Another aspect of the same problem is the passage from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand in Being and Time Heidegger takes as the starting point the active immersion in its surroundings of a finite engaged agent who relates to objects around it as to something ready-at-hand; the impassive perception of objects as present-at-hand arises gradually from this engage ment when things ‘malfunction’ in different ways, and is therefore a derivative mode of presence. Heidegger’s point, of course, is that the proper ontological description of the way Dasein is in the world has to abandon the modern Cartesian duality of values and facts: the notion that the subject encounters present-at-hand objects on to which he then projects his aims, and explots them accordingly, falsifies the proper state of things: the fact that engaged immersion in the world is primordial, and that all other modes of the presence of objects are derived from it.

On closer examination, however, the picture becomes somewhat blurred and more complex. The problem with Being and Time is how to co-ordinate the series of pairs of oppositions: authentic existence versus das Man anxiety versus immersion in worldly activity; true philosophical thought versus traditional ontology; dispersed modern society versus the People assuming iLs historic Destiny. ... The pairs in this series do not simply overlap: when a premodern artisan or farmer, following his traditional way of Life, is immersed in his daily involvement with ready-at-hand objects that are included in his world, this immersion is definitely not the same as the das Man of the modern city-dweller. (This is why, in his notorious ‘Why should we remain in the province?’, Heidegger himself reports that when he was uncertain whether to accept the invitation to go to teach in Berlin, he asked his friend, a hard-working local farmer, who just silently shook his head — Heidegger immediately accepted this as the authentic answer to his predicament.) Is it not therefore, that, in contrast to these two opposed modes of immersion — the authentic involvement with the ready-at-hand and the modern letting oneself go with the flow of das Man — there are also two opposed modes of acquiring a distance: the shattering existential experience of anxiety, which extraneates us from the traditional immersion in our way of life, and the theoretical distance of the neutral observer who, as if from outside, perceives the world in ‘representations’? It seems as if this ‘authentic’ tension between the immersion of ‘being-in-the-world’ and its suspension in anxiety is redoubled by the ‘inauthentic’ pair of das Man and traditional metaphysical ontology. So we have four positions: the tension in everyday life be tween authentic ‘being-in-the-world’ and das Man, as well as the tension between the two modes of extracting ourselves from the everyday run of things, authentic existential resoluteness and the traditional metaphysical ontology — does not this give us a kind of Heideggerian semiotic square?

Pp. 11-2

¶ 8:11 AM