THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH
4. This only occurs in the staking and stance (παιδεία) of man's own proper self, according to the law and rank of its existence.
The investigation, which had to set all this forth in its rigorous inner connection, for its part stands in the service of the question of αἴσθησις. The latter was more precisely determined as the question of what, in the perception of the perceived, constitutes the relationship to the encountered objects. It must come down to this question because αἴσθησις was put forward as the essence of knowledge. However, knowledge is the possession of truth, i.e. the unhiddenness of beings. Accordingly, such possession of truth involves a relationship to beings. Only where this exists is there the possibility of unhiddenness and thus of the possession of truth, i.e. knowledge. There can be knowledge only where there is a relationship to beings.
If we clearly analyse this unambiguous chain of questions, while keeping the result of the foregoing investigation firmly in view, we immediately see that the question of whether αἴσθησις is, or could be, the essence of knowledge, is now decided in the negative. The original unclarity of the concept (perceiving of beings) has now disappeared: in its narrower and strict sense, αἴσθησις refers to what is given to the senses, while in the wider sense (which was the one intended by Theaetetus) it refers also to beings.
We can now say what in the essence of perception constitutes the true and what belongs to the being-true of a perceiving. In an extremely concise sequence of questions and answers (186 c 7-187 a), the decision on Theaetetus' thesis is arrived at. The interpretation of the essence of truth through the cave allegory has taught us that when the unhidden becomes more unhidden (ἀληθέστερον), what is (ὄν) comes to be more beingful (μάλλον ὄν). The latter belongs together with the former and is not a consequence of it. In order that something can in any degree be unhidden it must previously be given as a being. Unhiddenness is intrinsically unhiddenness of beings; indeed we saw that the Greeks generally use the word 'unhiddenness' to mean nothing else but the beings themselves in their unhiddenness. In respect of this relation to beings in the essence of ἀλήθεια, Socrates now asks Theaetetus (186 c 7):
Οἷόν τε οὖν ἀληθείας τυχεῖν, ᾧ μηδὲ οὐσίας;
Ἀδύνατον.
'Is it then possible for anyone to attain something in its unhiddenness who