Heidegger on Present-at-Hand Relations

Posted on July 26, 2010
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I put up some comments on the sidebar earlier today on present-at-hand relations in Heidegger prompted by Enowning’s repost of an interview with Graham Harman. I wanted to put up a relevant quote. (Note I’ve not yet read Harman’s Tool-Being although I enjoyed his Prince of Networks even though I disagree in some key areas) Harman’s point is that for Heidegger present-at-hand entities (vorhanden) aren’t had in relations.

Dasein has no involvement with the environmental entities any more. The world in which I exist has sunk into insignificance, and the world thus disclosed can free only entities in the character of uninvolvement. The nothing of the world, in the face of which anxiety is anxious, does not signify that perhaps in anxiety an absence of Vorhandene within-the-world has been experienced. The Vorhanden must be encountered in such a way that has exactly no involvement whatsoever with it and so it can appear in empty mercilessness.
(SZ 343)

I quoted the above from David Weinberger’s paper Three Types of Vorhandenheit as I’m at work and don’t have access to my books.

The basic idea is though that things are still there for us but we encounter them in anxiety as having no involvement. That doesn’t mean no relations but merely not the involvement of my purposes – a particular kind of relation.

My sense, perhaps misguided on my part, is that a lot of the back and forth between the OOP folks and the Heideggarians ends up involving a lot of equivocation over what we mean by relations.

Related posts:

  1. Heidegger on Presencing and Nothing
  2. Present at Hand
  3. Philosophical Focus
  4. “Substances all the Way Down”
  5. A Joseph Smithian Metaphysics?
  6. Peirce, Heidegger and Ready at Hand

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