Dasein - Monoskop

HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE AS THE UNIVERSAL MEDIUM 194 SI
a hammer, and we put the hammer aside as inconvenient for some
given task. Heidegger speaks of interpretation in these cases because
in each one of them something is taken as something, despite the
fact that no words have been used: "FYom the fact that words are
absent, it may not be concluded that interpretation is absent." 189 In
order to delimit this prepredicative interpretation from the predicative
one, Heidegger calls the 'as'-structure involved in the first case
"hermeneutical 'as'", and the 'as'-structure involved in the second
case "apophantic 'as'". 190 The latter is a modification of the first,
and grounded in it, since readiness-to-hand (implicit identification)
precedes presence-to-hand (explicit identification). To assert that,
say, the hammer is heavy is to change the mode of Being the hammer
has for us; as ready-to-hand we would simply use it without
attending to it explicitly, that is, without talking about it. Yet once
we assert something about the hammer, it loses its unnoticedness,
and turns into something present-at-hand:
Something ready-to-hand with which we have to do or perform
something, turns into something 'about which' the assertion that
points it out is made. ... The as-structure of interpretation
has undergone a modification. ... The 'as 1 gets pushed into
the uniform plane of that which is merely present-at-hand. It
dwindles to the structure of just letting one see what is presentat-hand,
and letting one see it in a definite way. 191
Heidegger's point here is not only that the assertion changes
readiness-to-hand into presence-at-hand. He also uses this observation
as a criticism of the philosophical-logical tradition from Aristotle
to Husserl. Since this tradition focuses its attention on the assertion
as the central linguistic structure, it ir confined to an understanding
of Being as presence-at-hand, this being a limitation that ultimately
leads to a misconstruction of language as consisting of word-objects
and meaning-objects. The assertive sentence itself is split up into
subject and predicate whose combination then needs to be explained
via a third word-object, the copula. 192 What is lost in this tradition
is not only an appreciation for other forms of language use, but also
the basic insight that the being of language is not the being of an
object in the world. Therefore—and in radical opposition to his