Strange Familiarity, Part One
Traditional philosophers related to the world like it was a strangely unfamiliar kitchen.
Today's post is longer than usual. It comes in two parts. Part two is a member-access post. I will publish it on Monday.
In our everyday lives, we operate with an underlying sense or understanding of being. (See my earlier posts on Heidegger here, here, and here.)
This understanding lets us distinguish and interact with various entities—ourselves, other people, fictional characters, bicycles, trees, and cats—without needing a formal theory of being.
Our sense of being is like the familiarity we can have with our hometown, even if we can't draw a map or give precise directions for getting around in it.
Rather than being theoretical knowledge of definitions, our sense of being is more like a "know-how" or sense of familiarity.
As we will see in the weeks ahead, Heidegger unfolds his revolutionary ontological project by carefully describing everyday familiar situations. These were the kinds of situations and experiences previous philosophers did not bother to notice.
Consider the situation of making breakfast in your home kitchen. Here you have a range of typical tools and skills: toaster, bread, refrigerator, coffee maker, knives, forks, plates, and so on. Once you have your breakfast-making routine down, you can bumble bleary-eyed around in the kitchen while making breakfast half-asleep, or with your mind on the important tasks of the day ahead.
In an unfamiliar kitchen our breakfast-making skills get thwarted. Then we need to ask where to find things and we need guidance on how to use unfamiliar appliances and ingredients.
Heidegger unpacks the flowing-familiarity we have with our own kitchen in terms of an innovative ontological category: "readiness-to-hand" (or "availableness," both attempt to translate Heidegger's term Zuhandenheit).
I won't stop to discuss this term now, except to emphasize that something is ready-to-hand in this special sense if we can use it skillfully, without having to think about it.
Heidegger's guiding intuition is that the world (and, indeed, being) reveals itself distinctively through our familiarity with what is ready-to-hand. Before Heidegger, philosophers focused on how the world appears in detached, theoretical reflection, not in skillful engagement.
Traditional philosophers before Heidegger related to the world like it was a strangely unfamiliar kitchen.
For Heidegger, this detached view reveals the world not as "ready-to-hand" but as an "occurrent" thing for observation and measurement. Heidegger calls this mode of being "presence-at-hand" (or "occurrentness," both attempt to translate Heidegger's term Vorhandenheit).
Ultimately, Heidegger will argue that this detached, observer's perspective is unable to make sense of the world and our place in it. Our relationship to the world is first of all one of familiarity and skillful involvement, not theoretical knowledge.
Members, stay tuned for part two on Monday!
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What questions, half-formed thoughts, or perplexities does all of this bring up for you? Let me know in the comments or by sending me a message!