from its immersion in entities grounded in being; angst ‘moves out of the way everything which conceals [jede Verdeckung von] the fact that Dasein has been abandoned to itself ’ (SZ: 308). The entities to which inauthentic disclosing directs itself fall away and instead the world as ‘nothing’—no innerworldly entity—reveals itself (SZ: 186). World shows itself in its worldhood (SZ: 187), or rather, worlding, and Dasein is exposed to that worlding, as part of its own being-in-the-world, as thrown from a concealed whence. It experiences its own thrown ground, in its concealedness. This experience of angst is thus an experience of authentic disclosing, overcoming the concealment that made Dasein inauthentic, which concealment is thus an instance of lēthē2.
In ‘What is Metaphysics?’, angst also encounters disclosing’s concealed ground and so brings Dasein to authentic disclosing. There, angst asks the question of why there are entities, as such and as a whole, rather than nothing. ‘Entities as such and as a whole’ refers to world, and the ‘why’ question asks why world should be at all: why does worlding obtain? Thus the ‘why’ part of the question asks after the ground of third-plank disclosing. It reveals only a concealed ground or abyss. The very fact that there are intelligible entities as such and as a whole—that worlding or disclosing is at all—is shown to lack a ground. But the why question is internally complex, making angst’s disclosing complex. As we saw, the ‘nothing’ is the non-intelligibility that obtains in the absence of disclosing and so third-plank lēthē. Thus angst also reveals third-plank lēthē. But what about the remaining part of the question—the ‘rather than’? This brings us to the whither of thrownness, which—like the whence—is concealed, in yet another instance of third-plank kruptesthai.
22. The Concealing of the Whither of Thrownness
In asking, ‘Why are there entities at all rather than nothing?’, angst asks after the ground (qua impetus) of disclosing (‘why’) and contrasts that disclosing to its alternative, lēthē (nothing). In this section, I consider the ‘rather than’ part of the question and argue that it