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On Ontology

Nice posting on the Empyre list from Eugene Thacker (23 October 2007) Ontology, what ontology?: [1] The question of being thus aims at an a priori condition of the possibility not only of the sciences which investigate beings of such and such a type – and are thereby already involved in an understanding of being; but it aims also at the condition of the possibility of the ontologies which precede the ontic sciences and found them. All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its …

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(pre)occupations

Tools sink into extended being: it takes craft and intent to keep them visible. I’m wondering if there’s some connection with Shklovsky’s thoughts on art: that art exists to make perception difficult. Is art, amongst the other things it is, what makes us aware of what is the kernel of us, minus our embedded tools, yet through their use in its creation? Is that some of what art does, and how? Ink that in five lines becomes a bunch of nettles, in the night points one step north; where the colour of water gets over the road, over the pearl …

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Heft

Back to Heidegger: that tools which are ‘ready to hand’ (zuhanden) disappear into the task, and only become again ‘tools’ to us (as being, in themselves, things) when we put them down. I’ve written before, wondering about tools which we never put down — the tools which once we start using them, are internalised into our augmented experience — tools which become so much a part of our embodied being that we can never see them again in their own thingness. The word, not the axe. Also, possibly, pervasive tools like the mobile phone, certainly the internet, for some of …

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A Glance at Heidegger

Heidegger makes the distinction between tools with are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) and those which are ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). We are, he says, only conscious of tools as tools when they are present-at-hand. When we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of the tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which ‘withdraws’ into the task. The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all… The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the …

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Heidegger