entities consists in entities not being available as that toward which or with which we can comport.
Comportment (Verhalten) is a very broad term that is meant to include every instance in which we experience something, and everything that we do. Excluded from comportment, then, are physiological or merely causal events or behaviors. When I grow hair or hiccup, there is no sense in which I am comporting myself. Unlike such causal events or behaviors, comportments have a meaningful structure. But comportment is broader than the class of deliberate actions (although, naturally it includes them), because comportment involves things I do or experience without an occurrent mental state in which I intend to do it or register the experience. Thus comportment includes automatic reflexes, for example, which reflect a responsiveness to the meaning of a situation.
All comportments involve relationships to entities. When I swat at a fly, I am comporting myself toward the fly. When I hear a symphony, I am comporting myself to the symphony (as well as all the instruments, musicians, the conductor, etc.) An entity is concealed, then, when I cannot comport myself toward it – when it is not available as something toward which I can direct myself in a basic intentional comportment or when it plays no role in setting the meaningful structure of the situation I am in. The opposite of uncoveredness, Heidegger says, “is not covering up, but rather lack of access for simple intending” (GA 21: 179). The fly is concealed in a sense when I cannot find it to swat at it. And yet even then, it is uncovered to some extent, given that the situation I find myself in is structured by my desire to swat the fly. A more radical concealment of the fly, then, would obtain if I do not feel motivated in any way to react to it. Similarly, the symphony would be concealed if I lacked an understanding of symphonic form (that is, I might be able to hear beautiful music, but I could not hear it as a symphony). The contrast of comportments with behaviors allows us to see that something can be concealed, even if it is physically operative on my body. But because comportment is broader than intentional action, something is not necessarily concealed, even if I have no awareness of it whatsoever – there is a sense in which it is unconcealed as long as it figures meaningfully in my overall comportmental stance.
The unconcealment of entities, then, will be a privation of the state of affairs in which something is unavailable for comportment. But, as I have been suggesting, there are a variety of different ways in which something can be unavailable for comportment:
For that which is unconcealed, it is not only essential that it makes that which appears accessible in some way or other and keeps it open in its appearing, but rather that it (that which is unconcealed) constantly overcomes a concealedness of the concealed. That which is unconcealed must be wrested away from concealment,