itself once again, and precisely in doing so the worldly character of what is at hand also shows itself, too.
The structure of being of what is at hand as a useful thing is determined by references [Verweisungen]. The peculiar and self-evident "in-itself" ["An-sich"] of the nearest "things" is encountered when we take care of things, using them but not paying specific attention to them, while bumping into things that are unusable. Something is unusable. This means that the constitutive reference of the in-order-to to a what-for has been disrupted. The references themselves are not observed, rather they are "there" in our heedful adjustment to them. But in a disruption of reference—in being unusable for ...—the reference becomes explicit. It does not yet become explicit as an ontological structure, but ontically for our circumspection which gets annoyed by [75] the damaged tool. This circumspect noticing of the reference to the particular what-for makes the what-for visible and with it the context of the work, the whole "workshop" as that in which taking care has always already been dwelling. The context of useful things is lit up, not as a totality never seen before, but as a totality that has continually been seen beforehand in our circumspection. But with this totality, world makes itself known.
Similarly, when something at hand is missing whose everyday presence was so much a matter of course that we never even paid attention to it, this constitutes a breach in the context of references [Verweisungszusammenhänge] discovered in circumspection. Circumspection comes up with emptiness and now sees for the first time what the missing thing was at hand for [wofür] and at hand with [womit]. Once again the surrounding world makes itself known. What appears in this way is not itself one thing at hand among others and certainly not something objectively present which lies at the basis of the useful thing at hand. It is "there" before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection insofar as circumspection concentrates on beings, but it is always already disclosed for that circumspection. "To disclose" ["Erschließen"] and "disclosedness" are used as technical terms in what follows and mean "to unlock" ["aufschließen"]—"to be open" ["Aufgeschlossenheit"]. Thus "to disclose" never means anything like "obtaining something indirectly by inference."
That the world does not "consist'' of what is at hand can be seen from the fact (among others) that when the world appears in the modes of taking care which we have just interpreted, what is at hand becomes deprived of its worldliness so that it appears as something merely present. In order for useful things at hand to be encountered in their character of "being-in-itself" in our everyday taking care of the "surrounding world," the references and referential contexts in