Unconcealment

Concealing and Concealment in Heidegger

“…Wrathall explains: ‘Unconcealment is meant to be understood like blindness or reticence. […] With respect to each plank in the platform, then, concealment is the positive term, and needs to be understood before we can become clear about what unconcealment amounts to’ (Wrathall :18). So, to begin to understand what Heidegger means when he talks about concealment, we need to identify at each plank both an unconcealment ( alētheia ) and the positive term on which it is based: its procedurally prior concealment ( lēthē ).…”

“…Wrathall explains that for an entity to be uncovered as that and what it is, rather than not, is for it to be ‘available for comportment’ (Wrathall :13). But this must not imply that the entity is uncovered prior to comportment; rather, the unconcealing takes place in comporting towards the entity.…”

“…It is difficult to express this positively, but it is a sort of mute self‐containment of entities in non‐intelligibility. Wrathall gives the examples of a fly that I cannot find or am not motivated to swat, and a symphony that I do not understand very well because I do not understand symphonic form (Wrathall :22). As he recognises, of course, in these cases, I am actually comporting towards both the fly and the symphony perfectly well.…”

“…The transparency of the world in everyday comportment (e.g. Wrathall :33; Polt :25; Dreyfus :408)? The inexhaustibly rich extra or excess of manifestation? The mystery of Ereignis (Polt :101, Sheehan :78)?…”

“…Mark Wrathall has helpfully distinguished four different levels of concealment and its correlate phenomenon, unconcealment (Wrathall ). Since Heidegger refers to phenomena of unconcealment as phenomena of truth, Wrathall calls these four levels of unconcealment and concealment four ‘planks of truth’.…”