The withdrawal of Being and man's uprooted alienation were prepared by the Western conception or self-conscious Reason which was based on a doctrine of "Being as presence." Armed with this notion, Western thinking turned its back on the ground of presence, the real "object" to be thought. The early Heidegger tries to prepare a conception or Being not qua presence, but as the a priori precondition of presence. But Heidegger came to believe that to use the traditional term Being for this new notion was misleading. He also came to see that his early work could be accused or a kind or Nietzschean voluntarism and of transcendental subjectivism.

Being, if it can still be called that, is that absence that stands before presence; "It" gives (es gibt) or grants presence but withdraws and remains concealed. It is the ground of unconcealment or appearance which remains self-concealed, unlike Hegel's self-revealing, self-manifesting Spirit. Being must be linked with the primordial meaning or aletheia. Heidegger argues, Being is the ‘uncovering. which is simultaneously a “veiling.” Heidegger experimented with a variety or locutions that could express this Nothing in non-metaphysical terms free from the language or subjectivity. He finally arrived at the locution: Being "under erasure," (Being) signifying the absence which mysteriously remains the reason for presence.

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