Tools and surroundings are grasped through the ends they serve, not in themselves

Evidence

If I am typing a paragraph about Heidegger on the computer, I pay no attention to fingers, keyboard or screen; my concern streams through them to whatever it is I am trying to achieve. But then something goes wrong. The nail bends, or perhaps the whole hammerhead flies off the shaft. Or the computer freezes on me. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 233 (#expands, via linked claim)

Sartre preferred skiing, and that experience also found its way into Being and Nothingness. Walking over a snowfield is hard work, he pointed out, but skiing over it is a delight. The snow itself changes underneath you, phenomenologically speaking; instead of presenting itself as viscous and clinging, it becomes hard and smooth. It bears you up, and you slide flowingly over it, as easily as the notes of Nausea’s jazz song. He added that he was curious about waterskiing, a new invention which he had heard of but not tried. Even on snow, you left a line of ski marks behind you; in water, you left nothing. That was the purest pleasure Sartre could imagine. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 390 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something. I don’t tend to contemplate things; I pick them up and act on them. If I hold a hammer, it is not normally to ‘stare at the hammer-Thing’, as Heidegger puts it. (He uses the lovely word das Hammerding.) It is to go to work hammering nails. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 213 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The other as object is grasped through the tool-world he organizes around himself; Manufactured objects channel the user’s possible movements toward ends built into their design.; Tools disappear from awareness during successful use but surface when they fail. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 233 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Tools disappear from awareness during successful use but surface when they fail. #expands (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 233
• A person’s mode of engaging a surface changes how that surface phenomenologically appears. #exemplifies (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 390
• Everyday Being is practical engagement with tools, not detached contemplation #corroborates (0.88) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 213
• Failures flip tools from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand objects. #complicates (0.85)
• An object’s being shifts between use and detached observation. #complicates (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 215
• Action modifies the being of things, not just their appearance #complicates (0.75)