ABSTRACT
In approaching Chapter III it is important to keep in mind that for Heidegger there are two basic questions: (1) Which mode of being, that of mere objects or that of equipment, makes the other intelligible? and (2) What way of being makes possible every type of encountering, including encountering both objects and equipment? We shall see that Heidegger not only inverts the traditional interpretation that the disinterested attitude and the entities it reveals are more basic than the interested attitude and the entities it reveals, but he also changes the ontological question itself. It is no longer a question of which sorts of entities can be built up out of which other sorts of entities. This question makes sense only if ontology is a question of reduction, which assumes that entities are reducible to some basic substance or building blocks. Heidegger calls this whole traditional problematic into question. He describes two modes of being, which he calls availableness and occurrentness, and two modes of comportment, dealing with (Umgang) and cognition (Erkennen), that reveal them. He then asks which mode of being and which mode of comportment is directly intelligible to us and in what sense the other mode is a modification of the one which is most readily intelligible. But, even more basically, he points to a way of being called existing which accounts for both these ways of encountering beings and their priority relations.
