Philanthro
Often when reading Heidegger he takes weird roots to clarify other stuff.
Zeug and Werkzeug are very specific words for Heidegger.
The first can be translated more or less as thing, but this is the word Heidegger chooses in Being and Time to refer to things as they appear in the human-world. Das Zeug.
As a technical term it usually rather means useful thing. In spanish it is translated as Utensil.
Heidegger writes in a trivial manner, but then invents fancy words from that trivial meaning.
Can we describe the organ as a useful thing?
We cannot describe machines and organs as equipment, we need to use that idea to better characterise the essence of the animal.
Major contribution of Being and Time: the fact that there is no individual useful thing, it cannot exist by itself – if it is useful it is useful for something. Any thing that is useful directs you towards something else and it is placed within a network of significance of meaning. The cup is not just a cup for any by itself but it serves the purpose of drinking coffee which serves the purpose of giving a good lecture and so on. Everything is pointing towards other things. This pointing-towards-other-things, bewandtnis means that things are always embedded in a network of significance. It comes from wenden, so it is about having been turned to something. In Spanish it is translated as respective condition, the condition of being turned towards everything else.
Heidegger does sometimes distinguish world as a sum of things and world as a horizon of meanings.
Ernst Wolff: do heremeneutics til u can’t do it anymore and then do a bit of critique.
Useful things are embedded in a totality of pragmatic (in the realm of praxis) relations.
The functional network is always determined by a purpose.
Can we then describe life or animality using these terms? As useful things?
Distinction between a useful thing, and parts of the organism as more fundamental?
— may undermine this later.
Both the organism and the equipment has its essence in servicability.
Readiness, the way in which equipment can be servicable.
As equipment the pen is ready for writing but it has no capacity for writing.
Organism have functions of self-renewal, self-regulation, self-production.
Infusora and Amoeba are interesting casestudies philosophically because it seems they lack organs.
We usually think that organs give capacity of, but in amoebas there is no organ but rather a capacity, which in turn also creates a kind of organ.
The organ belongs positively to the capacity, and the capacity takes the organ into its service.
The organ stands in service of the capcacity that develops the organ.
The organ is subservient, whilst the equipment is servicable.
Equipmental being does not get any further in its being as such. It is produced and only as such.
Something like the eye which belongs to the capacity and subserves the capacity of seeing because the capacity is itself subeservient and as such can take something into service.
’sometimes he wants to be fancy and its just cringe’
In being and time, the human being is first and foremost not what it is, but what it can be. The essence of the human being is its projective nature, it is not its actus but rather its potentiality for being.