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HEIDEGGER: And then?
FINK: We must begin in a new sense.
HEIDEGGER: Where does the challenge lie for you?
FINK: In that we have come in the course of the history of thinking to an end in which a richness of tradition becomes questionable. Our question is whether, not in a new turn toward what the Greeks have thought, we can encounter the Greek world with our new experience of being. We must ask ourselves whether we already have an experience of being that is not stamped by metaphysics.
HEIDEGGER: Is that to be thought such that our experience of being matches up to the Greeks?
FINK: This depends on the truth of our situation, out of which we can ask and speak. We can only speak with the Greeks as nihilists.
HEIDEGGER: Do you think so?
FINK: That does not mean that a finished program lies in nihilism.
HEIDEGGER: But what if there had been something unthought in the Greeks, something which determines precisely your thinking and what is thought in the whole history?
FINK: But how do we catch sight of this? Perhaps this glimpse only results from our late situation.
HEIDEGGER: The unthought would be that which shows itself only to our view. But the question is how far we understand ourselves. I make a proposal: the unthought is ἀλήθεια. In all of Greek philosophy, there is nothing to be found concerning ἀλήθεια as ἀλήθεια. In paragraph 44 b of Being and Time, it is said regarding ἀ-λήθεια that, "Translation by the word 'truth', and above all the theoretical conceptualization of this expression, covers up the sense of that which the Greeks made 'self-evidently' basic to the terminological use of ἀλήθεια as a pre-philosophical understanding." (Being and Time, 7th unrevised edition, 1953, p. 262 = H 219.)
ἀλήθεια thought as ἀλήθεια has nothing to do with "truth"; rather, it means unconcealment. What I then said in Being and Time about ἀλήθεια already goes in this direction. ἀλήθεια as unconcealment had already occupied me, but in the meantime "truth" came inbetween. ἀλήθεια as unconcealment heads into the direction of that which is the clearing. How about the clearing? You said last time that the clearing does not presuppose the light, but vice versa. Do clearing and light have anything at all to do with each other? Clearly not. "Clear" implies: to clear, to weigh anchor, to dear out. That does not mean that where the clearing dears, there is brightness. What is cleared is the free, the open. At the same time, what is cleared is what conceals itself. We may not understand the clearing from out of light; rather, we must understand it from the Greeks. Light and fire can first find their place only in the clearing. In the essay, "On the Essence of Truth," where I speak of "freedom," I