A table or pen reveals a whole network of social purposes and relationships.

Evidence

By making this error, philosophers allow the whole structure of worldly Being to fall apart, and then have immense difficulty in getting it back together to resemble anything like the daily existence we recognise. Instead, in Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world, everything comes already linked together. If the structure falls to pieces, that is a ‘deficient’ or secondary state. This is why a smoothly integrated world can be revealed by the simplest actions. A pen conjures up a network of ink, paper, desk and lamp, and ultimately also a network of other people for whom or to whom I am writing, each one with his or her own purposes in the world. As Heidegger wrote elsewhere, a table is not just a table: it is a family table, where ‘the boys like to busy themselves’, or perhaps the table where ‘that decision was made with a friend that time, where that work was written that time, where that holiday was celebrated that time’. We are socially as well as equipmentally involved. Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 217

Categorization

• DEFINE: Definition of Mitsein/Being-with and the idea that worldly things come pre-linked in a network.
• ADDENDUM: This table passage is a companion to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ tree article — Heidegger’s family table as infrastructure that accumulates biography, much like the tree.
• XREF: Connects to harman’s object-oriented ontology and to the anthropology of material culture (things as knotting points of social relations). — connects to: Social relations are essentially structures of everyday knowledge — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 348; Every social relation rests on mutual knowledge between persons. — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 7456; The table functioned simultaneously as an instrument of power and of knowledge — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 228 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Diet, clothing, housing and family express social relations as a whole. #exemplifies (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1266
• The table functioned simultaneously as an instrument of power and of knowledge #exemplifies (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 228
• Objects are only knowable within their network of relations #corroborates (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 373
• Social relations are essentially structures of everyday knowledge #corroborates (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 348
• Every social relation rests on mutual knowledge between persons. #corroborates (0.75) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 7456
• Relationship dynamics dominate factual content in communication. #expands (0.72) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 135
• Character is sketched through specific physical details and social pressures #exemplifies (0.70) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 81