IV
¶ 67. The Basic Content of Dasein's Existential Constitution, and a Preliminary Sketch of the Temporal Interpretation of it
Our preparatory analysis1 has made accessible a multiplicity of phenomena; and no matter how much we may concentrate on the foundational structural totality of care, these must not be allowed to vanish from our phenomenological purview. Far from excluding such a multiplicity, the primordial totality of Dasein's constitution as articulated demands it. The primordiality of a state of Being does not coincide with the simplicity and uniqueness of an ultimate structural element. The ontological source of Dasein's Being is not 'inferior' to what springs from it, but towers above it in power from the outset; in the field of ontology, any 'springing-from' is degeneration. If we penetrate to the 'source' ontologically, we do not come to things which are ontically obvious for the 'common understanding'; but the questionable character of everything obvious opens up for us.
If we are to bring back into our phenomenological purview the phenomena at which we have arrived in our preparatory analysis, an allusion to the stages through which we have passed must be sufficient. Our definition of "care" emerged from our analysis of the disclosedness which constitutes the Being of the 'there'. The clarification of this phenomenon signified that we must give a provisional Interpretation of Being-in-the-world—the basic state of Dasein. Our investigation set out to describe Being-in-the-world, so that from the beginning we could secure an adequate phenomenological horizon as opposed to those inappropriate and mostly inexplicit ways in which the nature of Dasein has been determined beforehand ontologically. Being-in-the-world was first characterized with regard to the phenomenon of the world. And in our explication this was done by characterizing ontico-ontologically what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand 'in' the environment, and then bringing within-the-world-ness into relief, so that by this the phenomenon of worldhood in general could be made visible. But understanding belongs essentially to