The Unready-to-Hand Body: A Phenomenological Essay on the Source Experience of the Ontological Tendency Towards Mind-Body Dualism

Why do we have such a strong tendency to think of ourselves as being a combination of a mind and a body? Why has this concept of our most basic constitution become one of our ontological default settings? Is this really due to the influence philosophers (Plato, Descartes, etc.) have had on how we think about our ontological constitution? In this short essay I seek to show that this tendency is actually rooted in a rare type of experience we have of ourselves from time to time. It is this source experience that “inspired” certain philosophers to work out the theoretics of mind-body dualism. Of course, they were unaware of this source experience as such. Why? Well, because this experience is so subtle and invisible for the most part. This experience is so rooted in our everyday activities that it really takes the experiential precision and acuteness of a phenomenologist to point it out in all of its philosophical relevancy.

Section 1: Unreadiness-to-hand

What is meant by the word “unready-to-hand”? This concept is one of Heidegger’s most famous; he discusses it at length in Being and Time. Unreadiness-to-hand is the counter-concept of readiness-to-hand. But what then is readiness-to-hand? In Being and Time, Heidegger discloses three different modes of Being: 1. existence, 2. presence-at-hand, 3. readiness-to-hand. The first is the mode of Being of Dasein (human beings — “Da” means “there” and “sein” means Being, so the word “Dasein” means “there-Being” or “Being-there”); the second is the mode of Being of substances or mere things; the third mode of Being is that of equipment. Heidegger was the first philosopher to see that equipment is in a way that isn’t reducible to the concept of substantiality. Substances or present-at-hand entities are what they are by not requiring any other entities in order to be, or, as Descartes put it in Principles of Philosophy: “By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence”. This had been the standard concept of what it means to be a being right up until Heidegger revealed that tools don’t fit this definition. Equipment has its very own ontological structure, which consists of assignments (references), significances, in-order-tos, toward-whiches, for-the-sake-of-whiches, etc. A piece of equipment is always part of a whole, which is to say that equipment isn’t fundamentally substantial. As Heidegger said, “Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is” (Being and Time, Section 15, p. 97). For example, just think of all of the equipment that plays a part in the process of writing: “In the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something…. Equipment — in accordance with its equipmentality — always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room” (Being and Time, Section 15, p. 97). Along with the differentiating character of referentiality, equipment differs from substances insofar as it must withdraw or become absent in order to be most itself, which differentiates it from substances since they are what they are precisely by being present in one way or another. Heidegger describes withdrawal like this:

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work-that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered
(Being and Time, Section 15, p. 99)

In this passage Heidegger also points out that we normally don’t relate to equipment in a theoretical or cognitive manner, i.e., our absorbed activities with equipment are not usually mediated by any mental representations. Instead, we are simply familiar with equipment and “know” how to use it.

Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring Thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such even in the using. The hammering does not simply have knowledge about the hammer’s character as equipment, but it has appropriated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more suitable. In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the “in-order-to” which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is — as equipment.
(Being and Time, Section 15, p. 98)

So what then is “unreadiness-to-hand”? Equipment is unready-to-hand when it has become unusable. Whenever this happens, we take a theoretical step back from the equipment and newly see it as a present substance with particular properties. Heidegger highlights three specific ways in which the usability of equipment is suspended: 1. conspicuousness, 2. obtrusiveness, 3. obstinacy. Conspicuousness is when “a” piece of equipment is broken, e.g., when the head of a hammer has become detached from the handle or when a nail has been extremely bent. Obtrusiveness has to do with a missing referent in the referential totality, e.g., when you’ve lost your car keys. The obstinacy of equipment is when something stands in the way of you finishing your task, e.g., when a tree has fallen into the street and you can’t drive around it. So basically equipment is unready-to-hand whenever a breakdown in our absorbed activities takes place due to a malfunction of some sort.

Section 2: Care

The philosophical tradition has always attempted to define humankind (Dasein) in terms of certain cognitive abilities that allow us as “subjects” to know the world of objects. These abilities, with their logico-epistemological counterpart, i.e., truth as the correctness of the assertion, have produced a distorted image of the type of beings that we most fundamentally are. They’ve convinced us that what defines us is either our ability to reason, or know, or represent, or reflect, etc., which, in turn, convinces us that we are most basically subjects or minds relating to mere objects through private or intersubjective representations. This creates a divide between subjects and objects — a divide that’s impossible to bridge. But why is this subject-object schema so problematic? Heidegger explains the problem by discussing the proposition, “The stone is hard”:

