Seeing things

Here is a great blog on Merleau-Ponty with some lively (though sometimes needlessly tedious, thanks to people who know too much) discussion of his Phenomenology of Perception. Also some exciting, great previews of a much needed re-translation of the work by the author of the blog, Sean Kelly. This is probably the most important thing going on in the world of books in American philosophy--all sorts of cognitive neuroscientists will be able to really see how pertinent Merleau-Ponty (and "existential" interpretations of the lived-body and physicality in general, perhaps even the "world" as a phenomenon and not as a collection of things) really is.

The ready-at-hand, phusis, and physis

We know that the ready-at-hand is related to things in the world, and we have sort of established what a world is, but we still don't know what the hell Heidegger is up to with his term Vorhanden. We saw Heidegger say the following in my last entry:

The Greeks had an appropriate term for "things:" pragmata--that is to say, that which one has to do with in one's concernful dealings (praxis). But ontologically the specifically "pragmatic" character of the pragmata is just what the Greeks left in obscurity (Being and Time, 96-7).

Essentially, what I was suggesting--though did not really bring to the fore explicitly--was that Heidegger here meant that because the Greeks were closer to the phenomenon of Being, they left the "pragmatic character" of pragmata vague. This is why he thinks that his investigation of things in the world must lay this character out clearly: it must not only bring back the Greek closeness to Being, but also do so more rigorously so as to actually bring it to explicitness. This is also why this is not a return to the Greeks in any way: Heidegger is saying precisely what was left unsaid by the Greeks, and in a more coherent and acute way. But bringing in the Greeks serves a specific function not only for Heidegger, but for us, who understand him. In the end I was getting at this: it is only by seeing Heidegger's analysis of the "ready-at-hand" as this bringing to language of a concealed Greek experience of Being in the pragmata that we fully understand what Heidegger means by his term "Vorhanden," and, I suggested, why he feels he must coin this word rather than adopt a new one. We must take Heidegger's clue that there is a better word for things within the world than the "ready-at-hand," and that the Greeks possessed this word. This will allow us to grasp the central thrust of his remarks as well as the deficiency of the term "Vorhanden." Knowing not only what is signified by this term, but why the term in its current construction is insufficent and odd will fully bring what Heidegger means by it to light.
So, in order to understand what is Vorhanden, what is ready-at-hand--which we remember constitutes the world of Being-in-the-world--we have to look at pragmata. Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics (a seminar at Freiburg in 1935) gives us many clues for interpreting pragmata through his analysis of another Greek word, phusis, and its eventual derivation, physis. Heidegger says that phusis was the early Greek word for Being itself--when they were prompted by Being itself as to give an answer to why they existed, they characterized this prompting as a definite force, phusis. What is phusis, then? Let us look at what Heidegger says:

In the age of the first and definitive unfolding of Western philosophy among the Greeks, when questioning about beings as such and as a whole received its true inception, beings were called phusis. This fundamental Greek word for beings is usually translated "nature." We use the Latin translation natura which really means "to be born," "birth." But with this Latin translation, the originary content of the Greek word phusis is already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek word is destroyed... Now, what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding and holding itself and persisting in appearance--in short, the emerging-abiding sway... phuein [the noun form of phusis] means to grow, to make grow (Introduction to Metaphysics, 14-15).

This is a lot of text, but I feel it gives a sense both of what is to come for us and the correctness of what has already been said regarding the importance Heidegger gives to the Greek understanding of things. That now fully grasped, we can move on to phusis. Let us get a general sense of the assumptions required to grasp its distinctive character before we return to exactly what Heidegger says here.
