inaccessible, this is a form of self-concealing—third-plank kruptesthai. It is correlated with the concealing of the whither of disclosing’s being thrown.
Perhaps surprisingly, I think that it is this inability to access being’s rather than that commentators are trying to get at when describing being’s backgrounding in terms of its pervasiveness, familiarity, and atmospheric quality (§14). These descriptions all (more or less explicitly) tried to express the fact that we cannot get a contrast case for being into view. Consider Polt:
The experience of a whole as such requires a space that, paradoxically, is not contained within the whole. The verge of this space is the boundary that defines the whole, that allows it to be a ‘well-rounded sphere’ (Parmenides, frag. 8). This limit divides what is from what is not.4
The point of positing being as a whole is to show that we cannot access its ‘edges’, where it stops and where its rather than begins. Similarly, Dreyfus: ‘Since it is invisible and global, our current understanding of being seems to have no contrast class.’5 But Dreyfus’s ‘since’ gets the explanation wrong. It is not that being has no contrast class because it is global and invisible. Rather, we cannot access any contrast class because of the way that third-plank unconcealing works, and some interpreters try to express that by saying that such unconcealing is invisible and global. They also try to express it by talking about being as the ultimate presupposition, or as a sort of ground that we cannot see while we are standing on it. But trying to figure out what of being these metaphors track, as I did in §14, was a mistake, because they are not tracking anything. Instead, they are evocative images for the fact that third-plank unconcealing, by its very nature, cannot unconceal what it is rather than—namely, lēthē. That means that disclosing cannot ultimately grasp either itself or being. And that means that being is concealed.
Now notice, second, that not all contrast cases are rathers than. Some are instead others than. Most things, for instance, are other
4 Polt, The Emergency of Being, 25.
5 Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger’s Ontology of Art’, 409.