We say that an assertion, or the knowledge embedded in it, is true insofar as it conforms to [sich richten nach] its object. Truth is correctness [Richtigkeit]. In the early modern age, though above all in medieval times, this rectitudo was also called adaequatio (adequation), assimilatio (assimilation), or convenientia (correspondence). These determinations revert back to Aristotle, with whom the great Greek philosophy comes to its end. Aristotle conceives of truth, which has its home in λόγος (assertion), as ὁμοίωσις (assimilation). The representation (νόημα) is assimilated to what is to be grasped. The representational assertion about the hard stone, or representation in general, is of course something pertaining to the “soul” (ψυχή), something “spiritual.” At any event, it is not of the type of the stone. Then how is the representation supposed to assimilate itself to the stone? The representation is not supposed to, and cannot, become stonelike, nor should it, in the corresponding case of an assertion about the table, become woody, or in representing a stream become liquid. Nevertheless, the representation must make itself similar to the being at hand: i.e., as representing [Vor-stellen], it must posit the encountered before us [vor uns hin-stellen] and maintain it as so posited. The re-presenting, the positing-before (i.e., the thinking), conforms to the being so as to let it appear in the assertion as it is.
(Basic Questions of Philosophy, section 6, pp. 14–15)

Heidegger is pointing out the problem at the heart of the correspondence theory of knowledge. If an object and an idea (representation) are nothing alike, then how can they be said to correspond (link up in some sort of isomorphic relation) to each other? This problem, then, leads us to skepticism about our relation to the world insofar as we cannot philosophically ground this relation. However, time and time again, Heidegger argued that the real problem is believing that we normally and usually relate to the world via representations. This hyper-cognitive model has hidden our true ontological essence from us. Before we ever represent — we care. Simply put, what we most basically do is give a damn about particular things and people. Dasein’s ontological structure is a care-structure: “The formally existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). This Being fills in the signification of the term “care” [Sorge] , which is used in a purely ontologico-existential manner” (Being and Time, section 41, p. 237). William Large gives a great definition of “care” in his commentary on Being and Time:

Care (Sorge) The structure of Dasein’s existence is care which has three elements: Being ahead of itself, Being already in the world, and Being alongside beings encountered within the world. Being ahead of itself is projection and understanding, Being already in the world is facticity and thrownness, and Being alongside beings encountered in the world is falling. There are also two modes of care: concern, which is the pragmatic relation to beings as ready-to-hand, of which the present-to-hand is a further modification; and solicitude, which is the relation to others. Finally, each element of the structure of care has its ontological basis in temporality. Being ahead of itself is the future, Being already in the world is the past, and Being alongside beings encountered in the world is the present.
(Heidegger’s Being and Time, p. 108)

An example will help us to see the primordiality of care. Imagine yourself sitting on your couch and suddenly having a thirst for apple juice. The act of standing up and heading towards the kitchen is structured by the three temporal elements (ekstases) of care. You wouldn’t have stood up if you hadn’t (1) had the thirst for apple juice, which is the factical situation you found yourself thrown into, (2) been presently sitting on the couch, and, (3) projected yourself into a future in which you’d actually be drinking the apple juice. All of this occurs without any mental representations. We simply get up, walk into the kitchen and then drink some apple juice. We’re on “autopilot” the whole time, and we’re able to do this on the basis of our familiarity with the world. Now that we’ve discussed unreadiness-to-hand and care, we are ready to turn our attention to the unready-to-hand body.

Section 3: The Unready-to-hand Body

The phenomenon of the unready-to-hand body contains within itself the key to unlocking the answer to why we have a tendency to conceive of ourselves as consisting of a mind and a body. But instead of sitting back and merely reflecting on what the body is like when viewed as unready-to-hand, let’s actually look at the phenomenon itself. There are different ways in which the body can take on this mode, but the phenomenon of suffering an injury is particularly illuminating. Consider a basketball player. This person has spent hours upon hours practicing this sport. It is his passion. It is his primary concern. For him, basketball isn’t merely a game he plays once in a while as a hobby. On the contrary, his whole identity (selfhood) is based on his concern for, and engagement in, this activity. Being a basketball player is his ultimate for-the-sake-of-which, i.e., it’s the center of his care, which organizes and structures all of his possibilities. This care is what makes certain entities (people and equipment) matter to him in unique ways. Each of us have our “own” little world, but we must understand that these little worlds are only possible on the basis of our Being-in-the-world as such, which means that having your own world is never solipsistic. A basketball player exists in the world of basketball, that is, a little world or a region within the world as a whole, and it is the basketball player’s particular care for this world that makes certain entities and situations either meaningful or meaningless to him. It’s important to see that the body is usually and normally withdrawn for the basketball player. For the most part, his body is totally invisible to him, since it’s perfectly functioning, thus, allowing him to realize his concerned projections through its various movements and skills. The body is familiar with dribbling, jumping, shooting, passing, blocking, etc., and this familiarity is so subtle and non-theoretical that the player himself could never articulate how he does what he does with a series of propositions. Dasein is its familiarity with its world and this familiarity is the body’s familiarity with the world. When the player is skillfully absorbed in playing the game, there is no phenomenal distinction between his “mind” and his body. Phenomenologically speaking, there is just Dasein — and Dasein is always already embodied “in” a body that is always already outside of itself in the world through care. (To be more phenomenologically accurate, it might better to speak of Dasein’s da-bodiment instead of its em-bodiment.)

