#tool-being

To remain true to the contours of tool-being quite often requires that we jettison Heidegger's own stated opinions about it. Any citations of his works are not meant as an appeal to authority; therefore, I ask that they not be opposed by such appeals. I footnote particular texts only for the same reason that mapmakers label rivers and monuments: to prevent the traveler from losing track of the landscape. We are no more obliged to follow Heidegger's own understanding of tool-being than we are to follow the itinerary of Lewis and Clark when driving from St. Louis to Portland, or to limit our uses of electrical power to those devices patented by Thomas Edison himself. The historical greatness of explorers or inventors or philosophers does not guarantee that they have exhausted their own subject matter.

In turn, the bridge as a whole is not a self-evident, atomic finality; rather, it functions in numerous different equipmental ways, swept up into countless larger systems. Usually, it enacts an official plan of efficiency, shaving ten minutes from the drive around a bay. But in certain regions of the world, separating hostile factions, it is monitored by snipers. The bridge can be the unforgettable site of a fateful conversation (nostalgia-equipment), the location of a distant relative's suicide (memorial-equipment), or perhaps it is simply stalked in a troubling insomnia. It is an object of study for architectural critics or material for sabotage by vandals. In the lives of seagulls and insects, it takes on altogether different aspects.

The wrench as reality and the visible or tactile wrench are incommensurable kingdoms, solitary planes without hope of intersection. The function or action of the tool, its tool being, is absolutely invisible-even if the hammer never leaves my sight. Neither gazing at an object nor theorizing about it is enough to lure its being from concealment.

Heidegger's error lies in the assumption, typical of the post Kantian era, that a reflection on human being is the key to passing from an unphilosophical perspective to a philosophical one. Heidegger seems to think that human use of objects is what gives them ontological depth, frees them from their servitude as mere slabs of present-at-hand physical matter. And this is the point at which contemporary philosophy needs to part company with Heidegger in the most radical way: objects themselves are already more than present-at-hand. The interplay of dust and cinder blocks and shafts of sunlight is haunted by the drama of presence and withdrawal no less than are language or lurid human moods. As a result, philosophy must break loose from the textual and linguistic ghetto that it has been constructing for itself, and return to the drama of the things themselves. Contrary to Heidegger's own belief, his criticism of Vorhandenheit does not end metaphysics, but revives it. But since even physical matter can no longer be regarded as sheer present-at-hand mass, it will have to be a metaphysics of a very different kind from that which Heidegger criticized.

I regard as irrelevant the question of whether Heidegger meant to grant the prominence to tool-being that it receives in this book. As is often observed, Heidegger himself frequently tells us that any interpreter must bring to the fore those topics that the original author passes over in silence. But even this observation misses the point, since it implies that we need Heidegger's permission to think for ourselves--what could be more oppressive than this? A philosophy is not a private introspective diary to which the philosopher has unique access. Better to think of it as a thought experiment, a process of smashing fragments of reality together to see what emerges.

In closing, I make nothing less than a call to arms: the problems raised in this book are not be solved by the traditional metaphysics that Heidegger attacks, but only by the guerrilla metaphysics that he provokes. In the final paragraphs of the book, I invite the reader to participate in the liberation of objects from the philosophical ghetto where they have been confined for far too long.

Like Heidegger, Levinas points to the ambivalent polarization that must occur even in a single instant. But unlike Heidegger, Levinas ventures beyond this total determinacy of the instant so as to offer a genuine theory of time, whether successfully or not. And it is only here that the celebrated “alterity of the Other” emerges in his thought. His claim, probably inspired by Bergson, is that time in the real sense can never be found in the insularity of the moment; Heidegger’s version of “time” condemns every entity to utter solitude. To arrive at the genuine notion of time, we need to move beyond the concept of future as “projection” (which can be easily stuffed into a single instant, as happens with Heidegger) toward time as a disruption – as novelty, surprise, imperative. In this way, the ponderous strife within every instant is challenged from the outside, whereas for Heidegger the drama that threatens any moment occurs within that moment. The theory of time becomes a theory of the Other. Clearly, the famous ethical work of Levinas arises directly from the very crisis that the current essay has described: the collapse of all songs into the mantra of tool and broken tool. There is a sense in which Heidegger’s avoidance of ethics goes hand in hand with his surprising avoidance of the question of time.

There is always an unsounded suprlus in the things