Modes of Being: Readiness-to-hand, Presence-at-hand
Modes of Being: Readiness-to-hand, Presence-at-hand

Summary/Abstract: Stress-related disorders may be said to emerge out of a complex tension established between a human being and the two worlds that Immanuel Kant postulated as being the only real, namely the immediately present world of physical phenomena and the transcendental world of the spiritual numina. The relationship is complicated by the fact that human beings belong to both these worlds, but have limited access to them: 1) they can only sift through a limited number of physical phenomena, always therefore making selections of what to perceive with various degrees of attention and what not – and here a universal principle of economy seems to be operative; 2) for them the numina (Ding an Sich, the Thing in Itself) are a) entirely inaccessible – Kant’s notion that we in fact will never get to know the numina, instead we will get acquainted with them only by agency of the phenomena; or b) only partially accessible – Plato spoke of anamnesis, i.e. of man’s remembering, through askesis, his former lives and the eternal Ideas; Plotinus talked about artists as those capable of accessing the eternal Ideas directly, transferring them into art, which became the business of copying not nature, but eternity.

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