apprehended. For the time being, the following question is left open: To what extent is there actually a world present in concern and why does reality mean non-objectivity?
Before settling these important questions we must make the phenomenal ground even more secure, in order to possess the structure of encounter of the world transparently; we have to see how the specific world of concern, the work-world, now appresents the nearest environment and the wider world, the public world as well as the world of nature. The question is: Where does the peculiar priority of the work-world manifest itself within the environmental whole?
We maintain that the specific world of concern is the one by which the world as a whole is encountered. Correlatively, we maintain that the world in its world hood is built neither from immediately given things, not to speak of sense data, nor for that matter from extant things always already on hand belonging to—as everyone puts it—a nature existing in itself. The world hood of the world is grounded rather in the specific work-world. This proposition must now be demonstrated in the phenomena of the environing world.
When we follow this function of encounter of the work-world, namely, that it appresents the nearest and the wider environment, we find in it two aspects of reality which are characteristic for the entire structure of the environing world: being-handy, or better, handiness—the handy as the immediately available—and the extant and on hand, the always-already-there.
It should be emphasized from the start that what we are here distinguishing in the environing world as a whole—my own environment, public environment and world as nature—are not regions juxtaposed in themselves. Rather, they are themselves environmentally present on the basis of a peculiar exchange of presence, as we have yet to see.
What is of concern [Besorgtheit]—that for the sake of which concern is concerned—that which is primarily placed under care, lets us encounter everything around it toward which it is oriented, the referential connections of serviceability, usability, conduciveness, and these references in turn then let us encounter what stands in them. What all this means: 'to place under care,' 'to stand in a reference,' and to be encountered from it, can only be clarified later, specifically only by the phenomenon of time.
If we refrain from the opposite direction of interpretation, if we do not explain our encounter of the world from our apprehension of it but instead understand the latter as based on the former, then it becomes clear that it is the presence of what is of concern which first and foremost brings to light what we in the context of theoretical apprehension designate as the immediately given. The genuine immediate datum is thus once again not the perceived but what is present in