plausibly anticipated in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (1929) with the claim that ‘being itself is essentially finite’ (WM: 95/GA9: 120). The insight receives its most sustained treatment when Heidegger discusses Heraclitus’s claim that phusis (i.e., being) loves to hide in his lecture course, ‘The Inception of Occidental Thinking: Heraclitus’ (1943). Throughout Heidegger’s later work, the self-concealing of being is a central and recurring theme, associated with other significant phenomena, such as lēthē or forgottenness, the forgetting of the ontological difference, and the ungroundedness of being.
But some phenomenon of self-concealing is present even in Being and Time (1927). That text begins with the necessity of raising the question of being, which has been concealed in forgottenness (SZ: 1). Awakening the question of being means coming to experience being as question-worthy, and being is question-worthy precisely because it is both given to and withheld from us. This dynamic of giving and withholding is what makes ontology necessarily phenomenological. Phenomenology allows that which shows itself, from itself (as a phainomenon) to be seen (SZ: 31). Being is the primary object of phenomenology—the phenomenon in the phenomenological sense (SZ: 31, 35)—because, while it shows itself, being also needs something that ‘lets it be seen’ (legein) (SZ: 32). It needs to be allowed to show itself because of its own absencing or self-concealing—and, equally, it needs to be allowed to show itself in its distinctive self-concealing.
Of course, the concealing of being at stake in Being and Time need not be the same as, or even related to, the concealing at stake in Heidegger’s later work. In particular, the one may be contingent while the other is necessary and perhaps even essential to being. There may even be multiple phenomena of concealing and concealment in both the early and the later works—and indeed, there are. There are so many different phenomena of concealing and concealment in Heidegger’s corpus that it is difficult to determine how they are all distinguished—and perhaps even related—and which of them he names when he speaks of the self-concealing of being.
I omit German terms that are included for clarification in the translation if they are not relevant in context. Other modifications of translations are noted.