Presence-at-hand as a Necessary Possibility of Human Being

Presence-at-hand as a necessary possibility of human being

Cai, Wenjing

School of Humanity, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Abstract: In Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger pays special attention to the capacity for

treating something as present at hand and takes it to be a distinguishing mark of the life mode of

human being vis-a-vis that of other animals. However, this view seems to be in tension with some

of Heidegger’s other points. The paper shows that a so-called layer cake model for interpreting

Heidegger cannot successfully explain away the inconsistency in question. Arguing against the

layer cake understanding, as both truth and Heidegger interpretation, the paper suggests that the

capacity to treat something as present at hand should be understood as a necessary possibility that

uniquely pertains to human life. With such a conception, we shall be able to conceive of the

relation between presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand as an intrinsic rather than external one.

The paper ends with a preliminary observation of how such reading of Heidegger may contribute

to some recent discussions on whether our pre-predicative life of coping is conceptual or not.

Key words: Presence-at-hand, readiness-to-hand, layer cake model, conceptualism, Heidegger

1. Introduction

In the lecture course Basic Concepts of Metaphysics1, Heidegger takes what he calls “the path

of a comparative observation” to approach the problems of world and being2. There he notoriously

claims that animals are “poor in world” (Weltarm) whereas human beings are “world-forming”

(Weltbildend). On spelling out this thesis, Heidegger argues that animals lack the possibility to

access beings, that is, they cannot treat something as a being (das Seiende), or as the

present-at-hand (das Vorhandene). While the thesis itself still requires further elaboration, one may

already start to wonder, why the notion of presence-at-hand plays such a crucial role in this

context. In other words, why should the capacity to treat something as present at hand be the

distinguishing mark of human beings vis-a-vis other animals? Isn’t the mode of being as

presence-at-hand a mere derivative of a more primary mode, namely, that of readiness-to-hand

(Zuhandensein) according to Heidegger in Being and Time as well as other works?

Hence is the leading question of the present article: what could Heidegger’s emphasis on the

possibility to take something as present at hand illuminate with regard to the mode of existence of

human being? First of all, the question concerns how one should interpret Heidegger’s thoughts,

especially such notions as presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand as well as their relation.

Although many interpreters have worked on the problem before, the question here at stake

however urges us to revisit the prevailing Heidegger interpretation and examine its

appropriateness. Secondly and perhaps more significantly, the question has to do with an issue that

has been heatedly discussed in contemporary philosophy, namely, how judgment and predication

relate to our pre-predicative experience. Do our everyday experiences of fluent coping form an

autonomous realm upon which a stratum of cognition and language using is added, or are they

1 The book is later referred to as Basic Concepts in this article. 2 According to Heidegger, the other two ways are 1) the historical observation of the history of the concept of

world, which he takes in Grundproblem der Metaphysik, 2) the development of the concept of world from our

everyday understanding of world, a path he takaes in Sein und Zeit. GA 29/30, p. 272. Heidegger’s complete works

is abbreviated to GA (Gesamtausgabe) in this article.

already somehow permeated with the conceptual and linguistic capacities? The debate between the

so-called conceptualist and non-conceptualist view well manifests the prominence of this issue.

In the following, I shall start with Heidegger’s analysis on animals and human beings in

Basic Concepts and make explicit the seeming inconsistency between his view in this work and

those in others such as Being and Time. I then attempt to show that a so-called layer cake model

for interpreting Heidegger cannot successfully explain away the inconsistency in question.

Arguing against the layer cake understanding, as both truth and Heidegger interpretation, I suggest

that the capacity to treat something as present at hand should be understood as a necessary

possibility that uniquely pertains to human life. With such a conception, we shall be able to

conceive of the relation between presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand as an intrinsic rather than

external one. Finally, I shall make a brief comment on how such reading of Heidegger may

contribute to some recent discussions on whether our pre-predicative life of coping is conceptual

or not.

