-
Chapter Two. The Idea of the Good and Unconcealment
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter Two The Idea of the Good and Unconcealment§25. Being free: acting together in the historical con-frontation of truth and untruth a) The philosopher’s freedom: being a liberator in the transition1 In the previous session, we attempted to get clear about the fourth stage. What does it involve? What is its position within the whole? We discovered that the fourth stage is no mere appendix, nor a recapitulation: instead , the person under discussion here is fundamentally different from the other inhabitants of the cave. He has been transformed and he now has a different fate. Plato designates him as the philosopher. Through this story, he intends to show what the philosopher is. The philosopher is a liberator, and he is only as such a liberator. Authentic freedom does not consist in dragging an inhabitant of the cave out into the light and leaving him there to laze about in the sun. Authentic freedom does not consist in tranquil enjoyment: to be free means to be a liberator. The philosopher is not secure; as a liberator, he acts with others in the history of those who belong with him in a community according to their Being. Given what we have said, all human beings would have to become philosophers if they wanted to exist authentically. This is true inasmuch as being a philosopher, among the many possibilities for existing , means the fundamental way in which man takes a stance with respect to the whole of beings and toward the history of human beings. We derive the fundamental character of philosophical Being from the allegory. We see that what makes one human is not to be bound in the cave, to feel at ease and to chatter away; nor is it to be in the opposite 1. {Recapitulation at the beginning of the session of 18 January 1934.} 143 condition outside of the cave. Instead, the human is the transition out of the cave into the light and back into the cave. This transition is the authentic history of man, a fate that one cannot shake off by declaring that one is not interested in philosophy. A fate can only be surmounted —or one can founder on that fate without knowing it. b) Truth and untruth. Modes of untruth as concealment This story is supposed to tell us what truth is. Our interpretation of the fourth stage allows us a remarkable expansion of this question: we concluded that only the one who turns back is in a position to comprehend what those down below are seeing, namely, the shadows. On the basis of the return, the difference between Being and seeming only now becomes possible. Only now does the difference between unconcealment and idea as opposed to the concealed open up. But if this transition belongs to human history, if human beings cannot get away from it, then this means that there is no pure unconcealment . Instead, to this unconcealment there also belong semblance, disguise, and the covering-up of things, or, as we also say: untruth. This is the decisive answer: untruth belongs to the essence of truth. Untruth is not simply truth’s opposite; rather, only as confrontation is truth as unconcealment cast into untruth and embedded there. From this there follows a double concept of untruth. In Greek, truth is a negative, a privative in the expression “unconcealment.” Now we understand why the Greeks do not express truth positively. From the very first, what is must be torn out of concealment into history, must be wrested from concealment. Truth is not a possession. The initial counter-concept to unconcealment in the sense of truth is, in a formal linguistic sense, concealment; but now we see that for us this would be untruth. But if something is concealed, that does not yet mean that we therefore know something false; it is simply not knowing. The concealed has a double sense: 1) something with which we are unfamiliar; 2) something to which we have no possible connection. Concealment is a characteristic of what we call a secret. But concealment is not untruth in the sense of falsehood. Rather, concealment is the concealed in the sense that something is covered up, disguised to us. Mere seeming. It belongs to the essence of seeming that it appears to us, that it shows itself. What a thing is, is its εἶδος, its look. Seeming means that something only seems (looks) as if; for example, a stage set of a house. From this...