The concrete notion of the ready-to-hand equipment in existential analytics of Heidegger

The paper explores one of the aspects of Heidegger’s existential analysis that is daily dealing with ready-to-hand equipment. The purpose of the study is to analyze the equipment in a broader perspective to widen the borders of the daily being phenomenon. For these reasons, the phenomenological view of dealing with a product is considered to be inadequate, since it limits the essence of equipment to grasping its purpose in everyday use. Therefore, the author uses dialectics to elicit the essence of a ready-to-hand tool in the historical perspective of its emergence and formation. The author concludes that in everyday circulation only the purpose of the product is disclosed, whereas the actual knowledge of its essence is mainly accessible to its creator for whom it is the aim rather than a ready-to-hand means; the concrete notion of a thing is possessed by those who know the history of its “life”. Accordingly, everyday concern with the world is not the primary mode of being-in-the-world. The primary one is the person’s non-daily creative attitude to the world.