An analogue is the statement, "body is extended," which is a statement of essence and not a statement of fact; the statement does not say that one particular body or other is extant. The statement about transcendence is an existential (ontological) assertion, and not an existentiell (ontic) assertion.
To be sure, all this only serves to define, in principle, the meaning of the statement and to remove distortive interpretations. But what it means as to content is not yet clear, and here we need patience, step-by-step preparatory work, and especially the will to look toward that to which our indications point. The statement, "it belongs to the essence of Dasein that it is in the world," means that it is in fact extant among other things. Contrariwise, the statement that being-in-the-world belongs to the essence of Dasein characterizes its essential constitution. In both cases "world" means something fundamentally different. What is therefore decisive is, first: What does world mean (as a wherein)? Second: What is meant here by being-in?
The statement, "Dasein has, as the basic constitution of its being, a being-in-the-world," is thus supposed to be a statement of essence. It implies that Dasein "has," in its essence, something like world, and it does not obtain a world by the fact that it exists, that other beings of its kind and of other kinds are also factually with Dasein (or that it is among them). Rather, conversely, Dasein can, in each case, exist as this particular Dasein, insofar as it has, as Dasein as such, something on the order of world.
We find, by this, that the difficulty of seeing and understanding this basic constitution of transcendence obviously lies in the peculiarity of the concept of world. We wish therefore to try now to clarifY the structure of transcendence as being-in-the-world by defining and explaining the concept "world:'
b) The phenomenon of world
Our aim is to look more closely at what is signified by "world" as a feature of transcendence as such. Transcendence is being-in-the-world. Because it pertains to transcendence as such, world is a transcendental concept in the strictest sense of the term. In Kant "transcendental" has a meaning equivalent to ontological but pertaining to the ontology of "nature" in the broadest sense. For us the term has a meaning equivalent to "fundamental-ontological."
The expression "world" has many meanings, but this multiplicity of meaning is not accidental. We must first trace the traditional concept along the lines of its many meanings, i.e., investigate all it