Harman - Towards Speculative Realism: Essays &

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This piece was a conference paper submitted in February 1997 to the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). The submission was rejected. Since 199192 I had placed the tool-analysis at the center of my interpretation of Heidegger, though at the time of writing this piece I was not yet a philosophical realist as was the case from December 1997 onward. Also missing from this essay is my later preoccupation with the role of das Geviert or the fourfold in Heidegger, though this concern was already paramount from as early as 1994 when his Einblick in das was ist1 was finally published in full. A few key phrases from the following paper later found their way into my first book, Tool-Being (2002).2

Few passages in Heideggers writings have attained as much notoriety as the analysis of equipment in Being and Time. It is impossible to find a summary of this work that does not make frequent reference to the vivid description of the tool and its malfunction. Still, the theme of equipment has rarely been pursued as a worthy problem in its own right. On one front, the concept of the tool is regarded as an early version of a later, fullblown meditation on the essence of technology. Elsewhere, one speaks of Heideggers pragmatist period; from there, a debate erupts as to whether or not this pragmatism has anything to do with the philosophers later concerns. A third camp, which includes many of the most reliable commentators, regards the tool-analysis as possessing a largely historical function, as a settling of accounts with the ancient poiesis/praxis distinction. But in each of these cases the real action is assumed to lie elsewhere, in one of the more remote and complicated themes of Heidegger studies. The current paper will argue against this tendency. First, we will show that Heideggers account of tools is applicable not just to widely-recognized examples of handymans tools (hammers, drills), but to every possible entity. Second, we will suggest that all of the more widely admired Heideggerian themes are derivatives of the philosophers simple analysis of utensils. Finally, we will make a tentative suggestion concerning the development of a concrete theory of equipment.

The analysis of equipment is familiar enough that any paraphrase quickly becomes tedious. Our primary mode of encounter with entities, Heidegger shows, is not that of running across entities indifferently present-at-hand for perception. When the tool is most a tool, it recedes into a reliable background of subterranean machinery. Equipment is invisible. Furthermore, tools do not occur in isolation. Their meaning is determined by their definitive role in a referential contexture, their distinct position in this reality. The same hammer can be magnificent against soft wood, useless against metallic surfaces, and a lethal horror to many insects. In this way, the tool is what it is only with respect to the system it inhabits; there is no such thing as an equipment. Equipment is total, or contextural. What this tells us is that equipment, insofar as it is currently in use, is never something merely present-at-hand. Some part of the physical tool may stay in view, but its action necessarily withdraws into a totality that cannot become visible in principle. The tool is the execution of a reality or effect that necessarily retreats behind the presence of any surface. But this reality is not merely negative, as though self-concealment were its most striking feature. The tool is a force that exists rather than not existing, a reality that has emerged into the world and set up shop. Of course in the strict sense we should speak here not of tools, but rather of a single unitary world in action. For at this point we are not yet in position to regard an individual piece of gear as anything but illusory, as an ontic nullity with respect to its underground reality.

Let these remarks suffice to remind us of the basic features of Heideggers innovative research concerning equipment. At the same time, we should not fail to notice that the scope of his analysis soon expands far beyond the limited number of objects normally classified as tools. Heidegger does not mean to talk about spoons and forks, as he will later point out on another occasion. Rather, every conceiveable entity is nothing less than an item of equipment. No being can be reduced to its presence-at-hand. The most useless flake of stone does not escape the system of tools; the tiniest grain of sand is what it is, surging into existence and throwing its weight around. No matter how negligible these entities are, they are not without their significance, even if for most humans it is the feeble significance of triviality. Beneath its indifferent surface every entity occupies a highly determinate position in the system of significance that forms the world. In short, the analysis of tools is concerned only incidentally with the human use of tools. Its real subject matter is the stance of entities themselves in the midst of reality. The bridge is not a bridge due to the fact that Dasein uses it; the reverse is the case. A tool isnt used; it is.

It will be objected that we have already missed the central significance of Dasein in this analysis. It will be claimed that Dasein is the key, since everyone knows that Being and Time is compromised by a transcendental standpoint in which human being is always taken as the final standard of reference. But there is a rarely noticed ambiguity in Heideggers use of the term Dasein. Admittedly, the human being is not the same kind of entity as a stone. Human beings partly transcend the entities that surround them, while the rock is merely the oblivious punching bag of the forces that mass against it. In more familiar terms, Dasein is gifted with an understanding of being. Ignoring for now the difficult problem posed by animals, the human being seems to be a unique entity in precisely this way. But there is another trait of Dasein, one that is mentioned in an even earlier passage: the fact that Daseins essence lies in its existence. Never meant to be sized up as a rational animal or as the fusion of body and soul, Dasein can only be understood in the very act of its existence. Any claim to define Dasein via some representation or eidos or by way of any external properties is incapable of living up to the task. But this irreducibility of Dasein to a representation is also shared by hammers, and even by sand and rocks. We have already seen that none of these entities can be understood as if they were simply