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'First of all, being-in-the-world is to be made visible with regard to the structural factor 'world'.
The concept of the world is not simple. Heidegger delineates four meanings of the word 'world'. Two meanings refer to beings in the world, the third is the world of Da-sein and the fourth designates 'worldliness' itself. Heidegger reserves the word for the third, ontic, sense as that ''in which' a factical Da-sein 'lives'' and indicates what he means by the examples of 'the 'public' world of the we or one's 'own' and nearest (domestic) surrounding world'.
However, Heidegger does sometimes uses the word 'world' to refer to the totality of objectively present beings and employs quotation marks to distinguish this meaning. Objectively present beings are termed 'innerworldly'.
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Da-sein's association with things is foremost a practical one. Practical 'taking care' has its own kind of 'knowledge' which Heidegger calls 'circumspection'. When things are 'seen' in heedful circumspection (not just observed) they are encountered as 'useful things' and they have a kind of being termed 'handy'.
A useful thing cannot occur singly. Each belongs to a totality of useful things, a context without which it could not make sense. Useful things occur within 'a multiplicity of references' that connect them. Significantly, this totality 'is always already discovered before the individual useful thing'. However Da-sein's everyday association with useful things concerns itself not with the things themselves but with the work (the 'in-order-to') for which they occur (indeed in heedful absorption equipment is not seen thematically at all). Additionally, in working, Da-sein always uses something for something and there is therefore also a reference to materials. 'Nature' is thereby encountered, though not as the scientist or artist conceives it, but rather, like equipment, as something 'ready-to-hand', so that 'the forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is wind in the sails'. Further, working necessarily contains a reference to the public world, i.e. to other people (for example the user of whatever is produced). And, finally, a reference to the surrounding world of nature as an orienting environment is inevitable: in producing work an environing world is encountered which gives direction to what is produced.
To summarise, useful things occur with reference to:
All of this is contained within the idea of 'handiness' and 'handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are in themselves'. Thus Heidegger accords priority to 'handiness' over and above 'objective presence'.
Yet even now Heidegger says we have not shown the phenomenon of world in this interpretation of innerworldly beings, but presupposed it, and 'joining these beings together does not result as a sum in something like 'world''.
Usually, in circumspect absorption, Da-sein is thematically unaware of the very thing he is using and its worldly quality remains quite hidden. However, there are certain modes of taking care that uncover it:
These three modes of concern reveal the objective presence of things through heedful circumspection, without recourse to the 'deficient' mode of only knowing. Through conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy we 'see' the world without merely 'observing' it. In each case 'the character of objective presence making itself known is still bound to the handiness of useful things'.
The structure of being of handy things has been shown to be determined by references (§15). References themselves are not seen but they become explicit when disrupted in one of the ways described above. Then 'the context of the work, the whole 'workshop'' is uncovered 'as a totality that has continually been seen beforehand in our circumspection. But with this totality world makes itself known.'
The 'being-in-itself' of useful things is comprehensible only on the basis of the phenomenon of world. If things are divorced from their referential context then they can be only observed (as merely present-at-hand) and the 'in-itself' loses its ontological content. A thing only exhibits its being-in-itself when it is absorbed within its referential context which, in turn, must remain undisclosed and nonthematic for circumspection. It is precisely when the world does not make itself known, when the ready-to-hand 'holds itself in', that an innerworldly being exhibits its 'being-in-itself'.
So: 'being-in-the-world signifies the unthematic, circumspect absorption in the references constitutive for the handiness of the totality of useful things. Taking care of things always already occurs on the basis of a familiarity with the world.'
This understanding of world depends on the concept of 'reference'. Heidegger shows more clearly what references are by investigating signs. Signs are definite useful things which 'refer' in three ways. Simultaneously, they indicate:
Referential totality
Heidegger chooses the example of a car indicator, which is a useful thing within the world of vehicles and traffic. This sign is useful because it indicates. As it does so it refers to the other useful things that constitute its equipmental totality. This referring (the indicating) is easy to see, but it is 'not the ontological structure of the sign as a useful thing'.
The ontological structure of handiness
The deeper structure ('referral as the constitution of a useful thing') is discernible in all useful things in their 'serviceability-for'. In being useful for something (whether that be in indicating, as in the case for a sign, or not), ready-to-hand things are necessarily constituted by reference (§15).
Worldliness
It would be possible to encounter the indicator as something belonging to a car without knowing what or how it indicated. (Though even then it would be seen as a useful thing and not merely objectively present.) However, when we associate with signs in the appropriate way we do more than comprehend what is at hand. Heedful association of a sign by each 'spatial' Da-sein results in him/her securing an orientation within the surrounding world. Instead of merely discerning an indicating relationship to other things he/she gains a circumspect overview of the totality of useful things in which the sign occurs and, in so doing, the worldly character of what is at hand is made known.
Signs, then, 'indicate what is actually 'going on.' (They) always indicate primarily 'wherein' we live, what our heedfulness is concerned with, what the relevance is'.
When Da-sein encounters things at hand within the world, world is already there, discovered beforehand together with those things: 'World is that in terms of which things at hand are at hand for us'. World 'frees' the things we encounter for our heedful circumspection.
A useful thing, constituted by reference, is freed by being (together with something else) 'relevant' (JS) or 'involved' (M&R). 'Relevance (or involvement in something) is the being of innerworldy beings, for which they are always initially freed'. Whatever 'thing' it is involved in is the what-for of that thing's serviceability. This what-for can itself be relevant (i.e. for something). Ultimately the total relevance, which prefigures the relevance of each single thing, leads to a what-for with no further relevance, whose being is not that of things-at-hand at all, but is rather 'being-in-the-world'. This primary 'for-the-sake-of-which' always concerns the being of Da-sein.
Heidegger then discusses and clarifies the meaning of 'Letting something be relevant'. King acknowledges that 'letting be' is obscure. She says that 'letting be' implies that:
Dreyfus says, 'Bear in mind that, in dealing with equipment, 'letting something be' or 'freeing something' means using it.' (Dreyfus, 1991: 96)
(Heidegger shows how a Cartesian view of the world fails to 'let things be' in §21.)