as concern. This work to be taken care of is thus itself, more accurately seen, a work-world. In order to grasp the specific constitutive function of work-world hood for the 'reality' of the environing world, it is necessary for us to make the relations of this work-world to the environing world stand out more sharply.
The work-world is defined in the work. But the work, in accord with the kind of being it has, is itself in the character of 'conducive to.' The shoe is for wearing, the table for use, the clock for telling time. Once again, the what-for of its usability is discovered along with the work itself. Indeed, it is what it is only on the basis of this its usability, and this specific usability is what then in turn prescribes and modifies the manner of production, such that we distinguish alarm clock, stopwatch, and the like.
In simple craft conditions, every single work even has within it a reference to the particular prospective wearer and user. The work is as it were tailored to his body. Some goods are still custom-made and not mass-produced for the average "cross-section." Mass-produced articles themselves do not lack reference, but it is quite generic; they have an indeterminacy, an arbitrariness, but they nevertheless have a reference to indeterminate others. What is of primary importance here is not the variety of modifications in content which arise, but the already given context of being from which they arise and which characterizes the presence of the work to be produced in concern.
Along with the usability of the work, the work-world at the same time appresents the world in which users and consumers live, and in this way it appresents them too. In this relation, my own environing world is appresented as at the same time entering into a public world. More accurately, this public world is always already there with the work to be provided; because of it we encounter the work-world in a salient way. The boundary between my own environing world and a public one can be defined by modes of a varied disposability and by locality. The room in which I attend to my concern as a room in a house can belong to another; my environing world can be such that another disposes of it to some extent. To begin with, however, we ought not to bring these distinctions into our analysis. But what does matter now is to see the peculiarly unaccentuated manner of these relations between my own environing world and the public environment and first of all only this one relation, that my own and nearest work-world appresents a wider and public world not only occasionally, when I think of it, but essentially. The public world is included in the very sense of the work and its usability, even though it is not itself known.
But the work-world essentially shows still other relations which belong to its worldhood. A craftsman's work, the shoe, is in its sense