209. Ἀλήθεια—openness and the clearing of what is
self-concealing
Roughly speaking, these are different terms with the same meaning. Nevertheless, they harbor a decisive question.
1. Already ἀλήθεια does not always stay the same. Already here it must be asked how ἀλήθεια was experienced at the beginning, how far its determinateness reached, whether in general it was first through the Platonic ζυγόν that the initial determination was attained, and with this also whether the essential restriction—predelineated by the understanding of being (φύσις)—was already definitively established, i.e., the restriction to the outward look and later to an ob-ject for a perceiver.
Ἀλήθεια itself is forced into a "yoke" and, as "luminosity," concerns the unconcealedness of beings as such and the pathway for perception. Thus it concerns only the domain of the respective facing sides of beings and the soul. Indeed ἀλήθεια first determines this domain as such, though assuredly without allowing its own beyng and ground to come into question.
Since in this way ἀλήθεια becomes φῶς ["light"], i.e., is understood in terms of luminosity, the character of the alpha-privative is also lost. The concealedness and the concealing, their origin and their ground—these never become a question. What is taken into account is only, so to speak, the "positive" aspects of unconcealedness, what is freely accessible and the bestowal of access; and therefore ἀλήθεια in this regard as well loses its original depth and its abyssal character, assuming ἀλήθεια was ever thoughtfully interrogated along those lines. And nothing points in that direction, unless we suppose that the breadth and indeterminateness of ἀλήθεια in pre-Platonic usage also demanded a correspondingly indeterminate depth.
Plato turns ἀλήθεια into accessibility in a double sense: beings as such as standing freely accessible and the accessibility of the pathway for perception. If ἀλήθεια is viewed solely from the "side" of beings as such, then this accessibility can also be called manifestness and perceiving can be called making manifest.
Ἀλήθεια everywhere remains the unconcealedness of beings, never that of beyng; it is never the latter, because ἀλήθεια itself in this inaugural interpretation constitutes beingness (φύσις, e-mergence [Aufgang]), ἰδέα, visibility
What thereby gets lost back into the first beginning, so that concealedness and concealing, as such, are never questioned?