in the world, is—as such and even in its state of being lost—a kind of being in which existence is concerned for itself. When we speak of [231] absorption in, or fallenness into, the world, that does not mean that existence’s kind of being (viz., that its being is to be concerned about its being) is extinguished. If that were to happen, care would no longer be care and concern about things would be impossible. Rather, we understand absorption in the world, in the form of concern and loss of the self, as meaning that the being of the self is modified in some way by its absorption, but is still itself in this modification.

The modification is manifest precisely in the fact that, given such concernful world-absorption, existence understands itself only in and through such comportment. It knows itself and understands itself but only as related-to-its-world. Thus the world of my concern and the things with which I am involved ultimately determine me and my being. I now understand myself and regulate the possibilities of my being (whether primarily or in large measure) in terms of those things and their involvement. Even the extreme forms of this mode of inauthenticity still contain the primary structure. In inauthenticity, I am concerned about my existence.

Given the way we understand the being of existence, we can say that existence puts itself into one of the possibilities of its being and therefore into a specific possibility of concern, and in so doing remains with its world. Concern and its object are determined structurally in terms of care itself. We can interpret the most extreme case of manual engagement with something and show that even in complete self-forgetfulness, the orientation of care whereby existence is concerned for itself is still alive therein—except that the existence that is concerned for itself is now understood almost as a thing, something simply there, something you meet up with indirectly through whatever you happen to be working on at the time.

We must remember that inauthenticity is only a modification of the full structure of care. The concern that goes with inauthenticity we call [232] “fallen concern.” In inauthentic concern, existence places itself into one of its determined possibilities of being, and places itself into its concern about things in such a way that its comportment is determined in terms of the object of that concern. In its involvement with the object of its concern, existence remains with that object. Whatever existence is concerned about and cares for, is where existence dwells. Those are the things existence has, and existence is concerned with possessing them and increasing that possession. All production and acquisition in the broadest sense (including the production and acquisition of knowledge about things), all of that already presumes a specific kind of possession, and so the one who already possesses is able to increase his possession. By contrast, if existence is to