Peirce, Heidegger and Ready at Hand

Posted on January 22, 2009
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Graham Harman has up a post about his theory of tool-use in Heidegger. (HT: Enowning) It’s an interesting post about ready-at-handedness in Heidegger.

Heidegger has a famous passage where he analyzes hammers to make a larger point. He suggests that while hammering we don’t notice the hammer. When it is hidden like this it is ready-at-hand and has a meaning tied to its uses. When the hammer stops functioning we notice it. During these breakdowns objects become seen as objects.

Harman, in passing, notes:

The tool-analysis does not mean that “praxis comes before theory.” This is the pragmatist trivialization of the analysis. He’s not just saying that science and linguistic utterances have a tacit unthematic background. Hence, it is foolish to claim that Dewey beat him to the tool-analysis.

I’m anything but a Dewey expert. It’s clear that James and then Dewey transformed Peirce’s pragmatic maxim. The maxim is basically the idea that the meaning of any predicate like “is hammering” is wrapped up in the ways we verify it. James transformed this into a broader claim that truth is wrapped up with our purposes. But that’s just alien to Peirce.

Now to the degree we say any object “is” anything is to make a predicate. And we can predicate only to the degree there is some potential way of verifying it. Thus a book is blue only if we can discover it is blue.

The implication of this is that meaning is tied to habits acquired by objects. I can say I hammer with a hammer only to the degree there is a pattern such that I can say the hammer is hammering. Further new habits can always develop. One could say that being is not exhausted in that new habits can always develop.

The big question is whether the notion of a breakdown of an object and use can be found in Peirce. The following introduction to a paper (PDF) of Søren Brier is worth quoting here.


A short version of how integration between the different approaches can be made could be the following: Individuals interpreters see differences in their world that make a difference to them as information. Thus “the world” is the world of Heidegger (1962) in which the observer is thrown among things “ready at hand”, through which a “breakdown” of the original unconscious unity become “present at hand”. This situation is possible only by assigning signs to differences and interpreting them against a general non-reducible context. Living autopoietic systems do this by producing signs as parts of life forms. Signs can thus be said to obtain meanings through sign games. In the human social spheres forms of life give rise to language games. This part of social autopoiesis is what Luhmann calls social communication, employing what Peirce calls genuine triadic signs. Thus cognition and communication are self-organizing phenomena on all three levels: biological, psychological, and sociological/cultural. They produce meaningful information by bringing forth an Umwelt, which in cybersemiotics is called a signification sphere, connected to specific life practices such as mating, hunting, tending the young, defending etc. These characteristics distinguish cognition and communication in living systems from the simulations of these processes by computers. The forces and regularities of nature influence and constrain our perceptions and spark evolution. This process can be explained scientifically to some degree, but probably never in any absolute or classical scientific conception of the word, as Laplace thought. In my opinion, meaning cannot be defined independently from an observer and a world. Meaning is only created when a difference makes such a difference to the living system that it must make signs, join a group of communicating observers, and produce a meaningful world. (13)

So the breakdown is an eruption of sort into our consciousness that causes a difference. In other words it makes a sign. When that sign is not functional (not being thought) then the object must withdraw. It becomes hidden until it makes a difference again. This is all wrapped up in Peirce’s conception of a sign as able to be broken up (divided) into further signs ad infinitum.

While Peirce is typically focused on making or discovering differences – often through precinding commonalities into a new “real” which can be predicated. Yet it is the forces on me that determines what I think. (It was on this point that Peirce critiques Hegel and the Hegelians) If a difference is not acting on me (for Peirce feels signs act) then it has withdrawn in terms of his phenomenology.

Related posts:

  1. Morris vs. Peirce
  2. Peirce on Limiting the Pragmatic Maxim
  3. Peirce and Idealism
  4. The Problem with Metaphysics
  5. Virtual Peirce
  6. Peirce on Universals

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