31 INT. II
Being and Time

be seen (φαίνεσθαι), namely what is being talked about, and indeed for the speaker (who serves as the medium) or for those who speak with each other. Discourse "lets us see," ἀπὸ ... from itself, what is being talked about. In discourse (ἀπόφανσις), insofar as it is genuine, what is said should be derived from what is being talked about. In this way spoken communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about and thus makes it accessible to another. Such is the structure of λόγος as ἀπόφανσις Not every "discourse" suits this mode of making manifest, in the sense of letting something be seen by indicating it. For example, requesting (εὐχή)) also makes something manifest, but in a different way.

When fully concrete, discourse (letting something be seen) has the character of speaking or vocalization in words. λόγος is φωνή, indeed [33] φωνή μετὰ φαντασίας—vocalization in which something always is sighted.

Only because the function of λόγος as ἀπόφανσις lies in letting something be seen by indicating it can λόγος have the structure of σύνθεσις. Here synthesis does not mean to connect and conjoin representations, to manipulate psychical occurrences, which then gives rise to the "problem" of how these connections, as internal, correspond to what is external and physical. The συν here has a purely apophantical meaning: to let something be seen in its togetherness with something, to let something be seen as something.

Furthermore, because λόγος lets something be seen, it can therefore be true or false. But everything depends on staying clear of any concept of truth construed in the sense of "correspondence" or "accordance" ["Übereinstimmung"]. This idea is by no means the primary one in the concept of ἀλήθεια. The "being true" of λόγος as ἀληθεύειν means: to take beings that are being talked about in λέγειν as ἀποφαίνεσθαι out of their concealment; to let them be seen as something unconcealed (ἀληθές); to discover them. Similarly "being false," ψεύδεσθαι, is tantamount to deceiving in the sense of covering up: putting something in front of something else (by way of letting it be seen) and thereby passing it off as something it is not.

But because "truth" has this meaning, and because λόγος is a specific mode of letting something be seen, λόγος simply may not be appealed to as the primary "place" of truth. If one defines truth as what "genuinely" pertains to judgment, which is quite customary today, and if one invokes Aristotle in support of this thesis, such a procedure is without justification and the Greek concept of truth thoroughly misunderstood. In the Greek sense what is "true"—indeed more originally true than the λόγος we have been discussing—is αἲσθησις, the simple sense perception of something. To the extent that an o:fo􀂍crtc; aims at its ἴδια—that is, the beings which are genuinely accessible only through it and for it,


Martin Heidegger (GA 2) Being & Time (S&S)