Introduction

1. Approaching Being as Self-Concealing

Martin Heidegger’s philosophical project, both early and late, is to ask some version of the question, ‘What’s up with being?’. This question might be asking for any of a number of things: is there some single account of what it takes to be an entity at all, of any sort—and if so, what is it?; in terms of what horizon do we have access to this unified phenomenon of being?; what feature of us accounts for the fact that we can access that?; if that unified phenomenon of being changes over time, what drives that change?; and more. Exactly what Heidegger is asking in his interrogation of being appears to shift as his thought develops and he comes to new preoccupations and insights. One of these insights, however, does not merely shift the sense of the question of being but suggests why being might be question-worthy in the first place. It also indicates why asking ‘What’s up with being?’ might run into special difficulty. This is the insight that being is self-concealing.

That being is self-concealing is an insight most associated with Heidegger’s middle and later periods. It is plausibly introduced in ‘On the Essence of Truth’ (1930), where Heidegger discusses concealment, untruth, and the mystery (OET: 148/GA9: 193-194).1 It is


1 References to Heidegger’s texts, other than Being and Time, are either given in full in a footnote or given in the body of the text with an abbreviated title of the English translation and a page number, followed by the Gesamtausgabe volume and page number. All page references to Being and Time are to the marginal pagination in the English translation, which reflects the pagination of the eighth German edition of Sein und Zeit. In quoting from translations of Heidegger’s texts, I replace ‘beings’ with ‘entities’ for ‘das Seiende’, ‘Being’ with ‘being’ for ‘das Sein’ and ‘das Seyn’, ‘anxiety’ with ‘angst’ for ‘die Angst’, ‘potentiality-for-being’ with ‘ability-to-be’ for ‘Seinkönnen’, and ‘man’ with ‘the human being’ for ‘der Mensch’ (replacing masculine pronouns with neutral pronouns accordingly). I transliterate all Greek.