14. φύσις—ἀλήθεια—beyng
With Plato’s interpretation of being as ἰδέα, the essence of ἀλήθεια is brought into undecidedness; but that, too, is a decision. Indeed it is even the decision that should be accorded the most extensive bearing in the entire course of the “history” of “truth” up to now.
Through this decision on the undecidedness—here, it immediately means undecidability—of the henceforth unavailable essential beginning of the essence of truth, there arises an “epoch” in the history of being. Being conceals its essence after its emergence in the first beginning; the concealment lets come into being—i.e., now, into “power”— the abandonment of beings by being in the form of beingness as machination. The “ἀγαθόν,” the “good,” “is” its essence: the “bad.”
15. Ἀ-λήθεια and the open
The concept of the “open,” in the context of the history of beyng, is a determination of the begun beginning, i.e., a determination of disconcealment. The open (along with its openness) is an essential character of being and can be experienced only in inceptual knowledge. Inasmuch as only historical humans dwell in a relation to the being of beings, only their perceiving, i.e., the perception taken over by humans, reaches into disconcealment. Only humans perceive an open realm. Unless the strict relation between ἀλήθεια and openness is maintained, the essence of the open, as that essence is understood within the history of beyng, can never be thought with essential legitimacy. Only in interrogating the essential occurrence of beyng does thinking attain the concept of the “open” as thus determined.
Only where this openness obtains is there “world” as structure of the steadfastly grounded open realm (truth) of beings.
A being is a possible object, something standing over and against (ἀντί), only because it stands in the open domain of being. Precisely where there is an “over and against,” something more originary occurs essentially, the clearing of the “in between.” And precisely this open domain is denied to plant, animal, and everything that merely lives. To be sure, this has happened only where beings have become objects, because at the same time the being of beings is no longer appreciated in its essence but, instead, is taken to be purely decided: precisely as the certain, what is bent back to in “reflexion,” and, thus fastened down, the secured. This lack of appreciation of being is, in the mode of the oblivion of being, a proper mode of the truth of beings, a mode that