work Clothes The Hammer as Method Department of Ontological Distractions CONCERN: An In-House Glossary Project