ontologically—and that means also its being-in-the-world—initially in terms of those beings and their being which it itself is not, but which it encounters "within" its world.*
Both in Dasein and for it, this constitution of being is always already somehow familiar. If it is now to be recognized, the explicit cognition that this task implies takes itself (as a knowing of the world) as the exemplary relation of the "soul" to the world. The cognition [59] of world (νοεῖν)---or addressing oneself to the "world" and discussing it (λόγος)-thus functions as the primary mode of being-in-the-world even though being-in-the-world is not understood as such. But because this structure of being remains ontologically inaccessible, yet is ontically experienced as the "relation" between one being (world) and another (soul), and because being is initially understood by taking beings as innerworldy beings for one's ontological support, one tries to conceive the relation between world and soul as grounded in these beings and in the sense of their being; that is, as objective presence. Although it is experienced and known pre-phenomenologically, being-in-the-world is invisible if one interprets it in a way that is ontologically inadequate. One is just barely acquainted with this constitution of Dasein only in the form given by an inadequate interpretation—and indeed, as something obvious. In this way it then becomes the "evident" point of departure for the problems of epistemology or a "metaphysics of knowledge." For what is more obvious than the fact that a "subject'' is related to an " object" and the other way around? This "subject-object-relation" must be presupposed. But that is a presupposition which, although it is inviolate in its own facti.city, is truly fatal, perhaps for that very reason, if its ontological necessity and especially its ontological meaning are left in obscurity.
Thus the phenomenon of being-in has for the most part been represented exclusively by a single exemplar-knowing the world. This has not only been the case in epistemology; for even practical behavior has been understood as behavior which is not theoretical and "atheoretical." Because knowing has been given this priority, our understanding of its ownmost kind of being is led astray, and thus being-in-the-world must be delineated more precisely with reference to knowing the world, and must itself be made visible as an existential "modality" of being-in.
§ 13. The Exemplification of Being-in in a Founded Mode: Knowing the World
If being-in-the-world is a fundamental constitution of Dasein, and one in which it moves not only in general but especially in the mode of
* A subsequent interpretation.