going through and looking through. Lighting up therefore means making-free, giving-free. Light lights up, makes-free, provides a way through’ (ET: 44/GA34: 59). Being does not literally light up but it does provide a way through for the appearing of entities. (‘The appearing of entities’ must refer to second-plank unconcealing, rather than to the appearing of the world qua entities as such and as a whole.)40 In order for being to provide a way through for entities, it cannot activate Dasein’s absorption. So, it cannot allow itself the character that it is allowing entities to have. This is what makes it like a medium and so like light. This also makes being somewhat like a tool or an instrument, which is in order to. Being plays a similar sort of enabling role—although it obeys not the law of proximity but the law of presence. The law of presence holds that presencing cannot itself come to presence.41 This seems to be the principle that guarantees that being is self-concealing.
The problem with the law of presence is that it does not, as currently formulated, apply to being. Being does in some sense ‘come to presence’. This is why, as we saw at the start of this section, being is said to be that which ‘shows itself [zeigt sich] and withdraws [entzieht sich] at the same time’ (BQP: 178/GA45: 210–11). Whether or not we are explicitly aware of it, being must shine out for us if entities are to presence in their being: ‘Without regard to whether or not it is expressly brought into view by us, it [being] already shines; for it already shines even where we experience that which is only for us the more overt: particular entities. These show themselves only in the light of being’ (PR: 64/GA10: 94). Being—disclosing, worlding, presencing—in some sense ‘comes to presence’ when entities do. Indeed, ‘phusis, as the pure emerging, is more manifest than every manifest object’—but in such a way that it therefore ‘remains and unfolds as the inconspicuous’ (H: 109/GA55: 143).
40 Dropping world out of the picture is what simplifies the post-‘On the Essence of Truth’ story of the self-concealing of being.
41 This law is formulated by Miguel de Beistegui: ‘The law of presence is such that what it presents is only its counter-essence; presence happens only in the covering up of its essence’ (de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, 132). Beistegui, however, thinks this in terms not of the presencing of entities as such and as a whole but of the presencing of ‘this or that being’ (i.e., entity) (de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political, 132).