The term δόξα names various things: 1) aspect, or respect, as glory; 2) aspect as the sheer view that something offers; 3) aspect as merely looking-so, “seeming” as mere semblance; 4) a view that a person constructs for himself, opinion. This multiple [80|112] meaning of the word is not looseness of language, but a play with deep foundations in the mature wisdom of a great language, a multiplicity that preserves the essential traits of Being in the word. In order to see correctly from the very start here, we must guard ourselves against cavalierly taking seeming as something just “imaginary,” “subjective,” and thereby falsifying it. Instead, just as appearing belongs to beings themselves, so does seeming.Let us think about the sun. It rises and sets for us daily. Only a very few astronomers, physicists, and philosophers directly experience this fact otherwise, as the movement of the Earth around the sun—and even they do so only on the grounds of a particular, although rather widespread, conception. But the seeming in which sun and Earth stand—for example, the early morning of a landscape, the sea in the evening, the night—is an appearing. This seeming is not nothing. Neither is it untrue. Neither is it a mere appearance of relationships that in nature are really otherwise. This seeming is historical and it is history, uncovered and grounded in poetry and saga, and thus an essential domain of our world.

Only all the effete latecomers, with their overly clever wit, believe they can be done with the historical power of seeming by explaining it as “subjective,” where the {113} essence of this “subjectivity” is something extremely dubious. The Greeks experienced it otherwise. Time and again, they had first to tear Being away from seeming and preserve it against seeming.