For the Greeks, what prompted them to exist and answer the question as to their existence was a character of the atmosphere around them itself, an aspect of what was around them always, a place in which they found themselves always: the environment was the means to their answering this question such that they took it alone as this questioning force (that is, as Being, the being of beings, the beingness of beings--this is why Heidegger says the Greek word for "being" as well as "Being" is phusis) itself. Something in the world was what asked the question of Being--it was Being precisely in this sense. A Greek would be maneuvering through her or his environment and doing her or his thing, and would be confronted by phusis such that she or he felt like it was asking them--and not only them but the entirety of the existing itself--a question as to why and how they existed, whether that existence had any justification. This phusis inhered in the environment or atmosphere essentially as its chief characteristic, as what brought the questionability of whatever existed in that place before them most fundamentally.
Now, as we know, for Heidegger the "world" as he uses this term is not this atmosphere or environment. The world for Heidegger is a phenomenon that reflects and offsets the intention of Dasein to answer the question of Being: as such, the world does not really appear as like Being itself--the world is only an answer to Being or a means of answering Being and nothing more. For the Greeks, what was most inherent in the structure of their environment, phusis, was like Being, was Being. Why did they think this?
Well, let's put ourselves in Greek shoes for a second. The environment is what is encountered all the time as that which brings about the question Being puts to us--namely, "why do you exist instead of not?" There is an "environmental" characteristic that all things have within that environment, then, that is essentially like Being, in that it seems to make manifest the question most acutely; that is essentially like Being in that it seems to characterize the phenomenon of existence so much that it would bring that existence into question as perhaps not possible; that is essentially like Being in that it seems to be the most real, and thus allows a conception of the unreal, the non-existent, non-existence itself as an equal possibility for existence such that one can all of a sudden ask "why does one exist instead of not?" Now, there must be a particular characteristic of the things in the environment such that they can make the environment bring up the question of Being in this way. This quality will be phusis.
But what is phusis? As something that is most environmental, it must look like something inherent in things, since things are of the environment. What does this characteristic inherence in things look like? How exactly does it appear to inhere? In what way is it so characteristic? We have not gotten even near answering these questions in merely delineating phusis as what is "most environmental" about the things we encounter in the environment. We'll have to be more specific, especially with respect to how we come across and experience these things.
Now, when we say "things" in the phrase "phusis looks like something inherent in things" and then delineate the Greek "enviornment" as where these things set up, we are talking not about physical things and a physical environment, like a table, lamp, etc. in a three dimensional space like a room. For the Greeks, what was a thing was what was encounterable, claims Heidegger. In fact, a thing was this encounter itself--not in the sense that some subjective viewpoint "created" the thing such as it was in "perceiving" it (a la Berkeley's idealism or even the formative power of Kant's transcendental subjectivity), but rather in that something one happened upon suddenly thrust itself to the fore in a concrete way that was not in that way before (and yet occurred prior to any thematizing thought of it, any perception as such). It was this encounter in that something in it and not in you allowed you to encounter it. To be more clear: one suddenly becomes aware of a thing there, within the field of intention or--since the Greeks didn't really think of "intention"--within the field of action, possibility, potentiality. Something comes before me and I encounter it, it encounters me, it thrusts itself into my field of action and possibility as something to be taken up by myself and engaged with, and at the same time I thrust myself upon it such that it becomes something to be engaged by my action. This moment or rather structure of engaged encountering is the thing in that it is in the distinctive power of the thing to come before me in this specific way. In other words, the thing's being-there makes possible this structure and this encounter as if by itself. What I come across in my environment comes before me in this particular way, and doing so is what is characteristic of the thing itself as a thing in my environment. Thus, what is a "thing" can be said to be that and only that which encounters me: it is never a thing like a table in three dimensional Cartesian space.
If we realize all this--that is, not only the difference between an encounterable thing and a Cartesian thing, but also the distinctive characteristic of something that is encounterable as that which has a vague power to thrust itself at me--if we realize all this we can begin to see why this thing seems like "nature" in the sense of "what grows." And indeed, with this realization we begin to understand Heidegger's entire passage from his Introduction to Metaphysics such that we can begin to explicate it--all the foundations of a basic Greek experience of things has been set up.