2. Human comportment to entities as the present-at-hand

Prima facie Heidegger’s sharp distinction between animal and human being is problematic

and even counter-intuitive. For it is quite natural in ordinary language to talk about an animal

world, in which the animal looks for food, protects its territory from incursions, finds its mate,

cares for its babies, etc. It is also commonly believed that some animals have feelings and

emotions as we do such as happiness, sadness, fear or anger, only that they might express them in

a different way. From a naturalistic point of view, human being as homo sapiens is merely one

species among many others, and the distance between a human way of life and that of animals can

certainly not be that far. Thus, the Heideggerian thesis that animal, unlike human being, lacks a

world and cannot take beings as beings is challenged as too radical and without doing full justice

to animal’s life mode; it is even anthropocentric. Heidegger, however, is fully aware of the fact

that his formulations are at odds with everyday language and hence can by no means be

understood effortlessly. But the violation of language is the way Heidegger attempts to put to

question everyday and often inauthentic understanding of the world as well as ourselves qua

human beings. In the present discussion, I shall not put much weight on deciding whether

Heidegger’s terminologies are appropriate or not and whether he is somehow ignorant of animal’s

various capacities; instead, my purpose is to elucidate what Heidegger tries to tell us by claiming

an insurmountable “abyss”(Abgrund) between animal and human being (GA 29/30, 409). Let us

first take a look at Heidegger’s conception of animal life and how the notion of presence-at-hand

plays a significant role in the distinction between animal and human being.

According to Heidegger, an animal’s life has the structure of what he calls “captivation”

(Benommenheit) (GA 29/30, 344). A life of captivation, in comparison to human life in the world,

is characterized by a certain lack. As Heidegger claims, what we cannot find in an animal is the

capacity to take something as something. But what could this “as” mean? A lion hiding in the

grasses treats a zebra as its food, waiting for its chance to throw itself to the prey. A bird can

recognize the song of its fellow as an alarm call and thus respond to it appropriately. Shouldn’t we

thus say that an animal’s behavior in its environment also involves an as-structure? Yet Heidegger

would deny this, for the as-structure he refers to has a much stronger and more specific meaning,

which has something to do with being. Let us take a look at two examples he mentions in the text.

He first discusses a lizard lying in the sun on a warm rock:

When we say that lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word ‘rock’ in order to

indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and

yet is not known to the lizard as a rock. If we cross out the word we do not simply mean to

imply that something else is in question here or is taken as something else. Rather we imply

that whatever it is is not accessible to it as a being. (GA 29/30, 290; Heidegger 2001, 198)

The lizard, in Heidegger’s view, does not perceive the sun as sun and the rock as rock. Though it

stands in a certain relation to its environment, it nevertheless cannot access those beings as beings,

as we human beings do. But again, one might still keep asking, what an access to beings is

supposed to mean. Another example Heidegger refers to in his text is with regard to a bee, about

which he claims the following:

Rather, the bee is simply taken (hingenommen) by its food. This being taken is only possible

where there is an instinctual ‘toward….’ (triebhaftes Hin-zu). Yet such a driven being taken

(Hingenommenheit in dieser Getriebenheit) also excludes the possibility of any recognition

of presence-at-hand (Vorhandensein). It is precisely being taken by its food that prevents the

animal from taking up a position over and against (gegenüberstellen) this food. (GA 29/30,

353; Heidegger 2001, 242)

Heidegger denies that the bee can take the sun as sun, the flower as flower and the honey as honey.

More distinctively speaking, what the bee is deprived of is the possibility of “recognition of

presence-at-hand”. The relation of the bee to its food is a relation of “being taken”

(Hingenommenheit), or of being instinctually driven toward the food, or again, of being

completely absorbed in the latter. To see the food as something present-at-hand, which means, “to

stand in a position over and against it”, is excluded from the mode of being of the bee, and in

Heidegger’s view is reserved only for human being who lives in a world. What is present at hand

is something that stands on its own and, as Heidegger seems to suggest, endures at a distance as an

object (GA 29/30, 372; Heidegger 2001, 256). We as human beings can “comport ourselves”—a

specific term that Heidegger reserves for human behavior—in such a way that we may distance

ourselves from the thing, examine and raise questions of it and expect to find answers to them (GA

29/30, 291; Heidegger, 198); and at the same time, in such an opposing to the object, we ourselves

are also manifested as present individual beings. All these are nevertheless not accessible to

animals.

However, Heidegger’s descriptions in Basic Concepts give rise to a puzzling problem. One

may recall that according to his analysis in Being and Time as well as other works around the same

time, presence-at-hand is not the primordial mode of being of worldly things; in other words,

taking something to be present at hand is not the most essential moment of Dasein’s being in the

world. In Being and Time, Heidegger makes an analysis on Dasein’s everyday encounter with

other beings and claims that the first and foremost mode of being of worldly things is not

presence-at-hand but rather readiness-to-hand (Zuhandensein). In Heidegger’s formulation,

presence-at-hand as a mode of things usually involves a theoretical-epistemological standpoint,

under which the thing is isolated from the contextual whole where it is initially embedded. In

contrast, our everyday coping is guided by a totality of references which we are acquainted with,

and the thing, say, the cup on the table that I grab when feeling thirsty is not given as something

present at hand.

