fetishism through a theory of signs-as-useful-indicators fails to grasp how signs actually function in cultures where the sign and what it indicates coincide and where a sign can take the place of, and even be, what it indicates. However, such coinciding of a sign and what it is a sign of does not mean that the sign has been objectified—precisely because the sign and what it indicates are not understood as two separate objects that could somehow get pieced together. There is no “objectification” here at all. Instead, in this instance the sign has not yet become “free,” that is, differentiated and detached from what it indicates. It is still tightly bound up with what it is about, what it is a sign of.

This means that a sign used in fetishism or magic is not yet understood as a sign in the strict sense of the term. It is certainly something those people make use of, but it is not yet explicitly thematized as “something to be used as a means to an end.” In understanding what signs are and how they function in those cultures, it is likely that categories like “useful” and “means-to-an-end” are equally as inadequate as terms like “substance” and “thinghood.”

Nonetheless, those people do understand what signs are and how they function. That fact heightens the need to work out in the next section a formal definition of a world of practical activity. The definition must be broad enough and flexible enough so that when we say that something in a given world of meaning is “not yet X” (e.g., that “primitive” cultures do not yet understand signs as signs), such statements will not be understood negatively but rather as offering a positive insight into what we are discussing.

82b = 113b-114b = 81b

15. The definition of a sign. This analysis of signs has lent further support to what we have said about assigning a means to an end.

• Like any tool, a sign is for a purpose. Therefore, the usefulness that is specific to a sign is founded on its nature as a tool, i.e., on the fact that its being is “in-order-to-do-something.”
• Like any tool, a sign is always part of a set of tools, a whole context of means-assigned-to-achieve-ends.
• Unlike other tools, the usefulness of a sign consists in indicating a world of meaning in which our fore-sight can operate.

In short, then, a sign may be defined as

1. a useful thing
2. whose usefulness consists in indicating and making accessible
3. world of practical meaning, a unified set of things that are assigned to be means for attaining an end.

Those three elements show that, within a world of fore-sight and practical involvement, signs have a special status. Moreover, we note that just as the being of a tool (its assignment as a means to an end) is not itself a sign, so too the being of a tool cannot be an ontic element of a tool.

Transition to §18. The questions we now take up are: What does it mean to say that the being of a tool consists in the tool’s assignment as a means to an end? And how does that underlie the structure of a world of praxis?

Thomas Sheehan - Heidegger's Being and Time