What comes before me in such a way that it seems to do this by itself seems to possess a force behind it that impels it towards my field of action, encounters me by coming towards me out of my environment. What comes out of the environment towards me in the mode of an encounter and does so such that it comes out by itself can be said to be what "emerges," as Heidegger calls it in his passage from the Introduction, above. More: it "emerges from itself," emerges by itself, comes before me as a force that is propelled by its own essence towards me. The crucial question in order to define phusis is: What is this essence? Well, we answer with the following: the essence that forces the thing to encounter me and thus to emerge is this essence's being characteristic not of whatever particular thing it is, but characteristic of the distinctive quality of the environment as environment itself. The essence of a thing in the environment is its "environmentality."
Now, this is the key to grasping the Greek sense of emergence that is the essence of phusis, so let us elaborate upon this thought, proceeding slowly and delicately through what it implies.
Whatever comes before me with a force that is not necessarily inherent to the thing itself as whatever particular and individual thing it is, but with a force characteristic of the distinctive quality of an encounterable thing in general--this is what emerges, this is the essence of the emerging-character that is constitutive of a thing as a thing. This is why we said that the encounter itself is the thing: it is what in general is most like the encounter itself that makes the thing most like an encounterable thing, a thing in the environment--and this "what" is what is environmental in a thing. This may not be clear, so we'll use the rough and ready example of Heidegger's in the passage: the rose emerges, emerges by or out of itself. This means that the rose that I come across in my daily activities in a garden does not seem to come before me just as this particular rose and no other. What I encounter is not this rose as opposed to that rose, but the "possibility of roseiness" that constitutes this particular rose as a rose. To what belongs this possibility? Well, to the rose as an environmental thing--that is, not just to the rose itself, as distinct from all things, but to the rose as a realized possibility of that which is most characteristic of the environment, environmentality. Something in the rose seems to thrust itself as a "possibility of rosiness" at me: this is not its particularity as a thing, but its more universal quality of environmentality.
Let's be clearer. The essence of the object is not inherent in its just being there, but in its fundamental abiltity to just be there that announces itself suddenly in its just being there in that particular way--in its being a rose. Now, this essence is not really pertinent to the rose itself but it pertinent to the rose as a thing with possibility: the possibility to be itself. This is the crucial step. As soon as we realize that what is announcing itself in the essence of the rose being there is not the rose but the possibility that is inherent in the rose as a rose, it suddenly seems as if there is a force beind the rose that allows it to be what it is. This force is what allows the rose to emerge, to come to be. In other words, we begin to sense an inner connection between an individual thing as something that is encounterable and the environment that we encounter.
We continue to clarify, however. This force--the force that makes it possible for the rose to emerge--this force we have discerned must be of the envionment, not of the rose, if it is what is in the rose but only as that which makes it possible. Whatever a Greek came upon in the world that encountered him in a definite way made a point of not just being itself but being itself as an environmental thing. It remains itself, but also allows us to grasp the possibility of itself as constitutive for itself. This possibility is not confined to the thing itself, to the rose, but is characteristic of something larger than it--a context that is the environment. The opening up of what is environmental is what characterizes something as not really itself but as "growing into" itself--this is because this opening up of what is environmental is the opening up and bringing forth of the essence of the thing, the rose for example, as including in itself its own possibility--as including in itself the environmental quality of possibility.
This "growing into itself" of the environment in things, then, is phusis. It is what we most generally think of as the "power of nature," or "life," a sort of general force that unites all things in their ability to bring themselves out of the world as living things. But, as Heidegger says, calling this "life" is symptoatic of a really limited view of a much larger and much more definite phenomenon: we only have to show that this sense of the power of nature and of life applies equally to inanimate things and not even to grand sublime scenes that enthrall us: anything in the world as soon as we take notice of it, as soon as it encounters us genuinely and concretely, possesses this force as a thing. What "grows" in the rose is not life, then, or "nature:" it is phusis, the characteristic possibility of things in the world that makes them come to be what they are.