In accordance with the two modes of being of worldly things, Heidegger distinguishes

between two kinds of as-structure, namely, the hermeneutical “as” and the apophantic “as”, and

conceives of the hermeneutical as-structure as more primordial to Dasein’s existence. Taking

something as something is not necessarily making it a thematic object, inquiring into its formation

and uttering it out in a proposition. Besides the propositional or apophantic as-structure, in which

something is present at hand, there is yet a more fundamental hermeneutical one, which is

involved in our everyday pre-predicative life (SZ, 158)3. My understanding of a lamp, for instance,

does not have to be articulated in a statement; rather, most frequently, I understand it as a lamp by

using it, i.e., turning it on in order to get more light for reading. I do not attend to it thematically as

something over against me, examining its properties or functions—in a word, I do not see it as

something present at hand at all. My understanding of the lamp is expressed in my switching it on

rather than by any propositions; and such an action is oriented by and in light of my familiarity

with a contextual whole: the lamp on the right side of the desk, the line cord switch, the dimness

of the room, and most importantly, my writing an urgent paper, which is hindered by the darkness.

In other words, my comportment to the lamp reflects an understanding of both the surrounding

world and myself. In Heidegger’s view, such an as-structure that is first and foremost at work in

everyday life is characteristic of Dasein’s world.

Heidegger’s distinction between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand as well as that

between hermeneutical and apophantic “as” contributes to a proper understanding of our

experience and the various types of intentionality involved in it. For Heidegger, both ordinary

understandings and traditional philosophical theories have overlooked a more natural and

profound connection between Dasein and world; they conceive of presence-at-hand as the only

possible mode of being. However, given that for Heidegger, to take something as present at hand

is not the most fundamental way of our comportment, one may wonder why he emphasizes so

much on the conception of presence-at-hand as distinctively humane in Basic Concepts. To put it

more clearly, why should the essential difference between animal’s life mode and that of human

being lie in the capacity to take something as present at hand, which is, according to Heidegger in

other works, far from the most primordial way of being in the world? Or again, in claiming that

animals, unlike human beings, cannot treat things as present at hand and do not have a world, is

Heidegger simply suggesting that animals cannot take a theoretical stance towards things, or rather

attempting to show something more fundamental about the world and human existence? After all,

there must be a reason why Heidegger adopts a different strategy in the book and gives priority to

the notion of presence-at-hand in order to distinguish between a life poor in world and a

world-forming life.

2. Layer cake model and the necessary possibility of presence-at-hand

One way to answer the above-mentioned questions is to say that compared to human beings,

animals do not have the capacities to cognize and theorize what is in front of them, to calculate

and predicate the objects. For instance, in the passage where Heidegger discusses the lizard, he

3 The book Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) is abbreviated to SZ in this article.

says the following that may seem to support such a view: “the rock on which the lizard lies is not

given for the lizard as rock, in such a way that it could inquire into its mineralogical constitution

for example.” (GA 29/30, 291, Heidegger 2001, 197; my italics) These words seem to suggest that,

in Heidegger’s view, animals do not possess the faculty of thinking, if by thinking one means the

capacity to apply concepts and categories, to reason and judge. It is often believed that human

beings share with other animals certain basic senses and interests such as the need for food, shelter

and sex, but beyond these commonalities, they are unique by having some higher-level

intelligence or capacities that cannot be found in other animals; these capacities may include that

of pursuing theoretical knowledge, of applying rules to various situations, of creating symbolic

representations, of introspection, etc. We may, in Robert Brandom’s term, call such an approach “a

layer cake model”.

