PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
meaning, we must still bear in mind that the word for truth, ἀ-λήθεια, does not stand for some arbitrary and irrelevant thing, but is a word for what man wants and seeks in the ground of his essence, a word, therefore, for something ultimate and primary. And could the word for this be unimportant, its formation accidental, especially when it shows the peculiarity to which we have drawn attention? Instead, must not this word, if it is a word for what constitutes the ground of human Dasein, derive from a primordial experience of world and self? Is ἀλήθεια then not a basic and primal word?
Who would dispute that! But just for this reason we must demand to be shown whether and how the word arises from the fundamental experience of ancient man. If there was such a fundamental experience, what testifies to this? If the 'true' for the Greeks means the unhidden, that which is free from hiddenness, then the experience of the true as unhidden must also involve experience of the hidden in its hiddenness.
What then do the Greeks call ἀληθές (unhidden, true)? Not assertions, not sentences and not knowledge, but the beings [das Seiende] themselves, the totality of nature: the human world and the work of God. When Aristotle says (Metaphysics 983 b) that philosophizing is directed περὶ τῆς ἀλήθειας, 'to truth', he does not mean that philosophy must put forward correct and valid propositions, but that philosophy seeks beings in their unhiddenness as beings. Accordingly, beings must previously, and also simultaneously, be experienced in their hiddenness, i.e. as concealing themselves. The fundamental experience of hiddenness is obviously the ground from which the seeking after unhiddenness arises. Only if beings are previously experienced in their hiddenness and self-concealment, if the hiddenness of beings encompasses man and besets him in a fundamental way, only then is it necessary and possible for man to set about wresting beings from hiddenness and bringing them into unhiddenness, thus also placing himself within the unhiddenness of beings.
Now do we have some witness from antiquity for this fundamental experience of beings as hidden and self-concealing? Fortunately we do, and indeed from one of the greatest and oldest philosophers of the ancient world, from Heraclitus. The important saying of Heraclitus has been passed down: [ἡ] φύσις ... κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.5 The holding sway of beings, i.e. beings in their being, loves to conceal itself. Several things are to be found in this saying, ἡ φύσις, 'nature': that does not mean the region of beings which is today the object of natural-scientific research, but the holding sway of beings, all beings: human history, the processes of nature, divine