In many ways, Heidegger stood opposed to the entire edifice of Western philosophy. A hammer, he pointed out, cannot be represented by just its physical features and function, detached from its relationship to nails and the anvil, the physical experience and skill of hammering, its role in building fine furniture and comfortable houses, etc. Merely associating facts, values or function with objects cannot capture the human idea of a hammer, with its role in the meaningful organization of the world as we experience it.

Heidegger insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic distinction between mind and reality. What is required is a phenomenology of our lived experience of the world that tries to be true to what shows itself first and foremost in our experience. To translate this into another idiom, we might say that Heidegger is inverting the usual distinction between theory and practice. My primary encounter with the world is not theoretical; it is not the experience of some spectator gazing out at a world stripped of value. Rather, I first apprehend the world practically as a world of things which are useful and handy and which are imbued with human significance and value. The theoretical or scientific vision of things that find in a thinker like Descartes is founded on a practical insight that is fascinated and concerned with things.

¶ 6:49 PM