According to a layer cake model, human being is conceived of as having a substratum of

experiences that are more or less shared by animals and on top of that a layer of advanced

capacities that only belong to him. Given that Heidegger argues for the priority of the mode of

readiness-to-hand over that of presence-at-hand, one may interpret his view as endorsing a layer

cake model. The underlying level, on the one hand, is Dasein’s circumspective life in a

surrounding world where he simply copes with things without treating them as isolate and present

objects; in Brandom’s words, it is “an autonomous, preconceptual, prepropositional, prelinguistic

level of intentionality—namely, practical, skill-laden, norm-governed directedness toward

equipment treated as available” (Brandom 2002, 328-9). On the other hand, the level of taking

something as present at hand, of predication and theorization seems “an optional superstructure,

which might be erected on top of human existence (Dasein) and the being of equipment

(Zuhandensein), but which equally well might not be found along with them.” (Brandom 2002,

328) Mark Okrent, admitting himself as a layer caker, suggests that there are even more layers of

intentionality than Heidegger realizes. In his article “On layer cakes”, he describes five

autonomous layers of intentionality, the higher of which are only observable in certain animals

and human being. According to Okrent, the top layer is language that is distinctively possessed by

human beings; but for him, it is not just those who display the capacity of language that can count

as Dasein. Rather, already one level below, i.e. the level displayed by non-linguistic tool users

manifests the life of Dasein; in other words, those possibly non-linguistic animals which “use

socially instituted tools” and “interpret the roles that define those tools” are Dasein like us human

beings. (Okrent 2006, 27) The point of the layer cake model does not merely lie in the hierarchical

levels it differentiates, but more importantly, in the fact that the higher level rests upon the lower

and the lower is autonomous in relation to the higher. To put it more clearly, if an agent displays a

higher level of intentionality, then it must also display the lower one; but it is possible that the

agent displays a lower level of intentionality without exhibiting the higher one. Okrent believes

that Heidegger is committed to such a view in spelling out the two modes of readiness-to-hand and

presence-at-hand. As he explicitly remarks, for us as linguistic animals, a circumspective life with

what are ready to hand is a condition of possibility for a life of predication; but there can be

non-linguistic Dasein that treats things as ready to hand but never as present at hand.

Prima facie the layer cake model seems to be able to solve the puzzle raised at the end of last

section and explain away the seeming inconsistency between Heidegger’s descriptions in Basic

Concepts and those in other works. If the difference between human being and other animals lies

in the fact that the top layer of the cake is present in the former but not the latter, then with good

reason, Heidegger needs to accentuate the type of intentionality towards the present-at-hand as

distinctively humane. However, a careful consideration would suggest that the layer cake model

cannot settle the problem of why presence-at-hand becomes the crucial concept in those

paragraphs of Basic Concepts, and furthermore, that Heidegger could not have supported such a

model in the first place.

As was explicated before, according to Heidegger in Being and Time as well as other works,

the world that characterizes human existence is first of all a world of the ready-to-hand, that is, a

world preceding reflection, cognition and predication. For Heidegger, the uniqueness of human

life in contrast to other life modes is not manifest only when Dasein treats something as present at

hand or make propositions about it; rather, Dasein has a world and thus distinguishes himself from

other animals already before facing a present entity or utilizing the cognitive capacity. Or to put it

in another way, the world character of human life is most prominent when Dasein deals with

things in light of an implicit understanding of the contextual whole without thematizing either the

things or the context. Now if Heidegger indeed endorses a layer cake model, and granted that the

world that characterizes Dasein’s life manifests itself primarily on the level of readiness-to-hand,

he should have focused on the type of intentionality in the more fundamental, circumspective life.

He could have stated, for instance, that the most distinctive feature of a world-forming life

vis-a-vis a life poor in world lies in the fact that human being can treat things in the surrounding

world as ready to hand and comport to them accordingly. But then the problem would be how to

explain the difference between this non-objective, pre-predicative intentionality of human being

and the skillful, social life of animals. Indeed, for a layer cake model, such a difference might not

be very significant, since according to it, there can in principle be animals who display exactly the

same type of intentionality towards the handy things as we do and yet lack the capacity for

thought and language. As Dreyfus claims, the ground floor supporting the “linguistic, conceptual,

and inferential capacities that are uniquely human” is shared by “everyday perceivers and copers

such as infants, animals and experts” (Dreyfus 2005, 61). It thus seems that a layer cake model,

rather than distinguishing the life mode of human being from that of animals, tends to accentuate

their commonality, and for this reason it cannot provide a satisfactory account of why Heidegger

spells out the world character in terms of presence-at-hand in Basic Concepts.

