In addition, there is the forgetting explained as a consequence of "memory-disturbances." Psychopathology calls this "amnesia." But the word "forgetfulness" is too weak to name the forgetting that can befall man; for forgetfulness is only the inclination toward distraction. If it happens that we forget what is essential and do not pay heed to it, lose it and strike it from our minds, then we may no longer speak of "forgetfulness" but of "oblivion." The latter is a realm something may arrive at and come to and fall into, but oblivion also befalls us and we ourselves permit it in a certain way. A more appropriate name for the event of oblivion is the obsolete word "obliviation" [Vergessung]: something falls into oblivion. We are always in such a hurry that we can scarcely pause a moment to inquire into "oblivion." Is oblivion, into which "something" falls and sinks, only a consequence of the fact that a number of people no longer think of this "something"? Or is the latter, that people no longer think of something, already for its part only a consequence of the fact that people themselves are thrust into an oblivion and can therefore no longer know either what they possess or what they have lost? What then is oblivion? It is not just a human product and it is not simply human negligence.
If we now think of oblivion as the concealedness belonging to a characteristic concealment, then we first approach what the Greeks name with the word λήθη. In Hesiod's Theogony (V. 226f.) we read:
αὐτὰρ Ἔρις στυγερὴ τέκε μὲν Πόνον ἀλγινόεντα
Λήθην τε Λιμόν τε καὶ Ἄλγεα δακρυόεντα
"But the (goddess) Strife, the dark one, gave birth to Trouble, the one who brings sorrow,
As well as Oblivion and Absence and Suffering, the tearful."
Λήθη, "Lethe" is the daughter of "Eris." She is mentioned together with Λιμός, mistakenly translated as "Hunger." Of course forgetting is "painful" just as "hunger" is painful and agonizing. But the effects of forgetting and of hunger on the state of the body and soul, i.e., in modern terms, the physiological and psychological, or, in short, the "biological," aspects of forgetting and hunger do not "interest" the Greeks. Therefore something else is meant when λήθη and λιμός are mentioned together. It is not their effects on man but their own essence that sustains their identity. Λήθη, oblivion, is a concealment that withdraws what is essential and alienates man from himself, i.e., from the possibility of dwelling within his own essence. Λιμός does not mean "hunger" in the sense of the desire for food; the word is connected to λείπω, to leave, to let disappear, and means absence of nourishment. Λιμός does not mean the non-satisfaction of human desires and needs, but it refers to the occurrence of the absence of a donation and distribution.