us to encounter the world first rather than an isolated thing. This points to a priority of the reference over the thing which shows itself in the reference. The mode of access is concerned preoccupation and not a free-floating and isolated perception of the thing. The view that reality can be found in bodily presence and this in turn in the isolated thing of nature will even more strikingly prove to be a phenomenal and so a phenomenological deception.

On the other hand, however, it turned out that, second, it is really an absence in a distinctive sense which is constitutive for encountering an otherwise inconspicuous world, specifically absence understood here not in an arbitrary formal sense but the specific absence within the world of concern. But this means that absence has this function of encounter on the basis of the world always already being present. The breach in reference (when something is missing) is what it is only as a breach of a totality of references. This however implies that encountering the things of the environing world in their references comes about from a totality of references. This already indicates a certain structural correlation among the characters mentioned, namely, that it is the references which let things be present and that the references in turn become present or appresented through the referential totality. The apprehensibility and the objectivity of a thing is grounded in the encounter of the world, but objectivity is not a presupposition for the encounter. The very nearest thing which is on hand is there in its 'there' only from an 'already there' which accompanies and precedes it. This does not mean that in fact there are always some things on hand and we can proceed from the nearest one to another one. It means rather that it is a world which appresents a thing of the world. It is not world-things taken as real things which put together reality.

It is now a matter of discerning this peculiar structural correlation in which the world in its world hood appresents the specific thing of the world, references are encountered in a totality of references and individual things are encountered in the references. It is to be shown that the environing world of concern has a distinctive function in the constitution of world hood in general, and that it lets us encounter the world precisely in a double direction, first relating to the presence of the nearest available things and then relating to the presence of extant things always already on hand. The analysis of the structure of encounter of world hood is accordingly divided into three parts: α) a more detailed phenomenological interpretation of the environing world of concern, which up to now has been drawn out only in very rough outline. We shall call this specific environing world of concern the work-world; β) the characterization of the specific function of encounter of this work-world for encountering the nearest things in the world around us, thus the sense of this specific character of reality, the character referred