The above consideration at the same time puts to question whether Heidegger’s thoughts

indeed reflect a layer cake model, as some interpreters believe. How can we integrate the

following two theses which can be extracted from Being and Time and Basic Concepts

respectively: (1) the world character of Dasein’s existence is primarily manifested in the

pre-predicative life, in which he copes with handy things and other human beings; (2) animals are

poor in world, while only we as humans are world-forming? A layer cake model, as was already

explicated, would accept the first thesis while rejecting the second. According to the model, the

pre-propositional stratum is the necessary condition for Dasein to exhibit a higher level of

intentionality. Yet, such a higher layer is optional, which means, Dasein may or may not intend

something as an object present at hand; this implies that it is in principle possible that some

animals that lack the capacity to take things as present at hand can also count as world-forming.

To this extent, a layer cake model cannot entertain both theses and we have to resort to a different

model in order to fully grasp Heidegger’s idea.

The above-mentioned two theses, viewed together, suggest that the circumspective life of

human Dasein in the world is different from animal’s living in its environment in an essential

manner. However, how are we to explicate this difference? And again, how can we account for

such a difference in terms of the notion of presence-at-hand, as Heidegger does in Basic

Concepts?

There is a certain equivocation involved in the layer cake account; when the proponents of

the model argue that the type of intentionality towards something present at hand is merely a

possibility based upon a more primary and non-objective one, this can either indicate an empirical

fact or be a transcendental claim. According to Heidegger, it is the possibility of recognizing

something as present at hand that the life mode of animals lacks. That is to say, human life

distinguishes itself as having this possibility to take something as present at hand, i.e. as an object

over against oneself, or the possibility of an intentionality characterized by the apophantic “as”.

By calling it a possibility, Heidegger suggests, on the one hand, that presence-at-hand should not

be a constant mode of being of the things; that is to say, we do not factually experience the

apophantic “as” at each moment of our everyday coping. As Heidegger argues, a worldly thing

may become present at hand under the condition that its handiness in the surrounding world is

interrupted or broken. (SZ, 73-74) Absence of handiness brings to the fore the character of

presence-at-hand in what is initially ready to hand. But even though things can become present at

hand in some occasions, they are not necessarily so; to be sure, a pre-predicative life of fluent

coping is not constituted by what are present at hand and by an apophantic as structure. Yet on the

other hand, by elucidating the possibility of taking something as present at hand, Heidegger does

not merely intend to reveal an empirical fact; more importantly, he wishes to make explicit

something essential and necessary for human existence; as he himself says, it is an “inner

possibility” of human life (GA 29/30, 450). What does it mean to say that such a possibility is a

necessary one? One can only come to understand it if one regards the possibility itself rather than

its content to be necessary. More precisely speaking, the possibility per se of treating something as

present at hand can be said to be necessary to the extent that it must be possible for us as humans

to treat things as present at hand, to let it stand over against us, to inquire into and predicate it. It

follows that the foundational, pre-predicative life is not, as the layer cakers argue, autonomous or

without any reference to the predicative life; that is to say, though empirically speaking, the

capacity to take something as present at hand is not actually exercised at any time, it is by no

means an optional or supplementary feature for Dasein’s being in the world, but rather a capacity,

the possibility of which is essential to a human life. But what does such a necessity of possibility

imply? And how does it relate to the above-mentioned puzzle that Heidegger unusually stresses

the notion of presence-at-hand in clarifying the distinction between human being and animals?

These are questions that the following discussions are concerned with.

3. An intrinsic relation between presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand

The view that the capacity to take something as present at hand is a necessary possibility is in

essence different from the layer cake approach. In the framework of a layer cake model, the level

of presence-at-hand is based upon the level of readiness-to-hand; but the latter, being autonomous,

may exist independently of the former. The founding level is so to say indifferent to whether the

founded level may arise or not; or in other words, the possibility of the founded level, i.e. the level

of reflection and discursive thoughts, cannot be explained in terms of the level from which it is

derived; they are merely externally and empirically related to each other.

However, there can be a different story: to view the possibility of presence-at-hand as

necessary for the life mode of human being implies that this possibility is intrinsic to Dasein’s

being in the world. Or to be more precise, such a view indicates that, given the sort of being from

which presence-at-hand is derived, namely, the sort of being of readiness-to-hand, it must be able

to emerge and become actual at least once in Dasein’s life. To this extent, the possibility of those

so-called higher-level capacities is a possibility in the sense of non-accidental potentiality, the

origin of which ought to be found on the level of a circumspective life. In other words, the life of

everyday coping is so structured as to lend itself to a reflective and discursive life.

One consequence that the necessary possibility thesis entails is that animal’s life in its

environment and human’s pre-predicative engagement with handy things are essentially distinctive.

