be had without being present. In short, the dialogue repeatedly assumes and explicitly draws our attention to an understanding of, and relation to, being that far surpasses presence. In this case, there is in the dialogue no conception of being that prevents reflection on concealment as concealment and in its relation to unconcealment. Far from reducing concealment to mere absence, the dialogue, in characterizing our relation to being as a striving and “having” that are never a possessing and making-present, makes concealment pervade our relation to being or, in other words, makes every unconcealment of being at the same time a concealment.
The conclusion seems unavoidable: Heidegger’s own reading of the Theaetetus completely overturns the theses on which this reading is premised. However, this overturning is only implicit, and Heidegger tries to prevent it at the end of the course, even at the cost of completely dogmatic and arbitrary assertions. Yet, as already indicated in the introduction to part 2 of this book, there is another and later text in which Heidegger explicitly revokes the claims that have just been cited: specifically, a text in which he denies that ψεῦδoς and ἀλήθεια name completely different phenomena and defends an interpretation of ψεῦδoς as concealment; and in which he not only also claims that the Greeks experienced λήθη as the concealment of beings as a whole (and not as mere absence) but also finds Plato thematizing precisely this original sense of λήθη. This text is the 1942 course on Parmenides. It is to this text that we must therefore now turn in completing our examination of what could be called the secret history of Heidegger’s reading of Plato on truth and untruth: in other words, what gets suppressed and occluded by the official and definitive position in “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit.”