Now that we have a sense of phusis we have to see how this term relates to physis if we are to grasp pragmata as (here we put fort our provisional definition--one that Heidegger himself does not make and that we are making based on an interpretation of his texts) the manipulation of physis.
It is clear from the passage that phusis for Heidegger means not merely "emerging," but is really only encapsulated for him by the phrase "emerging-abiding sway." Why is this the case, and why have we asserted that phusis is adequately defined just by "emerging?" Well, we haven't really asserted this--we have just left "abiding" there as something yet to be interpreted. However, it is important to interpret phusis as "emerging" before anything else (Heidegger's characterization of phusis in the passage itself attests to this), because "abiding" is a phenomenon that is less dependent on the phenomenon of the environmentality of the Greek environment. That is, "abiding" is more of a secondary phenomenon associated with phusis as what comes out of the environment by itself in order to encounter. It really belongs to a fall in the interpretation of the emergence characteristic of phusis that reifies it into the term physis--a fall we will now briefly characterize.

I will continue this (with the below fragments integrated into the text) in a revision of this either later tonight or tomorrow morning. The key is Heidegger's interpretation of phusis and emergence as appearance or coming-to-appearance, which he is hesistant to embrace because it sounds too Nietzschian and is essentially too wrapped up in a knowledge of Being as presence as opposed to a knowledge of Being as presence defined by time, which is what Heidegger is trying to articulate in his opus... For characterizing the Greek that underlies the ready-at-hand, however, appearance will do fine and holding-in appearance will be a fall away from that, a fall from emerging towards abiding towards physis and the physical. I'll get to this soon.

Things' coming to be what they are is what Heidegger means by "abiding" in the phrase "emerging-abiding." What emerges is also what holds itself as what it is, that is, realizes its possibility such that it becomes itself and stays itself. It is what has come to limit its possibility to take a definite form in its emergence. The rose comes to be itself and remains itself in this coming to be, limiting down its possibilities to what it is. It emerges and abides as emergence, the emergence of the environment.
Thus what emerges is more fundamental to the sense of phusis than what abides. we can see this in the word unfolding that according to Heidegger seems also to characterize phusis and is not related to either emerging or abiding. Unfolding means primarily growing out of itself or emerging, rather than abiding. what unfolds only abides after it has unfolded. no doubt this is a process that is pretty essential to anything that unfolds, but it is secondary. it is the symptom of a fall in the interpretation of phusis.
What encounters seems to grow out of itself: this is why Heidegger calls it an "unfolding that opens itself up." It is an unfolding that is the opening of its own unfolding. In the case of a rose, the unfolding is the rose, but what unfolds most essentially to the rose in the encounter is the unfolding of the unfolding of itself--the possibility of itself inherent in the environment. It seems to "birth" itself by itself--this is the origin of the Latin according to Heidegger. But what is signified by this birth is not the birth of the thing, but the power of the birth of the thing as a thing that is within the environment. It is the environment's birth in the things that appear in the natural environment that characterizes these things most fundamentally as encounterable.

What the hell...

...is Heidegger up to with his odd terms "readiness-to-hand" and "presence-at-hand?" Since my posts have been getting tedious and long lately, I'll keep this short and to the point. I'll explicate these terms and what they do in probably three posts, and, if we take them together, we'll hopefully get a full sense of what he means.
