the constitution of a useful thing, it is just as incontestable that signs have a peculiar and even distinctive relation to the kind of being of the totality of useful things present in the surrounding world and their worldly character. Useful things which indicate have an eminent use in heedful dealings. However, it cannot suffice ontologically simply to ascertain this fact. The ground and meaning of this pre-eminence must be clarified.
What does the indicating of a sign mean? We can only answer this by defining the appropriate way of dealing with things that indicate. In doing this we must also make their handiness genuinely comprehensible. What is the appropriate way of dealing with signs? Taking our orientation toward the above example (the arrow), we must say that the corresponding behavior [Verhalten] (being [Sein]) toward the sign encountered is "yielding" or "remaining still" with reference to the approaching car which has the arrow. As a way of taking a direction, yielding belongs essentially to the being-in-the-world of Dasein. Dasein is always somehow directed and underway. Standing and remaining are only boundary instances of this directed being "underway." A sign is not really "comprehended" when we stare at it and ascertain that it is an indicating thing that occurs. Even if we follow the direction which the arrow indicates and look at something which is objectively present in the region thus indicated, even then the sign is not really encountered. The sign applies to the circumspection of heedful dealings in such a way that the circumspection which follows its direction brings the aroundness of the surrounding world in every instance into an explicit "overview" in that compliance. Circumspect overseeing does not comprehend what is at hand; instead, it acquires an orientation within the surrounding world. Another possibility of experiencing useful things lies in encountering the arrow as a useful thing belonging to the car. Here the arrow's specific character of being a useful thing need not be discovered. What and how it is to indicate can remain completely undetermined, and yet what is encountered is not a mere thing. As opposed to the nearest finding of a multiply undetermined manifold of useful things, the experience of a thing requires its own definiteness.
Signs such as we have described let what is at hand be encountered, more precisely, they let their context become accessible in such a way that heedful dealings get and secure for themselves an orientation. [80] Signs are not things which stand in an indicating relationship to another thing; rather, they are useful things which explicitly bring a totality of useful things to circumspection so that the worldly character of what is at hand makes itself known at the same time. In symptoms and preliminary indications "what is coming" "shows itself," but not in the same