equipmental totality

is the idea that, say, a hammer only makes sense in terms of nails and wood and houses; and that my skill of hammering only makes sense in a whole background of other skills of standing and moving and wearing my clothes and talking and so forth.

I think I should explain that a little bit further because we've only talked so far about the directedness being not the kind of mental directedness that Husserl was interested in. But any particular directedness of my mind towards a hammer I'm using -- me, not my mind -- toward the hammer--using this hammer--takes place on a whole background which he calls "the world". The hammer only makes sense in terms of nails and wood and houses and other, a totality of equipment which he calls "significance". And my skill of hammering only makes sense in a whole background of other skills of standing and moving and wearing my clothes and talking and so forth.

is the whole relatedness of things. If we walk into an alien ship, we will not know what the various things are for. We will still see the probes, but we will encounter them with ‘equipmental strangeness,’ not knowing what they’re for but knowing they’re for something.

At this point, Heidegger offers an example that is both brilliant and, by contemporary standards, somewhat offensive. As he stands in a lecture hall in Freiburg, addressing his students from the podium, Heidegger notes that professor and students all use the various objects in the room, taking them for granted. The podium is simply used, not consciously seen. The desks of the students, their pens and notebooks, are also taken for granted as useful items before they are ever clearly and consciously noticed. Heidegger now asks us to imagine what would happen if a “Senegal Negro” suddenly entered the room. This unlucky foreigner might have no concept at all of a lecture hall and its usual equipment. He might be utterly confused by the podium and have no idea of how to use it. Even so, he would not see the podium and the desks as meaningless colors and shapes. Instead, he might think of the podium as an item for voodoo or witchcraft, or as a barrier for hiding from arrows and slingstones. The “Senegal Negro’s” failure to understand the room does not mean that the room is a sheer perception without any practical use. Instead, he would encounter the room as a form of “equipmental strangeness.”

equipmental totality, n.Definitions

equipmental totality