The former, as Heidegger says, is characterized by captivation, and the possibility of taking

something as something is fundamentally closed to it. By contrast, the pre-propositional life of

human beings is different insofar as it has the innate potential to turn into a life fascinated by what

is present at hand. On the one hand, human circumspective life is surely more elaborate than that

of animals: it deals with more refined tools and more complex situations; yet the distinction is not

primarily one of degree in terms of elaboration or complexity. Even when a person acts on the

most basic level, say, uses a rock to crack nuts, such an act is by no means the same as that of a

monkey who, seen from the outside, does the very same thing. For the person has the possibility to

distance herself from the tool-using process and attend to, say, the unusual texture of the rock. On

the other hand, scientists keep on discovering new animal abilities: animals can achieve various

sorts of things, and some of them may even act as if they can develop tools, plan for the future,

pretend in order to confuse the enemies, etc. But despite of all these, animals lack the possibility to

stand aloof from their respective environments and take the object to stand on its own as

something enduring and independent, short of any practical references to the subject. And unlike

what the layer cake model suggests, the reason for such poverty should not merely be attributed

empirically to the lack of a layer in animals, but must be sought within their life mode from which

the distinctive capacity is by nature unable to be developed.

As was explicated before, two theses are at stake which can be found in Being and Time and

Basic Concepts. While the layer cake model accepts the first, namely, that Dasein’s world

character is most prominently and primarily manifested in the circumspective life, it is

nevertheless incompatible with the second thesis that sees animals as poor in world and essentially

distinctive from human beings. By contrast, if we interpret the notion of presence-at-hand as a

necessary possibility, then we are able to make both theses accessible. In adopting such an account,

one not only conceives of Dasein’s pre-predicative life as the primary manifestation of a

world-forming life mode and the condition of possibility of cognition and predication, but also

takes this life of fluent coping to be sui generis in the sense that it is uniquely structured as to be in

essence open to a discursive life. While one may criticize Heidegger of his undervaluing animal’s

capacity and deliberately widening the gap between animals and human beings, the descriptions in

Basic Concepts nevertheless calls to attention an intrinsic relation between presence-at-hand and

readiness-to-hand that is often overlooked by Heideggerian scholars.

To this extent, there is not necessarily an inconsistency between Heidegger’s project in Being

and Time and that in Basic Concepts. In the former, he reveals the world character of Dasein by

directly looking into the everyday circumspective and pre-reflective life, whereas in the latter,

after a comparison between the life mode of animals and that of human beings, he takes on a

retrospective path in that he traces the capacity for cognition and predication back to the

pre-predicative life, which is not only a necessary precondition but holds all the secret to the

emergence of such a unique, predicative life. From section 69 onwards in Basic Concepts,

Heidegger starts from an interpretation of the apophantic “as”, namely, the as-structure of the

proposition, and gradually explores the condition of possibility of such an as-structure in the

pre-propositional or, in Heidegger’s own term, “pre-logical (vorlogisch) openness of the world”

(Hua 29/30, 494). However, Heidegger’s move here is by no means one of stripping away a

subsidiary layer and exposing an autonomous remnant stratum. Rather, it is a somewhat

transcendental move insofar as it is to unveil the origin of this apophantic “as”, i.e. what makes

this apophantic “as” possible. The answer to this question lies in that the origin is to be found in

the pre-predicative, everyday life, which is somehow already articulated in terms of the

hermeneutical “as”. Differently speaking, instead of a stratum completely outside the experiential

level of readiness-to-hand, presence-at-hand is a derivative mode growing out of the former. It is

true that without the mode of readiness-to-hand, there can be no presence-at-hand; but conversely,

the type of intentionality that is at work in our pre-logical life cannot but have the possibility or

potentiality to turn into an intentionality towards entities as the present-at-hand. On this account, if

an animal cannot exhibit or develop such a capacity to treat things as present at hand, then it

cannot be said to comport to things as ready to hand either.

The above discussion on Heidegger thus enables us to gain a new understanding of our

discursive life4. To treat something as present at hand and to query about it—theoretically or

ethically—manifest something essentially human and it is intrinsically possible for human beings

to exhibit such a capacity, even though empirically they do not carry it out all the time. To have a

world, i.e. to let things be, means not only that one deals with worldly things and others in a

non-reflective, fluent way, but also that one can stare at these things like a spectator, pose

questions to them and describe them. More significantly, the discussion sheds light on the human

circumspective life or the life of what Dreyfus calls “mindless coping”. Seen from the outside,

there may not be a big gap between a person’s preoccupation with a certain equipment and an

animal’s absorption in its environment, both of which can be said to be “mindless” in a certain

sense; but following Heidegger, we are able to see the uniqueness of human being’s comportment

to things in the surrounding world, which is in principle open and responsive to a further

thematization and hence is intrinsically connected with the predicative life. All these

considerations prepare us for a more elaborate analysis of the structure of our pre-logical life5.

