THE FOUR STAGES OF THE OCCURRENCE OF TRUTH
'most beingful beings', the ideas, are also described as the most unhidden unhidden (what is unhidden now in the third stage, τὰ νῦν λεγόμενα ἀληθῆ.
How are we to understand this double character of the ideas, that they are the most unhidden and the most beingful? What do we conclude about the essence of the ideas and its connection with the essence of truth as such? The most unhidden: this superlative means that the ideas are the primary unhidden. They stand at the forefront of everything unhidden, they play the leading role, they prepare in advance for the others. In what way? The ideas are the most beingful beings, and what is most beingful in beings, what actually constitutes beings, is their being. But being, as we have seen, is what first of all lets beings through. The ideas prepare the way. Light allows what was previously concealed to become visible. The ideas remove hiddenness. The unhiddenness of beings arises from being, from the ideas, from ἀληθινόν. What is most disclosive opens up, and what is most illuminative lights up. The ideas allow unhiddenness to arise along with beings; they are the primordially unhidden, unhiddenness in the primordial originary sense. This is what the superlative means.
b) The Ideas as What Is Sighted by a Pre-modelling Perceiving within the Occurrence of Unhiddenness
Why did we say (secondly) that the ideas allow unhiddenness to arise along with them? Is anything else involved in this co-origination? Indeed! We have already seen that ἀληθές and the ideas are interrelated with light and freedom.
Why then do we say that the ideas originate along with unhiddenness? If the ideas are what lets-through, are they unable to bring about visibility on their own account? What might ideas be 'in themselves'? ἰδέα is what is sighted. What is sighted is so only in seeing and for seeing. An unsighted sighted is like a round square or wooden iron. 'Ideas': we must at last be serious with this Platonic term for being. 'Being sighted' is not something else in addition, an additional predicate, something which occasionally happens to the ideas. Instead, it is what characterizes them as such. The ideas are so called because they are primarily understood as visible. Something can be sighted in the strict sense only through seeing and looking. We must be strict here, for this is a passage where our interpretation goes beyond Plato; more precisely, where Plato, for quite fundamental reasons, could not go further (cf. the Theaetetus), with the consequence that the
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