4.2 CONTEMPLATING THE THINGS WHICH ARE GIVEN TO US
To deal with things, man dwells in the world alongside the innerworldly things with which he gets involved. He can, however, also withdraw from any involvement with things by distancing himself from every practical or technical comportment towards beings, by merely observing them and looking at them. Instead of dwelling alongside things, man thus merely tarries along with them. Heidegger says:
When we are using a tool, we can say, for instance, that the hammer is too heavy or too light. But this proposition can also mean that the entity before us, has a weight—that is to say, it has the ‘property’ of heaviness. When this kind of talk is so understood, it is no longer spoken within the horizon of an equipmental totality and its involvement-relationships. What is said has been drawn from looking at what is suitable for the hammer, not as a tool, but as a corporeal Thing subject to the law of gravity. To talk of ‘too heavy’ or ‘too light’ no longer has any meaning; that is to say, the entity itself, as we encounter it, gives us nothing with relation to which it could be ‘found’ too heavy or too light. The heavy hammer shows itself differently because we are looking at the ready-to-hand thing which we encounter, and looking at it ‘in a new way’ as something present-at-hand. The understanding of Being by which our dealings with entities within the world have been guided has changed over. In the physical assertion that 'the hammer is heavy' we overlook not only the tool-character of the entity we encounter, but also something that belongs to any ready-to-hand equipment: its place. It becomes a matter of indifference; its place becomes a spatio-temporal position, a ‘world point’, which is in no way distinguished from any other.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time