were, along certain portions of one's body—the soles of one's feet. And yet it is farther remote than the acquaintance whom one encounters 'on the street' at a 'remoteness' ["Entfernung"] of twenty paces when one is taking such a walk. Circumspective concern decides as to the closeness and farness of what is proximally ready-to-hand environmentally. Whatever this concern dwells alongside beforehand is what is closest, and this is what regulates our de-severances.
If Dasein, in its concern, brings something close by, this does not signify that it fixes something at a spatial position with a minimal distance from some point of the body. When something is close by, this means that it is within the range of what is proximally ready-to-hand for circumspection. Bringing-close is not oriented towards the I-Thing encumbered with a body, but towards concernful Being-in-the-world-that is, towards whatever is proximally encountered in such Being. It follows, moreover, that Dasein's spatiality is not to be defined by citing the position at which some corporeal Thing is present-at-hand. Of course we say that even Dasein always occupies a place. But this 'occupying' must be distinguished in principle from Being-ready-to-hand at a place in some particular region. Occupying a place must be conceived as a desevering of the environmentally ready-to-hand into a region which has been circumspectively discovered in advance. Dasein understands its "here" [Hier] in terms of its environmental "yonder". The "here" does not mean the "where" of something present-at-hand, but rather the "whereat" [Wobei] of a de-severant Being-alongside, together with this de-severance. Dasein, in accordance with its spatiality, is proximally never here but yonder ; from this "yonder" it comes back to its "here" ; and it comes back to its [108] "here" only in the way in which it interprets its concernful Being-towards in terms of what is ready-to-hand yonder. This becomes quite plain if we consider a certain phenomenal peculiarity of the de-severance structure of Being-in.
As Being-in-the-world, Dasein maintains itself essentially in a desevering. This de-severance—the farness of the ready-to-hand from Dasein itself—is something that Dasein can never cross over. Of course the remoteness of something ready-to-hand from Dasein can show up as a distance from it,1 if this remoteness is determined by a relation to some Thing which gets thought of as present-at-hand at the place Dasein has formerly occupied. Dasein can subsequently traverse the "between" of this distance, but only in such a way that the distance itself becomes one which has been desevered*. So little has Dasein crossed over its de-severance that it has rather taken it along with it and keeps doing so constantly; for
1 '. . . kann zwar selbst von diesem als Abstand vorfindlich werden . . .'