The characteristics of the mode of being of the hammer’s utility are not intrinsic to the hammer – they are contextual to the entity that would use it and the world in which it would be used. This object only becomes a hammer when it is recognized to be a hammer by someone who knows what it is used for and lives in a world which would allow it to be used. But those intrinsic characteristics do not make it a hammer. It has heaviness, it has smoothness on its surfaces, etc. The ‘substance’ of the hammer has intrinsic properties. As a substance, a hammer is a piece of wood with another piece of shaped metal on one end. The second mode of being is utility and this has to do with “being for something.” It is the mode of being a tool or equipment. The properties of a substance are intrinsic to that substance. It has certain properties and characteristics.

A substance is a kind of stuff and that stuff has certain properties and characteristics. Substance was one of them and the other two could be thought of as utility and existence. Martin Heidegger believed that there were actually three modes of being. In either case mind or matter are both thought of in terms of being a substance – a kind of stuff. An idealist believes that the stuff that the universe is made up of is mind. A materialist believes that the stuff that the entire universe is made of is physical in nature. This doesn’t make you necessarily a materialist. In other words, we live in a universe made of ‘stuff’ of one kind or another. All of reality was made up of substances. Martin Heidegger, the 20 th century German philosopher, believed that for thousands of years human beings had misidentified the nature of what it means ‘to be.” From the time of the great Greek thinkers the fundamental nature of ‘being’ was thought to be substance.

Heidegger being