This is my feeling:
For Heidegger readiness-at-hand is distinguished from other ways of being in that it refers to the immediately available, immediately incorporated, pre-understood way in which things around us are used by us as we go about doing things in the world. It is a class of beings that functions as a verb before all else: this cup is in the process of being for the purpose of drinking coffee as I hold it to my lips. According to Heidegger, to make statements such as “this is a cup” or “the cup contains coffee” require us to jump outside of our unreflective interaction, to fix our concentration on it as thing, and to noun the verb. This is what he calls an ‘ontical’ manoeuver: the cup stops cupping and becomes a cup. It is now present-at-hand. It has become an object of the past instead of a thing in the now and can be subjected to modes of understanding such as the scientific method and other ways of categorizing. In real life, we constantly jump between having things be as verbs and be as nouns, and according to Heidegger, we run into considerable difficulties when we think that things nouning are more primordial than things verbing. For him, nouning, or being in the mode of present-at-hand, is just one way of their verbing. Heidegger’s fundamental point (should be, I think) is that being is a verb and so has at least as many modes as there are forms of conjugation, which are, after all just different ways of grasping its constitution.
Unfortunately, Heidegger’s choice of words, das Zeug, which is what something that is ready-at-hand becomes when we conceive of it as present-at-hand, has often been translated as “equipment”. I think this divorces this mode of being unnecessarily from Nature and has led to a lot of confusion. Zeug expresses our process of recognizing what is ready-at-hand as ready-at-hand, it is the reflective step that nouns the verb. It is not something fundamentally connected to technology. Tinospora crispa, a jungle vine commonly used across South and Southeast Asia, is associated with various medicinal including lessening the effects of malaria and waning children off of breastfeeding. When Lao people use this plant it exists as ready-at-hand and when they realize that they are using it, it takes the form of das Zeug. Forest foods, trees for shade, rivers for washing, trees for wood vs. trees for fuelwood – all these accompany medicinal plants as being ready-at hand in cultures that still interact with wild things for their livelihoods. The reason why we can become absorbed in technology and its’ circle of references is because we already have the ability to interact with different things in nature in this way. These networks of signification are always developing in these people’s ready-at-hand natural worlds. In fact, that something is ready-at-hand for something else is totally pervasive: we see that the tree, while being shade for us is simultaneously being house for bird. The growth of the technological network of signification that Heidegger talks about replaces the ecological network of signification eventually shrowding it out completely from our way of being-in-the-world.
