sense of something merely occurring which is added to what is already objectively present. "What is coming" is something which we expect or "didn't expect'' insofar as we were busy with other things. What has happened and occurred becomes accessible to our circumspection through signs after it has already happened. Signs indicate what is actually "going on." Signs always indicate primarily "wherein" we live, what our heedfulness is concerned with, what relevance it has.
The peculiar character of useful things as signs becomes especially clear in "establishing a sign." This happens in and through a circumspect anticipation which needs the possibility at hand of letting the actual surrounding world make itself known for circumspection through something at hand at any time. But the character of not emerging and keeping to itself, which we described, belongs to the being of innerworldy beings at hand closest to us. Thus circumspect dealings in the surrounding world needs a useful thing at hand which, in its character of being a useful thing, takes over the "work" of letting things at hand become conspicuous. Accordingly, the production of such useful things (signs) must take their conspicuousness into consideration. But even as conspicuous things, they are not taken as objectively present arbitrarily, rather they are "set up" in a definite way with a view toward easy accessibility.
But establishing signs does not necessarily have to come about in such a way that a useful thing at hand which was not yet present at all is produced. Signs also originate when something already at hand is taken as a sign. In this mode establishing a sign reveals a still more primordial meaning. Indicating not only creates the circumspectly oriented availability of a totality of useful things and the surrounding world in general; establishing a sign can even discover something for the first time. What is taken as a sign first becomes accessible through its handiness. For example, when the south wind is "accepted" by the farmer as a sign of rain, this "acceptance" or the "value attached" to this being is not a kind of bonus attached to something already objectively present, that is, the movement of the wind and a certain geographical direction. As this mere occurrence which is meteorologically accessible, the south wind is never initially something objectively present that occasionally takes on the function of an omen. Rather, the [81] farmer's circumspection first discovers the south wind in its being by taking the lay of the land into account.
But, one will protest, what is taken as a sign must, after all, first have become accessible in itself and must be grasped before the sign is established. To be sure, it must already be there in some way or another. The question simply remains how beings are discovered in this preliminary encounter, whether as something merely occurring and not rather as an uncomprehended kind of useful thing, a thing at