environment any longer. It is only when we absent ourselves from the environing world by stepping out of it, as it were, that we gain access to the presumably authentic reality of the primary thing of nature. The mode of encounter of the natural thing in the character of bodily presence, a characteristic obtrusiveness which things of the world show insofar as they are merely perceived, this character of bodily presence has its basis in a specific "unworlding" of the environing world, a deprivation of its worldhood. Nature as object of natural science is in general discovered only in such an "unworlding." But the reality of the environing world is not a diminished bodily presence, a degraded nature.
Against this analysis of the founded sense of bodily presence, which is founded in handiness, which in turn is founded in the non-emergence of referential relations, and in turn again in the intimate presence of what is of concern, it can be objected that one can nonetheless let a pure thing be encountered at any time and directly in its naked bodily presence. One does not first need the performance of an initially unreflective concern. In other words, the founding connection is not at all necessary. This objection, that bodily presence is not a founded phenomenon since one does not have to run through the individual steps of founding it, is no objection at all, but perhaps only the unbiased confirmation of the phenomenal state of affairs which grounded our assertion that bodily presence is founded. In order to see this, it should be noted that the explicitness and the awareness of the modes of being and their ontological foundation in the course of being do not decide on what belongs to the phenomenal composition of a structure of being. The fact that I know nothing about a particular founding connection in the enactment of a way of being cannot be taken as justification for the conclusion that this founding connection is not constitutive for that way of being. Explicitness and awareness do not decide on these matters. Rather, the very lack of explicitness in traversing this course, the very lack of an awareness of going along with the founding steps is characteristic of all concerned being-in-the-world, inasmuch as we define it as absorption in the world, being drawn in by it. For why can I let a pure thing of the world be encountered at all in bodily presence? Only because the world is already there in thus letting it be encountered, because letting-it-be-encountered is but a particular mode of my being-in-the-world and because world means nothing other than what is always already present for the entity in it. I can see a natural thing in its bodily presence only on the basis of this being-in-the-world. I can means that I have this possibility at my disposal, and this possibility is of course nothing other than the basic constitution of my Dasein, of my I of which I am capable, to wit, that I am in the world. It is utterly unthinkable how something, a natural