First, the "ready-to-hand." This horrible neologism is a translation of another horrible neologism in the German: Zuhanden. Let's break it down. "Zu-" means "to," or "towards," while "Hand" means "hand," in the sense of one's anatomical appendage as well as something more like one's ability to grasp either with the hand or with one's potential to use or manipulate. So, we have Zu-handen: towards the hand. "Zur Hand" is the German expression for "at hand" or "readily available," and this is the sense that the word really has. Towards the hand: whatever is available and in a sense comes towards my ability to manipulate or use it or involve it in my existence is what possesses Zuhandenheit. In English, we say that something is "ready at hand" whenever it is there where we want it to be when we are in need of it: my gun was ready at hand when the robber came into my home and because it was so, it allowed me to fend him off successfully. My (military) general was ready at hand to deploy my orders--therefore they were carried out efficiently. This is why the translators adopt the stilted phrase "ready-to-hand," running all the words together to make them seem to signify a more integrated phenomenon.
But despite the good work of the translators here, this new word can be a bit misleading--and this is simply because Heidegger's word itself is also misleading and doesn't really get at what he means by it. Let's trace its genealogy and then specify what it really relates to.
Now, the word comes into use while Heidegger is explaining what he calls "Being-in-the-world," and specifically in the chapter of Being and Time in which Heidegger is trying to specify the "worldhood of the world." Let's establish this context concretely, then. Being-in-the-world is the mode in which we exist for the most part. It is the most basic "state" in which we carry out our lives. As beings that interrogate our own existence and our various possibilities of existence--this is what Hedegger specifies as "Dasein," what he determined as the basic type of being that can grasp Being, or what makes existence possible--as this being we produce and inhabit this basic state as the primary way in which we can be those beings--that is, as the primary way in which we can interrogate our existence. Being-in-the-world is a sort of state of our understanding of ourselves at any particular moment. But this understanding is not a superficial kind of understanding. Indeed, it is the understanding that makes possible all superficial understandings of ourselves. What is a superficial understanding? Well, "what I want," "what is making me angry," "what I feel like:" all these understandings, while essential to who we are, do not really get at who we are essentially. If one was to characterize oneself completely and fully and to only be considered as someone who characterized her or himself thus, then one would be understanding oneself more in this way of understanding that Heidegger specifies: Heidegger calls this state of understanding a laying-out of one's "mine-ness," one's most essential essence as oneself. Now it becomes clear that Being-in-the-world is the way that we go about understanding ourselves in this essential way. We interrogate ourselves as to why and how our existence is possible on the basis of our being-in-the-world. Now, what is being-in-the-world? Nothing other than what we might call "living out our life." We construct a world in which we live, an environment in which we are always, out of the various ways we see and understand our possibilities for existing, our possibilities for answering the question as to how and why our existence is possible. Put differently, we answer the question "what is Being," what makes existence possible, not through any formalized answer, but through existing. While we pursue this answer, we construct a world in which we exist and move such that it too is part of the answer. Thus when Heidegger himself asks about Being, he has to go to look at what the world is, and what being in it would be like for mostly everyone.
We haven't really specified yet what a "world" is, however. I mean, what isn't an answer to or understanding of Being if that answer articulates itself through existence? Well, the world is most basically characterized as that which is not Dasein but which nonetheless is what Dasein has constructed for itself in order to be itself. It is what is necessary for "mineness," for understanding. It is nothing like what we normally mean by saying "world:" it is not the planet Earth, it is not what is objective and outside subjectivity, it is not any immaterial and idealistic Spirit-world of various ideas and cultures which we specify by the words "world of ideas." Rather, it is what is, most fundamentally, familiar to Dasein, to the being that understands itself in order to interrogate itself as to why and how it is possible for it to exist. As Heidegger says, "'I am' means in its turn 'I reside' or 'dwell alongside' the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such a way" (Being and Time, 80). It is this "in such and such a way," this qualifying of the world that constitutes it as a world, as what is specific to any particular Dasein and indeed constitutes any Dasein as Dasein. In other words, we all understand ourselves differently (and sometimes similarly) and what is familiar to us then, what constitutes the place where our existence seems to dwell most at home, reflects this fact and is produced as a way of bringing that understanding to the fore. The spatial metaphor of "dwelling" is apt: Heidegger indeed will use this later to characterize being-in-the-world instead of that particular term (cf. "Being, Dwelling, Thinking"). Why is this apt? Because the world is "where" Dasein understands itself, "where" Dasein is familiar to itself such that it can successfully penetrate into its own essence and bring its own existence to the fore as an answer to the question posed by Being. When Descartes says "I am," he says it after supposedly abstracting himself away from what he considered his world--and yet, for Heidegger, Descartes in that moment was most thoroughly grounded in his own world, was dwelling in it most comfortably and appreciating it profoundly, because it was that space that actually allowed him to really assert that he was, that he existed. What appeared as the world to Descartes was not really the world--this was the world of thought, of cogitation. Descartes was being-in-the-world most fundamentally when he said "I am," cogito ergo sum. it was indeed this lack of attention to the world that made Descartes so blind to his own existence and his proof of his own existence so weak for Heidegger. Interrogating his existence through this world, is what would have ensured a more grounded idea of existence for Descartes, holds Heidegger, and this interrogation through the world is precisely what is specified by the term "being-in-the-world."
