bigideas

One of the things that struck me most forcefully when, a long time ago, I made a (mostly successful) attempt to read Heidegger‘s Being and Time was the idea of “equipment” — Das Zeug — as a picture of our relationship with the mundane world.

Leaving aside the deeper phenomenological concerns that gave rise to it, I still think this idea provides a very attractive practical way to think about physical interactions that are driven by an “agent” of one sort or another.

Being and Time begins with “everydayness”, and in a way the whole book is a meditation on how we can be thinking subjects who just get on with things, without constantly having ontological crises, despite the fact that nobody understands what a subject is, or what the universe is in which the subject exists, or what existence is, or really much of anything.

The “everydayness” of the world is typified by the Greek word pragmata:

that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings (praxis)… we shall call those entities… “equipment”.

Heidegger here decides to take seriously the instrumental aspect of our relationship with the world, the idea that we are always in it acting as agents, using stuff to get things done.

He immediately rules out, however, the intuitive notion that we encounter the world as a ready-made collection of neutral objects and then start putting them to use. Instead, we constitute a world by entering into relationships with existing networks — “the equipment”. We find things come to hand and we use them, and in doing so we determine what they are. And “what they are” is, at that point, nothing more complicated than their location in the network.

The presence of an agent is essential to the formation of such a world. It would be wrong, Heidegger thinks, to say “the chair is leaning against the wall”; that very sentence somehow suggests that the chair, or perhaps the wall, is doing something. Rather, a human being interacts with a chair-wall system (I’m not sure what the agent is supposed to be doing in this example, but you get the idea).

“The equipment” is a single thing; a compound thing, definitely, but not something we can easily analyse into its constituent parts, since each part has been defined, afterwards, by reference to its place in the network. Such an analysis is pragmatically useful, maybe, but it doesn’t tell you anything ontological.

Instead Heidegger gets excited when things break down, such as when a doorknob comes off in your hand, because that has the potential to give us an insight into what “really exists” beyond the world of equipment. But he’s a phenomenologist, so he would say that.

Heidegger’s picture of an equipmental world suggests a couple of things to me. The first is Peirce‘s semiotics, which has a lot of formal similarities with this, and Heidegger explicitly points out the semiotic aspects of the scheme although they aren’t really his main interest. If one were interested in an all-pervasive view of semiotics then the relevant bits of Being and Time (the “Analysis of Environmentality and Worldhood in General”) are well worth a read. They’re also not, contrary to popular belief, entirely impenetrable, although they do require a bit of patience.

The other thing is how simple it is to model formally, since it’s really just a directed graph with a distinguished element (that’s you, Dasein). If you were interested in modelling an agent’s relationship with a world, actual or virtual, you could do a lot worse than take Heidegger’s Zeug, formalise it and build your software (or whatever) around that. Indeed, giving an agent a capacity for building and adapting such networks would seem to be an obvious way to help it navigate (Heidegger would just say “be in”) a “world”.

For a modern thinker there are problems with adopting any Heideggerian ideas, and I’m not just talking about his dreadful war record. His kind of philosophy — subject-centred, transcendental, metaphysical, a priori — is very old-fashioned now, and most people will find there’s a lot to reject.

But then again, you can also think of philosophy as forming a part of your equipmental universe. Then making use of a somewhat transformed version of Heidegger isn’t so different from driving in a nail with a shoe when your hammer’s broken.