and for a heedful being which does not measure stretches and _which is related to the world which "concerns" us.
When there is a prior orientation toward "nature" and the "objectively" measured distances of things, one is inclined to consider such interpretations and estimates of remoteness "subjective." However, that is a "subjectivity" which perhaps discovers what is most real about the "reality" of the world, which has nothing to do with "subjective" arbitrariness and the subjectivistic "conceptions" of beings which are "in themselves" otherwise. The circumspect de-distancing of everyday Dasein discovers the being-in-itself of the "true world" of beings with which Dasein as existing is always already together.
The primary and even exclusive orientation toward remoteness as measured distances obscures the primordial spatiality of being-in. What is supposedly "nearest" is by no means that which has the smallest [107] distance "from us." What is "near" ["Nächste"] lies in that which is in the circle of an average reach, grasp, and look. Since Dasein is essentially spatial in the manner of de-distancing, its dealings always take place in a "surrounding world" which is remote from it in a certain leeway. Thus we initially always overlook and fail to hear what is measurably "nearest" to us. Seeing and hearing are senses of distance not because of their scope, but because Dasein, de-distancing, predominantly lives in them. For someone who, for example, wears spectacles which are distantially so close to him that they are "sitting on his nose," this useful thing is further, in being used, further away in the surrounding world than the picture on the wall across the room. This useful thing has so little nearness [Nähe] that it is often not even to be found at all initially. Useful things for seeing, and those for hearing, for example, the telephone receiver, have the inconspicuousness of what is initially at hand which we characterized. That is also true, for example, of the street, the useful thing for walking. When we walk, we feel it with every step and it seems to be what is nearest and most real about what is generally at hand, it slides itself, so to speak, along certain parts of our body—the soles of one's feet. And yet it is more remote than the acquaintance one meets while walking in the "distance," twenty steps away "on the street." Circumspect heedfulness decides about the nearness and farness of what is initially at hand in the surrounding world. Whatever this heedfulness dwells in from the beginning is what is nearest, and regulates our de-distancing.
When Dasein in taking care brings something near, this does not mean that it fixes upon something at a position in space which has the least measurable distance from a point of its body. To be near means to be in the range of what is initially at hand for circumspection. Bringing near is not oriented toward the I-thing encumbered with a body, but rather toward heedful being-in-the-world, that is, what that being