Hatab: Aufgehen - Immersion

Immersion is not   restricted to something like tool use or practical tasks, because it covers any form of pre-reflective engagement that shows itself in factical life (a conversation, for instance, could count). In explicating Zuhandenheit  , Heidegger talks of “concernful absorption” (besorgenden Aufgehen  ) at SZ   71-72, among other places—which I take to be central to what Zuhandenheit is meant to open up and which is indicated in my concept of immersion. Zuhandenheit cannot be captured simply by the notion of “usage” because it is the actual using that matters first (SZ 69), for which one must give first-person   indicative attention. When immersed in writing, I am not attending specifically to the pen, paper, or my hand per se, each of [3] which recedes in favor of the smooth, automatic performance of writing—indeed even the notion of “writing” recedes. Heidegger says that the “authentic” sense of Zuhandenheit requires such a recession (zurückzuziehen), even of the notion of Zuhandenheit itself, because it is the working activity as such that counts (SZ 69). Accordingly, a phenomenological understanding of immersion is not issued by the immersed activity itself, but by an indicative recognition of the difference between immersed activity and reflective consideration. In this way, the field-character of being-in-the-world is first given in the preconceptual experience of immersion. Heidegger himself sometimes talks of Zuhandenheit in terms of “entities” (SZ 88), and here tools certainly apply. But his own concept of absorption is something distinct from any kind of entity. (p. 2-3)