171
§30 [224–225]

We ask historically: to what extent did the Greeks know in their philosophies about the concealment of things, about what must be overcome in the happening of truth? We will see how against truth as unconcealment there stands untruth or nontruth. But nontruth is ambiguous. For the concealed can be conceived in two ways.


1. What has not yet been taken from concealment,

2. the concealed that was once taken from concealment, but sank back into concealment.


The first is the concealed, pure and simple. The second, which has passed through a process of unconcealing, is the hidden, the covered up, the disguised. We will encounter still further distinctions within both senses. Only in this way will we discover the kind of philosophizing that represents the contrary concept to the Greek concept of truth.


§30. The lack of questioning about the essence of concealment from which the un-concealed can be wrested



a) The transformation of the question of the essence of truth into the question of untruth3


We have brought the question of the essence of truth to a relative conclusion, inasmuch as the allegory of the cave showed us to what extent truth is connected with the Being of man. Truth is unconcealment. Unconcealment does not exist somewhere in itself, but is only insofar as it happens as the history of human beings.

Insofar as human history happens, the things that are, as a whole, come into openness. Now, this human history is not the history of theoretical thinking and opinion, but the total history of a people, such as happens before us, to a certain extent, with the Greeks.

That history has as a driving force within it the liberation of man to the essence of his Being. This liberation begins with Homer and is fulfilled in the formation of the Greek states, in conjunction with worship, tragedy, architecture, and so on, together with the awakening of philosophy.

This total happening carries out a projection of the world within which the Greek people exists. This projection of the world is the presupposition for the fact that man moves within what we call today a worldview. The worldview is not a derivative superstructure, but the projection of a world that a people carries out.

If today the Führer speaks again and again of reeducation for the National Socialist worldview, this does not mean promulgating this or


3. {Recapitulation at the beginning of the session of 15 February 1934.}


Being and Truth (GA 36/37) by Martin Heidegger

Page generated by BeingTruthSteller.EXE