by a human being to other human beings. However, because the human being who speaks here is a thinker, and because Artemis and Apollo are near to this thinker, it could be that his saying is essentially a dialogue with the gods—that is, with those who peer in. In that case the saying, which says “someone” (i.e., τίς), could also mean the gods. From another saying (fragment 30) we hear: οὔτε τις θεῶν οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν—“neither some god nor some human being has produced ‘the adornment’ (i.e., φύσις)”: rather, gods and human beings—indeed, anyone who is a being that is addressable by the question ‘who are you,’ whoever that may be—is such that, according to the saying, he is not able to be concealed from the perpetually emerging.

No one can be concealed before φύσις. Anyone who is, insofar as that one is, must thus be such that he emerges against the [173] emerging itself, and comports himself emergently toward φύσις. Everyone who is, as someone, does not merely occur as a being within the clearing (of being). Such a one not only stands ‘in’ the clearing, as does a rock or a tree or a mountain animal: rather, such a one looks into the clearing, and this looking is one’s ζωή—“life,” as ‘we’ say. But the Greeks thereby think emerging as being. The one who looks, in an essential way, into the clearing is lightened into the clearing. That one’s standing is an emerging-projecting into the clearing.

( ἔκ-στασις—“eksistent” in the just- mentioned sense: only a being who is such that it, not being able to conceal itself, comports in an emergent way toward φύσις can—precisely because it has emerged in such a sense—reflect upon itself and thus be itself, that is, be a self as the sort of being that we would address with the τίς—‘someone.’)

The saying questions the relation of φύσις (that is, of κόσμος as the inceptual adornment) to gods and human beings. The emerging adornment is ‘above’ them because gods and human beings, insofar as they are, only are in that they emerge into the open, and in such a way as to never be able to be concealed from it.

Only those whose essence cannot remain concealed over against φύσις are beings in such a way that they correspond in their being to emerging. The corresponding bearing of φύσις to φύσις must have in itself the essential features of emerging, self-opening, non-self-occlusion, non- self- concealment. Non-self-concealing is self-revealing abiding in revealing and unconcealment—or, as the Greeks said, in ἀλήθεια. We render this term as “truth.” However, we see now, in our first attempt to think the first saying of Heraclitus’s, that ἀλήθεια is thought in the saying, though it is not named in it.

ἀλήθεια—revealing into unconcealment—is the essence of φύσις, of emerging, and is at the same time the fundamental feature of the way that anyone who himself is, be he a god or a human being, comports toward ἀλήθεια in such a way as to not [174] be a λαθών—i.e., one who conceals, hides, and occludes oneself—but rather one who reveals. Every being who is addressable only by the

130    The Inception of Occidental Thinking