Readiness-to-hand

is not a conscious experience and equipment under this aspect of being are not subject to the traditional subject/object distinction.

Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent.

is somewhere between existence and presence-at-hand, because although useful things are obviously not human beings, they form part of the human world and have meaning only in relation to human activity.

Heidegger appears to imply that every entity either exists (as does the geologist) or is present-at-hand (as is the quartz). But there are actually some other ways of Being. One very important way of Being is readiness-tohand, the Being of things of use. Heidegger will examine readiness-to-hand in depth soon. It can be viewed as lying between existence and presence-at-hand, because although useful things are obviously not human beings, they form part of the human world and have meaning only in relation to human activity.

readiness to hand, n.All

readiness to hand