Heideggerian Concealment: On Katherine Withy's Heidegger on Being Self-Concealing

The project of Being and Time was premised on the idea that being could be grasped in its truth. Heidegger maintained that “being can be something unconceptualized, but it never completely fails to be understood” (SZ 183). “Even if being may perhaps be hidden in its primordial grounds,” he maintained, nonetheless “there is a necessary connection between being and understanding” (SZ 183). Thus Heidegger pursued ontology through an inquiry into the conditions under which being could be manifest or disclosed to the understanding (SZ 183).

But if Heidegger was confident that being could be grasped or made intelligible through a phenomenological ontology (see SZ §44), the uncompleted second part of Being and Time was premised on the idea that it might be quite difficult to bring being to manifestness – that a historical deconstruction was required to expose the concealments and confusions behind which the meaning of being has lain hidden throughout the history of metaphysics.

In Being and Time, and for several years after its publication, Heidegger focused on temporality as the primary horizon within which being could be made manifest. And so Heidegger took his project to involve making “temporality visible as the transcendental original structure,” thereby illuminating the “concealed projection of being on time as the innermost event in the understanding of being in ancient and subsequent metaphysics” (GA3: 241–2).

In the subsequent decade or so, Heidegger developed in his lecture courses and unpublished manuscripts a conception of ontological concealment as something more pervasive and essential than he had previously supposed. For instance, in his 1931 lecture On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger writes that “the entity in its being” has an “authentic, inner drive to remain concealed and, even if it has become unconcealed, a drive to go back into concealment again” (GA34: 14). And in 1942, with the publication of his essay “Plato's Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger declares publicly that concealment “permeates the essence of being” (GA9: 223). He argues that the pre-Platonic philosophers were the first to have an inkling of the essentially concealed nature of being, and he saw this insight as implicit in the Greek word for truth itself – alētheia. The alpha in a-lētheia, Heidegger emphasizes, is an alpha privative, so that truth is literally a privation of concealment. Consequently, Heidegger argues that for the Greek thinkers, it was concealment (lēthe), not truth (a-lētheia), that was the prior and most fundamental condition of being. Heidegger concludes the essay on Plato by insisting on the necessity of returning to the early Greek “appreciation of the ‘positive’ in the ‘privative’ essence of alētheia. The positive [i.e., concealment] must first be experienced as the basic characteristic of being itself” (GA9: 144). This is a striking claim: to understand being itself, we have to experience concealedness as being's basic character.

Jaspers wrote (but never sent) a letter to Heidegger in the immediate aftermath of the publication of “Plato's Doctrine of Truth.” In that letter, Jaspers fixates on Heidegger's meditations on the concealment of being in the closing lines of the essay. “That's when I realized,” Jaspers wrote, “that I probably can't assess what you actually want to do here. But that's because I do not yet understand truth as unconcealment in the sense you mean… The whole thing comes across to me as a constant tension without resolution, and like a promise that is betrayed at the end. I could almost say that I feel cheated at the end of the reading, because there was always talk of unconcealment, without saying what that actually is” (Heidegger & Jaspers 1990, 164).

I think it's fair to say that Jaspers is not alone in his perplexity. Heidegger's account of concealedness as a fundamental character of being is simultaneously one of the most essential but also the most mystifying aspects of his work. In what sense is being essentially affected with concealment? How are we to assess this claim?

These are the central questions of Katherine Withy's book, Heidegger on Being Self-Concealing. Withy promises to sort through the confusion by establishing both what the self-concealing of being is not, and what it is. In doing so, she builds on my own modest efforts to bring some clarity to Heidegger's thought on unconcealment or truth (See Wrathall 2011, especially chapter 1). But she also takes issue with several aspects of my account of concealment and unconcealment in Heidegger's work.

Withy observes: “My method is … less narrative than is usual in philosophical monographs and more taxonomical: I sort the various things that Heidegger says about concealing and concealment, cataloguing, and categorising them” (Withy 2022, 3). To the degree that Withy's taxonomic impulse aims at identifying the criteria and categories that organize the various forms of unconcealment into different type-classes, I am very sympathetic to her approach – as my own identification of distinct planks of unconcealment attests. I think it is clear that Heidegger's method depends on describing the phenomena of interest in such a way that they could be sorted and classified – for instance when he deploys his description of everyday existence to identify multiple distinct kinds of being. It is worthwhile trying to delineate clearly the web of concepts that Heidegger employs when offering an account of the various species of truth, concealment, and unconcealment.

The taxonomy that Withy offers us, however, goes beyond the task of conceptual definition and clarification; it aspires to be exhaustive – to fix everything into a determinate place in an all-encompassing system by establishing in advance a rigid order of ranks and differentia within those ranks. In these respects, Withy's book offers a taxonomical tour de force, concluding with five pages of tables meant to precisely delimit every conceivable variety of concealment and unconcealment using just a few taxonomical categories.