4. The debate between non-conceptualism and conceptualism

In this final part, I wish to briefly comment on what implication the above-discussed

interpretation may have for the contemporary discussion of whether our pre-predicative perception

is conceptual or not. The debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell is of special

importance here, since both of them seem to more or less draw on Heidegger’s theory to support

their own views. According to Dreyfus’s interpretation, Heidegger defends a non-conceptualist

view of perception, arguing that our everyday life of fluent coping is mindless, or without any

reference to concepts. In contrast, McDowell holds the view that our human experience is

4 Notably, a discursive life means not only a life of cognition, as when we theoretically inquire about something,

but also a life in which we reflect upon our own deeds and consider them from an ethical point of view. 5 It is hence insufficient to merely emphasize the feature of “mindlessness” if we want to account for the

pre-reflective life of human beings.

conceptual through and through, and he sees his own view as influenced by Heidegger, indirectly

through Gadamer. An apparent question is whose understanding of Heidegger is more truthful. A

further inquiry will be whether it is possible to integrate McDowell’s and Dreyfus’s views through

a reading of Heidegger, given that both have learned something from him. In the present paper,

without providing answers to these questions, I only give some preliminary observations on the

issue.

Following Heidegger, Dreyfus argues that our everyday life experience is by no means

structured in a propositional way. As was explicated before, for Heidegger as well as Dreyfus, our

circumspective life in a familiar surrounding world is guided by a contextual whole in which we

ourselves are at stake, and such a life “consists in simply seeing the appropriate thing to do and

responding without deliberation” (Dreyfus 2005, 51). Here Dreyfus contrasts the experience of

seeing or intuition with what he takes to be an experience on a higher level, namely, reasoning or

deliberating; the former does not entail but provides the basis for the latter. In a simple perceptual

experience, we human beings as well as some other animals are able to respond to the situation in

an immediate, non-reflective manner; for instance, we skillfully use tools to prepare our food,

apologize without a second thought to someone whom we nearly push over on the street, etc. In

those cases, actions take place before one could possibly deliberate on them. More importantly, as

Dreyfus insists, since such practices are so responsive to the specific situation, “they could not be

captured in general concepts.” (Dreyfus 2005, 51) Thus for Dreyfus, the non-conceptual character

of our everyday experience can be said to be two-fold. On the one hand, descriptively speaking,

our experience in a life world does not have content that directly involves concepts; there is a

fundamental difference between the attitude in a circumspective life and a theoretical,

propositional one, the former being non-reflective and immediate, the latter consisting in concepts.

On the other hand, not only do these situation-dependent experiences lack any conceptual contents,

but they are also irreducible to general concepts. According to Dreyfus as well as many other

non-conceptualists, our life experiences are so rich and fine-grained that no subsequent

propositions using concepts can fully grasp and articulate them. In other words, between a rich,

lived experience and a verbal report on it there is often an insurmountable gap.

However, from what we have spelled out in the previous sections, although Heidegger is

allied with the non-conceptualists in rejecting that perceptual experiences in daily life consist of

bits of concepts, he nevertheless does not share the fundamental presumption of the

non-conceptualists as well as the layer-cake model it results in. This presumption is that our

non-reflective life forms a basic and autonomous level of experience external to our reflective and

discursive life. Dreyfus obviously holds a view like this, and this is why he argues that “in their

direct dealing with affordances, adults, infants, and animals respond alike” (Dreyfus 2005, 56); for

him the level of experience of the present-at-hand, which is perhaps something specifically human,

is merely added onto the fundamental stratum we share with other animals. The problem of this

approach, as was shown, is that it loses sight of the inner possibility of a life dealing with the

present-at-hand, of reflection and discursive experiences; it thus cannot illuminate the distinctive

nature and mode of existence of human beings, which is undoubtedly an issue at the very center of

Heidegger’s inquiry.

