can be something like a not-belonging-here only against the background of a primary familiarity, which itself is not conscious and intended but is rather present in this un prominent way. The broken familiarity as broken familiarity constitutes the very contrasting and bringing into relief of the pale and inconspicuous presence [Anwesenheit] of the world. Because something like the 'obstructive' and 'disturbing' occurs in the familiar world, the obviousness of the world and its peculiar kind of reality undergo a hardening.
This is manifest even more clearly in the phenomenon in which some surroundings, especially the most familiar ones, become a compelling presence {Anwesenheit} when something is missing in them. Because the specific presence {Anwesenheit} of the environing world lies precisely in the familiar totality of references, missing something can allow us to encounter the inconspicuous extant thing. And to be missing always implies an absence of a something belonging-here within the closed context of references. The absence of something within the world of concern, absence as a breach of reference, as a disturbance of familiarity, thus has a distinctive function in encountering the environing world. We could put this in a very extreme form by asserting that the specific handiness of the environing world of equipment as the world of concern is constituted in the absence of handiness, in not being handy. But we do not wish to stop at such a perhaps somewhat paradoxical formulation. We want to understand its positive sense, namely, that this specific absence points to what underlies it as its possibility, that is, the always-already-there of a familiar continuity of references which is disturbed because something is missing, and which stands out through this specific absence.
We first see only very roughly that these characters of reference, referential totality, and familiarity together make up the specific presence {Anwesenheit} of the world as environing world, but this does not give us a truly phenomenological understanding of this structure of worldhood. We can gain such an understanding only by an interpretation of the founding correlation among these phenomenal characters, that is, by laying open the way in which these phenomena (referential totality, references, familiarity) now constitute the specific manner of encounter of the environing world. We therefore proceed to the second point of our preliminary outline.
b) Interpretation of the structure
of encounter of the environing world:
the phenomenal correlation founding
the characters of encounter themselves
Two things stand out from what has already been shown. First, the things of the environing world are encountered in and from references. The proper phenomenal way of envisaging world hood allows