the uncovering comportment toward beings that is required if I am to be deceived is the uncovering and having of the being itself. But why cannot covering-over and falsehood get the better of this having of the being? As will be shown later, it is quite possible for me to live in an act of uncovering and to have pointed out a being, to know about that very being on the basis of having pointed it out—it is possible to live in the knowledge about and truth of the thing and yet be able to fall victim to deception about the very being that I intend in the act of truth (i.e., uncovering).

So why isn’t that possible in the case under discussion?

The answer is: πᾶσαι εἰσὶν ἐνεργείᾳ—δυνάμει [all these are either in ἐνέργεια—or in δύναμις]. These simple beings, the ultimate beings on the basis of which all beings are determined, are simply and directly present and never “not-yet-present” and thus never not-present. Their being excludes every possibility of non-presence regarding what and how they are. These beings are never not-present just as they are. [184]

No deception is possible because there is no possibility of dissembling. How so? For a being to be disguised, and for the disguising to result in a mistake (a wrong understanding of the being in question), the being must be intended at some point. There must be a tendency to uncover, a specific tendency directed toward the being. But a being can be disguised only insofar as something can be synthesized with the being as something. Given that “something,” the being can be seen and determined-as, and deception means alleging and pretending that something is something. But nothing can be synthesized with a simple being because, as simple, the being stands in no need of synthesis with anything. In fact, here we have an absolute exclusion of the possibility of synthesis.

The being lacks not only everything that could be put in front of it to help pass off the disguised being as something that it is not, i.e., to dissemble it. What’s more, this simple being excludes the very possibility of synthesis with something else. Because it is completely lacking in synthesis, the being cannot be taken as something else. Rather, when the being is understood, it itself is present there. If you intend this simple being as itself from the start, and then try to determine it on the basis of something else, you have already misunderstood the thing you intended. If you try to determine a simple being in terms of what it is not, at the very least you cover it over it in what it is.

Let’s take some examples from the field of sense perception, wherein Aristotle recognizes an analogy with direct [intellectual] perception—for example, the direct seeing of qualities such as colors. Now if I were to lay out, in the most extravagant dialectic that you can imagine, the relations that colors happen to have among themselves, that would