The multiplicity of meanings of the word “world” is striking now that we have discussed it and made frequent application of it. Unraveling this multiplicity can point toward the phenomenon intended in their various meanings and their connection.
1. World is used as an ontic concept and signifies the totality of beings which can be objectively present within the world.
2. World functions as an ontological term and signifies the being of those beings named in 1. Indeed, “world” can name the region which embraces a multiplicity of beings. For example, when we speak of the “world” of the mathematician, we mean the region of all possible mathematical objects.
3. Again, world can be understood in an ontic sense, but not as beings essentially unlike Dasein that can be encountered within the world; but, rather, as that “in which” a tactical Dasein “lives” as Dasein. Here world has a pre-ontological, existentiell meaning. There are various possibilities here: world can mean the “public” world of the we or one’s “own” and nearest (domestic) surrounding world.
4. Finally, world designates the ontological and existential concept of worldliness. Worldliness itself can be modified into the respective structural totality of particular “worlds,” but contains in itself the a priori of worldliness in general. We shall reserve the expression world as a term for the meaning established in the third meaning of world. If we use it at times in the first meaning, we shall put it in quotation marks.
Thus, terminologically “worldly” means a kind of being of Dasein, never a kind of being of something objectively present “in” the world. We shall call the latter something belonging (NoteH: It is just Da-sein that obeys and listens to the world (welthörig)) to the world or innerworldly. (BTJS:64-65)