I think Withy's approach yields some genuine insights into Heidegger's account of being and the truth of being. But there are real dangers to a taxonomical approach to any field. A taxonomy, once established, tends to pre-determine our understanding of the phenomena in question. For this reason, the imposition of a rigid taxonomical structure is inimical to a phenomenological method. Phenomenology works by bracketing what we think we know in advance – and that means also bracketing our preexisting categories and concepts in order to return to the things themselves. The phenomenological encounter with a phenomenon is not constrained by any given set of categories. To the contrary, the categories used to classify things should emerge from the phenomenological encounter, and not the other way around. As Heidegger himself warned us, if our methodology is not responsive to the phenomena, we might well discover features that are in some sense characteristic of distinct types of phenomena. But we will grasp, not the true essence, but only an “indifferent” or “unessential essence” (GA5: 37 / PLT 49 / OTBT 27–8). And if the categories that are used to structure the taxonomy are not based in a sound phenomenological understanding of the field, the result can be misleading or even comical (think of Plato's taxonomical definition of man as a featherless biped, Statesman 266e).

In assessing Withy's taxonomy, then, we need to attend closely to the question whether she correctly defines the categories that organize Heidegger's account of unconcealment. We should ask both whether she has defined the categories in the way that Heidegger has, and also whether her categories successfully latch onto what is essential about unconcealment as a phenomenon. I'll primarily focus here on the former question. I hope Withy's fine book will encourage more attention to the latter.

Consider, for instance, Heidegger's account of “plank one” unconcealment – the unconcealing effected by assertions (and other propositional states and acts). Heidegger claims that “the old traditional definition of truth … is indeed correct in its approach” (GA29/30: 497). And he insists that his account of propositional truth – plank one unconcealment – is “no casting off of the tradition, but rather its originary appropriation” (SZ 220). Heidegger takes it as essential to his account of unconcealment to demonstrate that “truth, understood as correspondence, has its origins in disclosedness” (SZ 223). Thus, an account of Heidegger's theory of propositional truth should explain the sense in which an assertion is true in virtue of some sort of agreement between an assertion and that about which the assertion is made.

Here again, the commitment to taxonomy seems to me to obscure the phenomenology. In order to provide the kind of discrete categories that will sustain a taxonomic approach to being, Withy insists that a strict hierarchy of grounding relationships must exist between the planks. The unconcealment that obtains at each level, Withy asserts, provides the ground for that which is concealed at the next lower level. So the unconcealment of being at level three grounds the entities that are (initially) concealed at level two. The unconcealment of those entities in turn grounds the facts that are (initially) concealed to an interlocutor at level one. Finally, to round off the taxonomy, Withy posits that there can be no higher-level that grounds being at level three. Being, she insists, must be a “regress-stopper” beyond which no further grounding relationship is possible.

We'll return in a moment to the question of specifying what might count as the grounds of being itself. At this point, however, I note that Withy will only accept something into her taxonomy as a kind of unconcealing if “a genuine phenomenon of unconcealing is identified that is the condition of possibility of” that which is unconcealed at the lower level (Withy 2022, 134). As before, it seems to me, Withy's taxonomical impulse is driving the analysis – indeed, she acknowledges as much herself: “the plank structure will force me to interrogate the relationships between each of the levels by asking how one makes the other possible, or how the other is grounded in the one” (Withy 2022, 9).

Withy's focus on CP-grounds, however, leads to a reductive account of grounding in Heidegger's thought. Heidegger's phenomenology develops an open-ended, diverse, and reciprocal account of grounding. As Heidegger puts it in “On the Essence of Grounds,” “grounding is strewn in a variety of ways” (GA9: 166). He discusses in that essay three distinct kinds of grounding which occur simultaneously (“gleichzeitig”) (GA9: 166). One such type of grounding – grounding as taking up a footing in the midst of entities [Bodennehmen] – consists in Dasein being “captured by entities in such a way that, in its belonging to entities, it is thoroughly attuned by them” (GA9: 166). The phenomenon Heidegger is describing is the way that our existence adapts itself to the entities we encounter in our immediate environment. This adaptive response attunes us in such a way that we find ourselves disposed to disclose some specific set of possibilities as the definitive ones for our existence. But, at the same time, the entities that attune my projection of possibilities are themselves grounded in the way that the possibilities onto which I project myself – my “for the sake of” – discloses entities as having significance relative to my way of inhabiting the world. Heidegger calls this world-disclosive grounding “grounding as endowing [Stiften]” or “the projection of world as grounding” (GA9: 165). So both ontological possibilities and entities “must remain concealed” absent the attunement that Dasein receives from the very entities it discovers (GA9: 166).

