has such a direction. The way is then a directed ὀρθὰ ὁδός. Only if the way can proceed into the unconcealed can it go on directly to the unconcealed and be the directed way. Only if it is in this manner the directed way is it the right way. What is right has the possibility of its essence and the ground of its essence in the disclosing of unconcealedness. Since, for the Greeks, the ὀρθός—straight, along—holds sway and is present only in what is unconcealed and in what goes toward the unconcealed, hence only there is an assignment possible and a setting up and a "sup-plementing" in the sense of a determining direction without any concealing and dissembling—without an occurrence of λανθάνειν. Thus in the same place Hesiod calls Nereus ἀψευδέα καὶ ἀληθέα, not distorting and not hiding, he also says of him οὐδὲ θεμιστέων λήθεται—he does not stand in concealedness with regard to the supplementing directions.
(We will have to discuss θέμιστες and θέμις when we return to the word of Parmenides. Nothing, however, can be said at all about θέμις without a preceding meditation on the essence of θέσις, "positing," as the Greeks think it.)
Forgetting, as experienced by the Greeks. is neither a subjective state. nor is it only related to the past and the "recollection" of it, and neither is it simply a matter of thinking in the sense of "re-presentation." Concealment places the entire essence of man in hiddenness and tears him in this way from the unconcealed. Man is "away" from it. He is no longer with it. He neglects and forsakes what is assigned to him. Concealment comes over man and draws him away from the πραγμάτων ὀρθὰν ὁδόν. Forgetting is no-longer-being-there-with-it and by no means only a no-longer-remembering as the lack of a representation. We are tempted to say the Greeks conceived forgetting not only in relation to cognitive comportment but also with regard to the "practical." But when we speak this way then we already think in a non-Greek way, for concealment concerns at the very outset man's entire being-with-beings. Only because this is so does forgetting concern at once and equiprimordially "theoretical" and "practical" comportment.
On the basis of this elucidation of the essence of oblivion as concealedness, and in view of what is to follow, we can summarize in a kind of "definition" the meditation we have completed. Λήθη, oblivion, is the concealment that lets the past, the present, and the future fall into the path of a self-absenting absence. And with that it sets man himself away into concealedness in relation to this withdrawal, precisely in such a manner that this concealment for its part does not, on the whole. appear. Λήθη conceals while it withdraws. It withdraws while, withholding itself, it lets the unconcealed and its disclosure lapse into the "away" of a veiled absence.