“What does, however, need to be stressed is the rigorous order that the phenomenological analyses of Being and Time (I ,3) establishes with respect to these two modes: Presence-at-hand is founded on readiness-to-hand, and things come to show themselves as present-at-hand only when certain structures of readiness-to-hand get covered over or repressed. One could say, then, that in the strict sense everything is ready-to-hand; or, alternatively, that there is nothing purely present-at-hand. In what one might take as present-at-hand. eg., the hammer merely stared at-there is always something else operative yet repressed, a concealed operation of readiness-to-hand, a disregarded instrumentality. What is decisive is the displacement of presence that this analysis produces. There are no simply, sheerly present things; for everything is openly or concealedly ready-to- hand, and what is ready-to-hand-the hammer when one takes hold of it and uses it-is not sheerly present as a self-contained positivity. Rather, it is extended beyond itself into the referential totality by which it is determined, its presence limited and yet rendered possible by its insertion in that totality. But the totality is one of signifying references; it is Bedeutsamkeit, the operation of signification.' There is no pure presence; for in whatever presents itself there is already in play the operation of signification. Presence is delimited-limited and yet rendered possible-by the operation of signification.” (p.597-598)
JOHN SALLIS talking about the difference between Vorhandenheit (present-to-hand) and Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand) in Heidegger’s Being and Time circa 1984:
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