Therefore fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein…
The Being of those entities which we encounter as closest to us can be exhibited phenomenologically if we take as our clue our everyday Being-in-the-world, which we also call our ‘dealings’ in the world and with entities within-the-world. Such dealings have already dispersed themselves into manifold ways of concern. The kind of dealing which is closest to us is … not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’. The phenomenological question applies in the first instance to the Being of those entities which we encounter in such concern. To assure the kind of seeing which is here required, we must first make a remark about method.
In the disclosure and explication of Being, entities are in every case our preliminary and our accompanying theme; but our real theme is Being. In the domain of the present analysis, the entities we shall take as our preliminary theme are those which show themselves in our concern with the environment. Such entities are not thereby objects for knowing the ‘world’ theoretically; they are simply what gets used, what gets produced, and so forth. As entities so encountered, they become the preliminary theme of the purview of a ‘knowing’ which, as phenomenological, looks primarily towards Being, and which, in thus taking Being as its theme, takes these entities as its accompanying theme. This phenomenological interpretation is accordingly not a way of knowing those characteristics of entities which themselves are; it is rather a determination of the structure of the Being which entities possess. But as an investigation of Being, it brings to completion, autonomously and explicitly, that understanding of Being which belongs already to Dasein and which comes alive in any of its dealings with entities. Those entities which serve phenomenologically as our preliminary theme, in this case those which are used, or which are to be found in the course of production, become accessible when we put ourselves into the position of concerning ourselves with them in some such way. Taken strictly, this talk about ‘putting ourselves into such a position’ is misleading; for the kind of Being which belongs to such concernful dealings is not one into which we need to put ourselves first. This is the way in which everyday Dasein always is: when I open the door, for example, I use the latch. The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretative tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us, and which conceal not only the phenomenon of such concern, but even more those entities themselves as encountered of their own accord in our concern with them. These entangling errors become plain if in the course of our investigation we now ask which entities shall be taken as our preliminary theme and established as the pre-phenomenal basis for our study.
One may answer: ‘Things’. But with this obvious answer we have perhaps already missed the pre-phenomenal basis we are seeking. For in addressing these entities as ‘Things’ (res) we have tacitly anticipated their ontological character. When analysis starts with such entities and goes on to inquire about Being, what it meets is Thinghood and Reality. Ontological explication discovers, as it proceeds, such characteristics of Being as substantiality, materiality, extendedness, side-by-sideness and so forth. But even pre-ontologically, in such Being as this, the entities which we encounter in concern are proximally hidden. When one designates Things as the entities that are ‘proximally given’, one goes ontologically astray, even though ontically one has something else in mind. What one really has in mind remains undetermined. But suppose one characterizes these ‘Things’ as Things ‘invested with value’? What does ‘value’ mean ontologically? How are we to categorize this ‘investing’ and Being invested? Disregarding the obscurity of this structure of investiture with value, have we thus met that phenomenal characteristic of Being which belongs to what we encounter in our concernful dealings?
The Greeks had an appropriate term for ‘Things’ – pragmata – that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings (praxis). But ontically, the specifically pragmatic character of the pragmata is just what the Greeks left in obscurity; they thought of these ‘proximally’ as ‘mere Things’. We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern equipment (das Zeug). In our dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement. The kind of Being which equipment possesses must be exhibited. The clue for doing this lies in our first defining what makes an item of equipment – namely its equipmentality.
Taken strictly, then, there is no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially ‘something-in-order-to …’ A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability.
In the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something … Equipment, in accordance with its equipmentality, always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves, so as to add up to a sum of realia and fill up a room. What we encounter as closest to us (though not as something taken as a theme) is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this the ‘arrangement’ emerges, and it is in this that any individual item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered.
Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure – hammering with a hammer for example. But in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring Thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such even in the using. The hammering does not simply have knowledge about the hammer’s character as equipment, but it has appropriated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more suitable. In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the ‘in-order-to’ which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just 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. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ (Handlichkeit), of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses, in which it manifests itself in its own right, we call readiness-to-hand [Zuhandenheit] …
Being with Others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for Dasein in its very Being. Thus as Being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of Others. This must be understood as an existential statement as to its essence. Even if the particular factical Dasein does not turn to Others, and supposes that it has no need of them or manages to get along with them, it is in the way of Being-with. In Being with, as the existential ‘for the sake of’ of Others, these have already been disclosed in their Dasein. With the Being-with, their disclosedness has been constituted beforehand; accordingly this disclosedness also goes to make up significance, that is to say, worldhood. And, significance, as worldhood, is tied up with the existential ‘for the sake of which’. Since the worldhood of that world in which every Dasein essentially is already, is thus constituted, it accordingly lets us encounter what is environmentally ready-to-hand as something with which we are circumspectively concerned, and it does so in such a way that together with it we encounter the Dasein-with of Others. The structure of the world’s worldhood is such that Others are not proximally present-at-hand as free-floating subjects along with other Things, but show themselves in the world in their special environmental Being, and do so in