Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Spatiality pp. 134-48

This section of Being and Time is easy enough to understand. Our most basic, most immediate and familiar understanding of space and spatial orientation is relative to our involvement in the world. There's the equipment in front of me and at my periphery. There are the things behind me, and I can think about them, but essentially for Dasein, it's out of sight, out of mind. In an objective sense, there are some piece of equipment I'm making use of which are close to me but which I take for granted and which in some respects seem not even there despite their objective spatiality. My eyeglasses, for instance. They're on the bridge of my nose, but I take them for granted. My laptop and my typing hands seem more immediate to me than my eyeglasses. That's how much I take the function of the glasses for granted.

All well and good, I think, but as usual, the trouble for Heidegger is when he or the Heideggerians try to draw deep ontological conclusions from this everyday existential phenomenology. A Heideggerian might say that this understanding of space and spatiality is more "primordial" but that way of talking is just to privilege the phenomenological reading of space over a scientific understanding. I don't see a need for such privileging. That's a kind of prejudice, nothing more.