The concealed will to [82|115] transform beings for the openness of Dasein calls for more. In order to bring about a change in science—and this first means bringing about a change in originary knowing—our Dasein needs an entirely different metaphysical depth. It once again needs a fundamental relation to the Being of beings as a whole, a relation that is well founded and built truly.

The connection between us today and everything that Being, truth, and seeming means has been so confused and groundless and passionless for so long that even in our interpretation and appropriation of Greek poetry, we have an inkling of only a small portion of the power of this poetic saying in Greek Dasein itself. We have Karl Reinhardt to thank for the latest interpretation of Sophocles (1933), which comes essentially closer to Greek Dasein and Being than all previous attempts, because Reinhardt sees and questions tragic happenings according to the fundamental connections among Being, unconcealment, and seeming. Even if modern subjectivisms and psychologisms still often interfere, Reinhardt’s interpretation of Oedipus Rex as the “tragedy of seeming” is a magnificent achievement.¹²

I will conclude these remarks on the poetic formation of the struggle between Being and seeming among the Greeks by quoting a passage from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex that gives us the opportunity to establish the relation between our previous characterization of Greek Being as constancy and our new characterization of Being as appearing.

The few verses from the last choral passage of the tragedy (verses 1189ff.) run as follows:

12. Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles, trans. Hazel Harvey and David Harvey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), chap. 4.