PATHMARKS
may still be used at all – is the truth of essence. Sheltering that clears is – i.e., lets essentially unfold – accordance between knowledge and beings. The proposition is [97] not dialectical. It is no proposition at all in the sense of a statement. The answer to the question of the essence of truth is the saying of a turning [die Sage einer Kehre] within the history of Beyng. Because sheltering that clears belongs to it, Beyng appears originarily in the light of concealing withdrawal. The name of this clearing [Lichtung] is ἀλήθεια.
Already in the original project, the lecture "On the Essence of Truth" was to have been completed by a second lecture, "On the Truth of Essence." The latter failed for reasons that are now indicated in the "Letter on Humanism."
The decisive question (in Being and Time, 1927) of the meaning, i.e., of the project-domain (see Being and Time, p. 151), i.e., of the openness, i.e., of the truth of Being and not merely of beings, remains intentionally undeveloped. Our thinking apparently {GA 9: 202} remains on the path of metaphysics. Nevertheless, in its decisive steps, which lead from truth as correctness to ek-sistent freedom, and from the latter to truth as concealing and as errancy, it accomplishes a change in the questioning that belongs to the overcoming of metaphysics. The thinking attempted in the lecture comes to fulfillment in the essential experience that a nearness to the truth of Being is first prepared for historical human beings on the basis of the Da-sein into which human beings can enter. Every kind of anthropology and all subjectivity of the human being as subject is not merely left behind – as it was already in Being and Time – and the truth of Being sought as the ground of a transformed historical position; rather, the movement of the lecture is such that it sets out to think from this other ground (Da-sein). The course of the questioning is intrinsically the path of a thinking that, instead of furnishing representations and concepts, experiences and tests itself as a transformation of its relatedness to Being.
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