On Heidegger's account, then, the grounding involved in unconcealment involves multifarious and reciprocal forms of grounding. This is perhaps why the later Heidegger suggested on numerous occasions that, properly understood, the “truth [i.e., unconcealment] of beyng” requires an “effort to come free of the ‘condition of the possibility’” (GA65: 250). The relationship of beyng to entities for the later Heidegger is “no longer that of … a ‘condition of possibility’” (GA65: 250; GA65: 183; see also GA66: 321).

To be fair, Withy does consider time and Ereignis as potential sources of the grounding of being, but she rejects them as CP-grounds because they are not “independent.” Withy, however, offers no clear account of what counts as the right kind of ‘independence’, so it is hard to assess her arguments here. Heidegger himself seems to regard being and time as independent of one another in some sense: “[b]eing and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former – being – be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter – time – be addressed as being” (GA14: 7). And, as noted above, Heidegger consistently holds that temporality is the condition of the possibility of being (GA21: 410; GA55: 816). Without a clearer account of what kind of independence is required for the right kind of grounding relationship, Withy's reasons for denying that time is a CP-ground of being feel ad hoc, driven by her taxonomy rather than arising out of phenomenological considerations.

Consider, finally, Withy's argument against accepting Heidegger's clearing as a plank of unconcealment. In Heidegger's later work, the problem of understanding the historical character of unconcealment was perhaps the central question. The distinctive kind of unconcealment brought about by the clearing was central to Heidegger's account of this historical dimension of being. The clearing, Heidegger says, “opens up beyng as history” (GA65: 422–3). “[T]he clearing of beyng accomplishes the essence of history,” Heidegger explains, because it allows for a decision about what entities as such and as a whole are, “and with this decision it … grounds ‘epochs’” (GA71: 19). What being “means in each case has already been decided in terms of the epochal clearing of being” (GA10: 84). There can be little question that Heidegger regards the clearing as a necessary and distinctively historical kind of unconcealment, one that grounds whole ages or styles of being.

Heidegger himself describes the clearing as affected with lēthē / Verborgenheit,9 and treats the clearing as producing a “truth” or unconcealment (See GA69: 162). Why then does Withy refuse to the clearing the status Heidegger gives it as a distinct kind or (in my terms) “plank” of unconcealment? She offers two, closely related arguments, which I'll dub the “explanatory heuristic” argument and the “no prior lēthē” argument respectively.

Ironically, and by-the-by, Withy's own account of level-three concealment seems to fall prey to the “explanatory heuristic” argument. After all, on Withy's account of the lēthē of being, positing the absolute non-obtaining of intelligibility is a way of making sense of the “the strangeness of the fact of the world and its worlding” (Withy 2022, 139). We make sense of this by imagining that we can make sense of the idea of an agent existing in a space where nothing is intelligible, where there ‘is’ sheer non-being. But this is merely an explanatory heuristic; there is no real sense in which there is such a space or agent. Where “there is no manifestness of being,” Heidegger explains, “there also is no non-being and not even the nothing and emptiness” (GA16: 330; also GA39: 62, GA80.2: 584). And there is certainly no agent if there is no intelligibity. So the lēthē that Withy has in mind is not a genuine phenomenon and thus, according to Withy's ‘explanatory heuristic argument’, we ought to collapse the third level into the second level.

According to the “no prior lēthē” argument, we can only give the clearing “plank” status if we can identify some prior absence that gets overcome through the clearing. According to Withy, I have neither identified a prior lēthē that is overcome by the clearing, nor have I “identified a further phenomenon that overcomes lēthē” in order to provide the CP-ground of being (Withy 2022, 127–8).

Now, this argument presupposes Withy's taxonomy by assuming that the lēthē at the heart of an unconcealment must be a complete absence or lack that is “overcome” or “vanquished” by the unconcealing. This is why she thinks that the clearing only counts as an unconcealment if we can identify such a lēthē.

As I've explained, however, I reject this presupposition. Heidegger's inquiry into the clearing is driven by a phenomenological sensitivity to the interplay between concealment and unconcealing. As a result, Heidegger's question is not: what absence is vanquished by the clearing? His question is rather, what is intrinsically affected with concealment in such a way that it enables and sustains an unconcealment. And I offered Heidegger's answer to that question: what is concealed is the modal character of being, the contingency of any given style of being. When the clearing is not experienced as such, we get a metaphysical account of being as beingness: “metaphysics must think being as beingness … All this means that being remains without clearing” (GA66: 393). The unconcealment sustained by this concealment is the emergence of distinct periods in the history of being: “times of history” – epochs – “arise in each case only from out of the clearing of beyng and are themselves only the way in which this clearing disposes of its spatio-temporal field” (GA95: 251). When Withy collapses the “truth of the clearing” into her “level three”, she obliterates the historical dimension of Heidegger's thought.11.