213
structure with conceptual rigor only against the background of the entity which understands and discovers in understanding. I cannot pursue these structures any further here; they only aim to demonstrate that being a sign, the being of a source, of testimony, and the like is grounded in this, that there is something like a world, a world whose mode of encounter and of being is meaningfulness; and that the access to what is indicated and going along with its indication is an environmental understanding, and this always also means an understanding of the in-being in this world, which is grounded in the understanding of Dasein itself.
With regard to the phenomenon of relation and its relationship of being to reference, sign and meaningfulness, it must be said that, as the formal structural element, relation is accessible at all times in references and signs. It is accessible specifically by way of a disregard, not only of the concretion and material content of these phenomena, but also that it is itself an indicating and referring of the relational kind, in order to let us see only the empty in-order-to. The apprehension of pure relations as such is a supreme way, but at the same time also the emptiest way of objectifying entities. It is a making present which does not go along with references and sign-taking in a primary way; rather, it only looks at and thus takes in the whole as a whole of relations.
Some things should be said about meaningfulness by way of summary. Being-in-the-world as concerned understanding lets us encounter something self-signifying in self-meaning. This self-signifying meaning [sich deutendes Bedeuten] constitutes meaningfulness and is the presence of the world, insofar as it is discovered in understanding concern. Presence {Anwesenheit} of the world is the worldhood of the world as meaningfulness. The correlations of meaning which we now take as references are not a subjective view of the world, which in addition and to begin with would still be something else, for instance, an initially immediate world, which then would refer to something else for the preoccupation with it. Rather, concern itself is the being of the entity, which is only in this way and has no other being.
If the world hood of the world is defined as a totality of references, this should not be misunderstood as saying that the environmental things, the 'substances,' are now dissolved into lawlike correlations of functions. Instead, the specification of reference as meaning points to the appresentational sense of references. This sense is what it is only in its grounding in the presence of what is of concern, of the work-world. As I have already emphasized, all further understanding will go back to the phenomenon of the presence of what is of concern in the authentic sense, to the analysis of being-in-the-world in its particular sense as concern, which has the mode of being of pure letting-become-present