So, that clarified, how do we get to the ready-to-hand? In order for Heidegger to show that specific way of interrogating existence that is and that occurs through a world, Heidegger must characterize what that world consists of. It consists of the ready-to-hand. Now, all Heidegger is getting at here is that we go through our lives essentially oblivious to and yet always answering the question that Being puts to us, namely, why and how is is possible that we should exist--let us not complicate things for ourselves too much with all this terminology. The world is what allows this answer, is what allows us to understand ourselves, is what is around us always throughout this process of being oblivious and yet of answering the question of Being. This is composed of what is ready-to-hand. Now, what the hell does this mean?
Well, Heidegger uses the example of walking into a room (97-98). Let us take it over to show concretely what he means. At any point in my life, I can walk into a room. Now, at this point, I am obviously walking into the room for a reason--I can be done with a day of work and walking into my home, I can be ready to get fit at a gym and walking into it, I can be pensive and viewing art in a particular room at a gallery, I can be a worker and rushing into a place where a crucial part is when it is needed elsewhere. All these various reasons for entering the room are my particular answer to the question of Being, that is, as to why my existence is possible. It is possible because of the way I exist: I constitute an answer by existing, by going to the gym ("I exist to get fit"), by viewing the art ("I exist to understand existence through art"), by rushing into the room with the part ("I exist to build that structure"). Now, the room itself will get constituted in accordance with this particular answer such that it will allow this answer to be. In other words, the room will become part of my world, it will appear to me and even exist for me in such a way that it conforms itself to this particular answer that I am constructing in my existence. For example, if I am urgently seeking one part I need to build a structure outside, I will enter a room and it will constitute itself such that I only see, only grasp, only understand the particular bolt which is necessary. After grabbing it, I will leave the room, and it will disappear from my intentional field, the field in which things come before me in order to allow me to exist in a particular way, the field that is my world. The room will become my world, and it will then disappear from my world. Similarly, I will enter a room in an art gallery that is dedicated to the paintings of Monet, and I will do so slowly, pensively, such that the space itself becomes my world in such a way as to reflect my intention to exist and answer the question Being poses to me. I might notice the stillness of the room, the sombre tones of its walls: all these things will constitute my world for me and will be taken up into my existence. When I come to view a painting, it will be there before me as part of my world, as something that I will use and utilize in order to construct a mode and a way of existing: I will take over whatever it represents and even see only that in it which is necessary for me to do this, to exist with it--I may only see one water-lily out of all those represented because it perhaps speaks to me more than all the others. I will then leave the room with this world there, with my world as it were added on to, made richer or enhanced, and I will carry this world with me into other rooms where I will use it and construct it to exist as well. It should be obvious that the world has no relationship to anything like "objective reality:" what is there might not be what enters into my existence. Being-in-the-world is a lot like walking through an unlit room at night: you bump into objects and they (as Heidegger says) light up for you, reveal themselves to you as there, as part of a space and a place you should be attentive to and would like to be attentive to in your trek to get some water from the fridge.
