Comment by questionable_ju
3 days ago
Heideggers "ready-to-hand" more or less says that we use things first and understand them later. We experience a hammer first as "thing you hit nails with" and later abstract to "object with these particular properties".
The classic Cartesian view was that we take in raw data from the outside world and process it into more and more abstract concepts (somehow), until we say "aha! I can use this for hammering". Heidegger says that this view is wrong, and our first experience of things is in terms of a social context and in terms of use. That's what's meant by us experiencing them as "ready-to-hand".
From the starting point of the ready-to-hand, we can step back, take a scientific view, and arrive at the present-at-hand, where we examine the properties of the object seperate from its use. The argument is quite compelling, and especially convincing to me is how well this agrees with modern neuroscience. In reality, 3x as many neurons path FROM the high abstraction parts of the brain TOWARDS the visual processing parts of the brain. In the classic Cartesian view of the brain beginning with the signal and abstracting its way towards the top, this is very mysterious. In Heideggers account, where the social context and potential uses of objects are the primary constituents of our experience, this makes total sense.
Is that it? Wouldn't this be compatible with Hume's claims? And yet hume is still quite Cartesian in thinking (as everybody of around that era was)
I have to say my memory on the exact beliefs of Hume are murky. IIRC he did still think that human cognition starts with neutral input data and processes its way to the most abstract concepts. Heidegger inverts this. The context, the use, and the meaning are already embedded in all of your experiences. You don't have "neutral input data".
This is also what he means by "thrownness". Our being-in-the-world, in particular the way things have meaning to us and are intelligable, is conditional on our use and our social context. Not the other way around. We never logically arrive at our context, we were always already "thrown" into it.
I think it's actually quite a profound conceptual shift, which is why Heidegger is so popular. He's still an asshole for writing so obscurely, though.
Yeah Hume is an example of someone who had the bias of the myth of the given, even though you can uphold him as someone who skeptical of notions of truth; associations, traditions, accidental regularities, type of guy
Heck even Hegel and Heidegger were orthogonal (I believe? I'm not sure if Heidegger responded either favorably or not to Hegel - I think he wasn't really responding to him, more to the Greeks and Kant) to each other. That's weird.
And Sellars can say he rejects the Myth of the Given but inferentialist is very much not a phenomenological theory. Accepting that "nouns" are not some representation relation, not "some thing we have yet to achieve but has an end goal / we refine it", etc. still doesn't get you to Heidegger I feel, either.
Like, there are so many positions circling around Heidegger, but only Heidegger has a distinctly Heideggerian feel. Maybe I'm overcomplicating it though. I think it's because he's distinctly making a claim about the human experience, whereas all the philosophers I've listed, you can list aspects of them that get away from that (even Kant lol). They've been "naturalized" in some sense. You can't naturalize Hediegger, but then I'm not sure why his theories are better than say, idk, science. You can diagnose the common prejudices of thought through a lot of other philosophers
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