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case that Heidegger is tracking how things “mean” to us (“how things stand concerning us”) as a matter of mattering, a kind of mattering that could contingently collapse and thereby reveal itself.

Our initiation into any historical world is primarily an initiation into this regime of mattering. When we learn a language as children, not only do we learn intuitively the rules of grammar but we learn in a different way the pragmatics of the language: what point there would be in saying such a thing in such a context, what effect an expression might be expected to have, how aspects of rhetoric work, when it is better to say nothing. Language use is normative not only grammatically but in the matter of its proprieties. That is, we are implicitly attuned to proprieties, or meaningfulness and significances, in daily exchanges with others. (Being so attuned is not incompatible with disregarding or challenging such assumed norms. In fact, it is a necessary condition for doing so.) Likewise, when we learn a task, like cooking, we learn the normative proprieties of the art: what utensils are for, how best to use them, what makes for good seasoning, good time management, best techniques, mis en place, etc. We learn to understand the relation between eating and dining, and the place of food and cooking in the rituals of family and social life. In this and in many other domains, all the beings we encounter are encountered within a world in which public proprieties have come to prevail, and we are onto these not by having beliefs about them or as a result of explicit evaluations but through being in a world, coping with the other beings and other Dasein, in our Verhalten, as Heidegger keeps saying: comportment, a practical mode of access everywhere normative.

Moreover, the greatest possible contrast Heidegger wants to draw is between his approach and a way of dealing with beings that is common to modern science, capitalist consumerism and its reduction to exchange value, and everyday thoughtlessness, all of which involve what Dahlstrom has called “the logical prejudice,”27 that only what is fit to be the content of an assertion can count as a being. The result is a kind of leveling of meaning to mere presence and a prioritizing in our involvement of only one dimension of care, efficient mutual satisfaction of interest.

Let us count up one by one the various meanings that we have interpreted by paraphrase. The “to be” said in the “is” signifies: “actually present,” “constantly present at hand,’’ “take place,” “come from,” “consist of,” “stay,” “belong,” “succumb to,” “stand for,” “come about,” “prevail,” “have entered upon,” “come forth.” It is still difficult, and perhaps even impossible, because it goes against the essence of the matter, to extract

27. Dahlstrom 2001a.


The Culmination by Robert Pippin