If we understand being-in-the-world a bit better, then, we can finally grasp what is ready-to-hand as what makes up this world, as that of which this world consists--and do so in the appropriate way. Let's continue using our examples. When you bump into something at night and then grasp its presence there in the form of a sort of basic awareness (that is, not explicitly in a reflective, fully-conscious way), what do you grasp? Obviously not the object as it is, but rather a perspective on the object shaded and colored and constructed to fit your intention and your relationship to it. That is, when you bump into a table in the middle of the night, you might only perceive or feel the corner of the table--in fact, you might only grasp that there is a corner there, not even that it is a corner "of the table." By no means do you instantly perceive the entire object such as it appears and is in daylight, and it is impossible to grasp as an object present there in its full presence, with all its dimensions available to you and all of its possible orientations, like in a carpenter's plan or a scientific rendering of the table in Cartesian space. You are simply getting up to get some water, and... corner. It is there. You orient yourself towards it as you continue to the fridge. You may even forget about it on your way back, or not remember exactly where it is, and bump into it again. Again it is only a corner, this time approached from a different angle. Refreshed, you go back to bed. What you have just encountered was in your world, as you existed in order to go get the water. As what composed that world, the corner was ready-at-hand, simply there, part of the means with which you attained your goal of getting to the fridge. The fridge itself and the glass of water were ready-at-hand too. At any point you approached and appropriated these things into the trajectory or path of your existence as it made its way towards its projected goal, and could access them again and again as these types of things, as means. Thus they were ready there for your hand, for your potential to manipulate on your way of forming and shaping and witnessing your world, the reflection and condition of your existence.
Now, for Heidegger, all our grasping of the world occurs in this type of manner, and always encounters this type of thing, the ready-at-hand: indeed, one could be at the height of their awareness at noon and the way one makes her or his way through the world would not differ essentially from this example. Turning to the other examples we have used (which all take place during the day and with varying moods of high awareness) should make this more than clear--that is, should make it clear that the sort of structure of this nighttime experience isn't necessarily connected to the night but, phenomenologically, is similar to the way it is with Being-in-the-world always. That is, it isn't the case that our vision is always impared such that we cannot fully conceive of the object fully. But it is the case that our awareness of things even in the daytime only extends so far--that is, only extends about as far as it does in this nighttime situation. The night reveals us for what we are, in this way--Maurice Merleau-Ponty continually uses it (and primarily nighttime sleepiness) for a setting to demonstrate his own take on Heideggerian Being-in-the-world in his Phenomenology of Perception. But let us look at the other examples.
When I am running into the room or warehouse to get the bolt necessary for completing the metal structure I am building outside, the bolt is my concern and in fact I never really become aware of the room that constructs itself around my rush to the bolt. I simply grab it and run out: the bolt appears there before me, it drops into my purview, and the objects in the room drop into my purview as objects that are merely obstacles on my way to getting that bolt to drop there before me. The bolt and the room have no existence beforehand, and they disappear afterwards. The only way I become aware of it and the room is if the bolt is not present to me in some way, if I drop it, if my intention and my existence is hampered by it or another object suddenly being there. In a similar way, I only become aware of the artwork insofar as it fails in some way to my discerning eye: integrated in an intention and an existence towards the work that seeks to take it up and be with it, it is only available to me as something there in the world when it becomes a problem for me. We will return to this precise aspect of the ready-to-hand later, but for now the point is that the objects get integrated into my world in a hazy and concealed way that is fused with my various intentions and modes of existence. I do not perceive the bolt acutely because it is merely something that is there to be included in the work I am producing outside--I need the bolt to complete my larger intention, that to which I am devoting my existence as an answer to the question posed by Being. The room too falls into place on the basis of this intention or devotion, and gets oriented obscurely around my rush to the object. A series of boxes on the left of me as I rush to a table there in the room do not really exist for me explicitly even if I see them there. My concern is the bolt, and they become merely things that are there in such a way as they compose a general space that acts as a means for my grasping it. The boxes and the room more generally are a big misty haze of means as I pass them, a blur that does indeed exist--we are not denying what is not "important to us" the right of existence--but which merely exists in a particular way that is such that they are in the background. This "way" is the way of the ready-at-hand: the room as part of my world gets oriented towards my existence and experienced by it in this way. More precisely stated, my world gets constituted as a world in its being ready-at-hand there. The ready-at-hand, then, is as we said what constitutes the world, and we understand this verb "constitute" now in the right way: those things that exist as ready-at-hand for me throughout my world do not make up this world as parts get combined together one by one into a whole, but rather they exist as a world when they exist in the particular way of the ready-at-hand. Being ready-at-hand, they are the way the world is experienced and thus the way in which the world is.
