In the previous chapters of Division 1, Heidegger looked at the meaning of Dasein’s “being-in-the world.” In preliminary fashion, he gave an account of our “being-in” that rejected the idea of a “bare perceptual cognition” (95). Instead, our primary mode of world-relation, and the basis for our intimacy with the world, was found to be a practical one, seen to reside in a “concern which manipulates things and puts them to use” (95). However, this “practical engagement” notion remained abstract. In this chapter, Heidegger aims to describe in more concrete terms what this practical relation involves and what it signifies philosophically.

As he explains, in our pragmatic dealings with the world, we do not first encounter “things.” Rather we find what Heidegger calls “equipment” ready to use, “ready-to-hand.” This is not to be thought of in terms of distinct “items of equipment,” such as knives, pans, or chopping boards. On the contrary: “To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is” (97). In other words, with the ready-to-hand, what we primarily encounter is a network of interconnected relations, or a matrix, of equipment.