associated, this point is developed through consideration of the role of intersubjectivity in the possibility of meaning. Without the constant interplay between individuals, in which each adjusts to the other’s linguistic behavior and in which each is sensitive to being corrected by the other, there can be no way in which to maintain any consistency of usage and therefore also consistency of meaning over time; consequently a language that was wholly based in an individual’s “private” assigning of meanings to expressions in a way isolated from any broader “public” practice would not be capable of functioning as a language at all because there would be no way in which one could prevent those assignments shifting in ways that could not be kept track of by the individual concerned.
Of course, in terms of the equipmental structure that interests Heidegger, the public character of the equipmental “system” is also determined by the need for items of equipment to have a character that will allow them to function in certain specific ways. Thus no matter how intent we may be on assigning the equipmental character, for example, of “hammer” to a piece of string, the string will remain incapable of taking on that particular character. Items of equipment are oriented to particular uses and tasks to which they must themselves be adequate. Moreover, even though particular items of equipment may be crafted for individual use (perhaps my hammer is custom-made in weight, shape, and so forth to fit, not only my specific type of work, but also the contours of my hand and the strength of my arm), still those items are always available to be taken up by others with more or less facility. Tools that may be designed only to be able to be employed by one person in particular and that are made so through being keyed to a particular code, perhaps to a fingerprint, retinal image, or whatever, do not count against the point at issue here. It is not that such tools are properly “private” as such, but that they are simply “made private” through being “locked” away from the use of others— moreover, it is precisely because they could be used by others that such locking is required. The equipmental structure of the world is thus a necessarily public structure both in virtue of its systematic ordering and in virtue of the need for items of equipment to be geared to particular equipmental tasks. The space of equipment is thus also a necessarily public mode of spatiality, and thus it also directs attention to the way in which being-there is as much a being-with others (Mitsein, Mitdasein) as it is a being-amidst or being-alongside things (Sein bei).56
Heidegger’s discussion of being-with others takes up an entire chapter of its own (division 1, chapter 4, sections 25–27), but what is particularly relevant to the present discussion is the way in which the character of being-there
56. See Being and Time (GA 2), division 1, chapter 4, H113ff.