This should clarify some of the relationships between the world and the ready-at-hand, but it still isn't clear what the hell Heidegger is getting at here. Though we showed what a ready-at-hand thing could be experienced like--namely, various rooms--we don't understand what this has to do with an inquiry into Dasein and its ability to grasp Being. Still less do we understand why objects in the world have to exist in this fuzzy and intentional manner rather than as objects like we normally see them. But all these questions arise and persist because we have stuck to the term "ready-at-hand" and elaborated what it meant without paying attention to our original reservations about it--namely, that it was a cruddy neologism. What we have to turn to in order to get a real understanding of what Heidegger is doing with the ready-at-hand is this reservation.
Why would Heidegger coin this new word? It is not merely because Heidegger does this a lot--indeed it is one of the main techniques of his particular hermeneutic, his way of engaging with philosophy. Heidegger is doing this here for a more basic reason. We read in Being and Time the following right before Heidegger characterizes the ready-at-hand through his example of entering a room, where Heidegger is simply trying to give a name to those basic things that exist within the world:

The Greeks had an appropriate term for "things:" pragmata--that is to say, that which one has to do with in one's concernful dealings (praxis). But ontologically the specifically "pragmatic" character of the pragmata is just what the Greeks left in obscurity (96-7).

There is a word that is better than Zuhanden, "the ready-at-hand," a Greek word. It is because this better word exists that Heidegger feels he should make a word in German that would bring its Greek sense back into modern times. Now, Heidegger does not believe that the Greek time was any better than modern times, though many still characterize him in this way. Heidegger is not another Winkelmann nostalgic for the age in which "real men" lived; he does not wish he was Greek. Heidegger conducted an intense study of the Greek and early Greek writings in the years before and during the composition of Being and Time in seminars and privately because he realized that the Greeks had a closer understanding of the real ground of ontology than many throughout history. It is not that this understanding allowed them to grasp it better and define it concretely. Indeed, it is often their misunderstandings of Being that Heidegger finds most informative as to what Being is. What is crucial for Heidegger about the Greeks is that they brought Being, the ground of ontology and metaphysics, to words more explicitly than the rest of Western history. Indeed, this did not make them better in any way, but made them engage with philosophy in a way Heidegger thought was particularly important for his time. Their language reflects this closer understanding and misunderstanding of Being, and so it brings into the sphere of signification more subtleties in the characterization of Being and beings that relate to Being (like Dasein) than a more modern vocabulary. This simple difference is, at bottom, why they are valuable, and why they can have a word for something that we must create a neologism for.
We might see, then, the passages on the ready-at-hand in Being and Time as merely explicating in a language more rigorously interrogating the phenomenon of Being that which the Greeks meant by pragmata--specifically that which was produced in the relationship of praxis and physis, what Heidegger calls "world." I will get into this in my next entry--this is enough for now.