Trevor,
a quick summary and a query.

Heidegger's concept of everydayness breaks with the view of an isolated subject related to discrete objects. In contrast, Dasein is immersed in a world which is experienced as a significant whole: Trevor in his garden at Rostrevor or living at Rostrevor. In Heidegger's language Dasein is already familiar with the world and on this basis, always already concernfully involved in its projects. This is a world that scientific analytic philosophy refers to as common sense.

What is problematic about Heidgger's conception of everyday is the way that he equating the everyday with useful activity.

Rudi Hayward says that this comes from the idea of ready-to-hand. This category implies that useful things (gardening tools) always exist within an equipmental totality in which each useful thing can be what it is. A useful thing is essentially something in order to...do something, say pruning. This contextual structure of in order to... is referential because each equipment essentially belongs to, and therefore refers to, a totality of equipment.

So early Heidegger tacitly accepts instrumental reason as useful activity that sees tools as instruments to manipulate the resources of the earth. So we can have forestry in which foresters have agri-silviculture skills that are used to clear the public native forest estate for pine plantations and the development of pines and then used for exporting woodchips.

Hence we have the conflict between foresty and environment that is so familar to us in Australia. The totality of equipment in forestry is all about wood production, total ultilisation and the production of maximium quantities of wood.

So how does this account of everyday activity allow for non-growth values such as biodiversity, conservation and ecological considerations. So how does Heidegger's account allow for something that is other to the totality of equipment of the wood-volume maximising intensive industry.

As far as I can see it doesn't. And this is of concern to me because of the debate over the clearfelling of our native forests that started in the 1970s that was begun by Richard and Val Routley in their Fight for the Forests book.

If Heidegger is to be of relevance to us in Australia then his philosophy would to help us with understanding the forest issue of that time; a time when the incumbent native forests were being flattened, windrowed and burnt without any consideration for ecological effects.