An affordance is the opportunity to act that an environment offers an agent. Affordances are a function of, on the one hand, the projects, abilities, skills, and dispositions of the specific agent and, on the other hand, the possibilities furnished by the equipment the agent encounters when that equipment is situated in a whole context of equipment.
The world we immediately inhabit, according to Heidegger, is not articulated into occurrent objects with determinate properties. Instead, the basic structure of the lived world is what he calls a Bewandtnisganzheit, a whole of affordances. The world thus shows up as a shifting1 and richly interconnected context of opportunities and invitations to act. The available entities that we encounter are ontologically defined in terms of what they afford: “affordance is the being of innerworldly entities” (SZ 84). The particular affordances that are disclosed in any given situation are a function of three things: the equipment that is on hand, the kind of activities in which agents are absorbed, and of course the character of the particular agent himor herself, including her skills and bodily constitution.2
There is considerable perplexity over the proper translation of the noun Bewandtnis into English, as there is with the associated passive verbal construction Heidegger uses, bewenden lassen. Macquarrie and Robinson translate these as “involvement” and “let be involved” respectively. Stambaugh translates them as “relevance” and “let be relevant.” Hofstadter translates them as “functionality” and “letting function.” Kisiel translates Bewandtnis as “deployment.” This wide disparity in translations is a mark of the fact that Heidegger is using these words in a rather unconventional fashion, although the different translations all try to capture the fact that a Bewandtnis has to do with the way use-objects function in a particular setting or context.
In its archaic uses, bewenden meant “to use” or “to employ” a thing and it was a synonym for anwenden and verwenden.3 The prefix be- in this case probably has the force of “supplying or endowing.” Be-wenden, then, would mean “to supply or endow or offer something to be used or utilized.” The use of the passive construction (bewenden lassen) indicates that it is the entities in the world which are themselves supplying or offering us their use, so as to open up to us a possibility for changing the circumstances through our actions.4 The word Bewandtnis in the colloquial German of Heidegger’s day meant the “conditions” or “circumstances” that attach to or determine a particular thing or state of affairs. The word was typically used in passive locutions: a condition (Bewandtnis) is had with (bei or mit) things. By combining these different senses – the sense of a use
1 “It is precisely when we see the ‘world’ unsteadily and fitfully in accordance with our moods, that the available shows itself in its specific worldhood, which is never the same from day to day” (SZ 138).
2 “Disclosedness . . . concerns equiprimordially the world, being-in, and the self” (SZ 220).
3 See “bewenden” in Grimm and Grimm 1854, 1782.
4 In colloquial German, bewenden lassen means to let things be, to let affairs take their course, to acquiesce in the prevailing conditions. But in Heidegger’s appropriation of the expression, this should not be heard as involving a lack of activity – we let equipment be by taking it up and using it in the way it invites us to.
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