Now, let us imagine our basketball player severely spraining his ankle during a championship game. Something happens as he sits on the bench in pain. His care has been blocked by his body. An alterity has arisen in him. In this moment, an existentiell rift is torn open in Dasein’s existence — an antagonistic opening and separating that is also a concealing (it conceals the primordiality of Dasein’s body). The material “inconsiderateness” or the dense lack of concern of the unready-to-hand body blocks care’s projections. This obstinate breakdown, in turn, leads to Dasein experiencing the body as Other (that which does not care), since Dasein is most primordially its care. The body has undergone a transformation from an invisible home base to an indifferent appendage that Dasein has calamitously been “sewn” to. But Dasein then mistakenly grows to identify this existentiell rift with its ontological structure as such. And this is because this rift is usually cleaved open in a traumatic way. Why traumatic? Because trauma is a violence against Dasein’s existence (care) and impacts the fullness of the disclosure of its world (here “trauma” is used in it’s more etymologically original sense to signify a turning wound, that is, a wound that turns). Trauma dislocates Dasein from its absorbed everydayness to the highest heights of despairing consciousness in shock, embarrassment, grief and loss (of course, some forms a trauma are much more intense and life-altering than others, that is, some wounds turn Dasein much more than others, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not all traumatic in their own degree of turning). The trauma “caused” by the body eventually descends and settles into the background from which it silently reverberates. From then on, whenever Dasein theoretically reflects on itself, it will disassociate itself from the body that brought about the trauma. As our basketball player sits injured watching the game continue, he’s saddened and angered at his ankle. His care is now “outside” him just passed his body — the body is now the alienation of care. He even curses his ankle: “Fucking ankle! You piece of shit! Are you fucking kidding me?” Moments like this one are what led to mind-body dualism becoming an ontological default setting for human beings more so than any influence Descartes, or any other philosopher, had on us. And this tendency naturally beget another one: the subject-object schema. Once Dasein has experienced its own body as a present-at-hand Other, it’s not long before it radically and absolutely disassociates itself from all other entities as well. Out of the traumatic experience of the unready-to-hand body, Dasein retreats, or so it thinks it does, into an existentiell cave of subjectivity with private representations, i.e., the cogito, which pushes its body away from it with the rest of the not-I entities. The cogito (mind-body dualism and the subject-object schema) acts in a strange way as a defense mechanism. The more primordial phenomenon of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world has now been lost. The worldly constitution of the self has been unnoticed.

Suffering an injury is just one way that the body can become unready-to-hand; there are different ways in which the body can take on this mode. Another way in which the body can take on this modification is to become ill. Obviously, injury and disease are closely related concepts, but, in my opinion, there’s still enough difference between the two to warrant a distinction. Unattractiveness can also cause the body to become unready-to-hand. The lack of beauty in one’s physicality can certainly limit a person’s possibilities, e.g., someone who’s very unattractive isn’t going to make it as a modal. Physicality in general (height, weight, etc.) can also block the actualization of the projection of care; someone who’s 6'9 and weighs 350 pounds cannot be a professional jockey and someone with only one arm cannot be a professional boxer. Age, gender and ethnicity can all certainly get in the way of care and bring forth the body as unready-to-hand. Even the inconvenient and untimely “demands” of bodily functions can interrupt care and lead us to experience the body as Other (it goes without saying that our bodily functions usually don’t get in our way in any traumatic fashion, however, under certain circumstances they can totally and utterly humiliate us, and these types of experiences are what I have in mind). All of these blockages are potentially traumatic (turning wounds).

Conclusion

I believe that in the experience of the unready-to-hand body we have discovered and located the source experience of our tendency towards mind-body dualism. The reason why this dualism has seemed so intuitive to so many people is because of the misleading aspect of this type of experience. This aspect is the concealing of our more originary relation to the body. Normally, there’s no distinction at all between our “minds” and our bodies. Usually, we are an open comportment towards the world, i.e., a unity of Being-in-the-world. We must recognize our bodies as essential to our openness to the world. Science and philosophy are both guilty of furthering the domination of the misleading aspect of the experience of the unready-to-hand body by theorizing it. I conclude with a quote by Merleau-Ponty:

Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the “there is” which under lies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body — not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts.
(The Primacy of Perception, p. 160)