McDowell’s conceptualist view, on the contrary, pays special attention to the intrinsic

connection between direct perceptual experiences and discursive ones. One of his aims is to

underline the distinctive mode of being of human beings qua free and rational animals. For

McDowell, our non-reflective daily life is not autonomous and separate from thoughts and reason.

In responding to Dreyfus’s criticism, McDowell emphasizes that one should not think of

rationality to be merely situation-independent (McDowell 2007, 340). This means that it is not

necessary to drive reason out of the picture even if one admits that our everyday coping is so

specific to situations and takes place in a non-reflective and embodied manner. For McDowell, the

claim that our direct experience is conceptual or permeated with reason denotes the fact that such

experience is more than a mere embodied coping; we as human beings have a distinctive life mode

in that we are, as he stresses, inhabitants of “the space of reasons”. In McDowell’s view there must

be a single form operative in both perceptual and discursive experiences; he calls it “conceptual”,

for it makes our perceptual experiences “suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities”

(McDowell 2007, 347), that is, open and responsive to further discursive and reflective inquiries

and thinking.

McDowell’s attempt to spell out the distinctive life mode of human being by stressing the

pervasiveness of rationality is in line with what Heidegger argues in the previously discussed texts.

By rejecting the layer-cake model, our discussion aims at showing that Heidegger’s notion of

readiness-to-hand should not be understood as an autonomous level of experience externally

connected with the experience of the present-to-hand; rather, it is structured or formed in such a

way that it necessarily lends itself to propositional or discursive thoughts. Whether Heidegger

would be willing to call this unique structure or form “conceptual” as McDowell does remains a

question; yet it should be clear that McDowell’s insistence on the conceptuality of our

pre-reflective experience by no means indicates a kind of cognitivism.

Of course more needs to be elaborated if we wish to understand how such a form functions in

our circumspective life; and a significant part of the picture to which Heidegger himself later turns

is the issue of language. However, these preliminary observations should have already enabled us

to see a possible reconciliation between the two seemingly opposite views through a way

Heidegger shows us6. On the one hand, our pre-logical experience in a familiar surrounding world,

descriptively speaking, is not constituted by concepts that are the basic units of propositions. Yet

on the other hand, if we want to comprehend the possibility and origin of discursive experiences,

we have to find it in the mode of being, in our initial engagement with the world. These two

aspects, combined together, present a whole picture of who we are and how our mode of existence

is.

6 In his recent paper “What is Conceptually Articulated Understanding?”, Joseph Rouse has persuasively argued

that the points of Dreyfus and McDowell can be compatible because they rely on different ideas of what

conceptual understanding is (See also Rouse’s article “What is the Phenomenon of Conceptual Articulation?” in

the forthcoming book Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate). In Rouse’s view,

what Dreyfus challenges is “descriptive accounts” of concepts rather than “normative accounts”. The point of

Dreyfus is that, descriptively speaking, in embodied copings, we do not “have concepts explicitly or implicitly ‘in

mind’, and cannot take up a stance of reflective detachment while they perform well”. But as Rouse points out,

“what matters for a normative account of conceptual understanding and judgment, such as those advocated by

McDowell, John Haugeland, or Wayne Martin, is not whether concepts are explicitly represented or employed in

the course of one’s actual performances. The issue is only whether those performances are accountable and

responsive to the relevant conceptual norms. Conceptual understanding involves the possibility of reflection, and

subsequent revision and repair of its associated practical/perceptual skills, but it need not be identified with any

present component of the exercise of those skills.” To a certain extent, Heidegger has in his philosophy paid

attention to both the descriptive and the normative dimensions, whereas Dreyfus seems to ignore the significance

of the normative dimension of human experience.

References:

Brandom, R. (2002). Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of

Intentionality. Harvard University Press.

Dreyfus, H. (2005). “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers can Profit from the

Phenomenology of Everday Expertise”. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. Vol. 79 (2), pp. 47-65.

Heidegger, M. (1983). GA 29/30: Die Grundbegriff der Metaphysik. Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit

(Winter Semester 1929/30). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,.

Heidegger, M. (2001). Trans. by McNeill, W. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,

Finitude, Solitude. Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1949). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Neomarius Verlag.

McDowell, J. (2007). “What Myth?” Inquiry. 50(4), pp. 338-351.

Okrent, M. (2006). “On Layer Cakes”. http://www.bates.edu/philosophy/files/2010/07/onlayer.pdf

Rouse, J. (2010). “What is Conceptually Articulated Understanding?”

https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/jrouse/DreyMcDPap.doc