§6. The Greeks' final word concerning the hidden counter-essence of ἀλήθεια, λήθη, (1): The concluding myth of Plato's Politeia. The myth of the essence of the polis. Elucidation of the essence of the demonic. The essence of the Greek gods in the light of ἀλήθεια. The "view" of the uncanny.
a) The πόλις, the pole of the presence {Anwesenheit} of beings as determined out of ἀλήθεια. Reference to Sophocles. The reverberation of the conflictual essence of ἀλήθεια in the counter-essence to πόλις: ἄπολις. Reference to Burckhardt.
The mythical presentation in Hesiod's theogony shows the provenance of the essence of λήθη out of ἔρις (strife) and νύξ (night). And Pindar's ode provides the clarification of a decisive essential relation. The signless nebulosity of λήθη refers to its concealment. which itself hides itself and thereby withdraws. This complexity of veiling and letting disappear manifests unequivocally enough the provenance of the essence of λήθη. This provenance is nocturnal. The night veils. But the night does not necessarily conceal by drawing everything into the blackness of mere darkness. Rather, the essence of its veiling consists in this, that it relegates things and people and both in their relation to one another to the abode of a concealment. Oblivion, too, in its nocturnal essence, does not befall man as an individual creature so as to effectuate changes in his mode of representation, in consequence of which a person can no longer perceive certain objects. Above all, oblivion tears things and man away from unconcealedness, in such a manner that the one who forgets dwells within a realm in which beings are withdrawn and man himself is withdrawn from beings; and even this reciprocal withdrawal, as a relation, is withdrawn from unconcealedness.
We might expect that where oblivion is experienced in this way as withdrawing concealment, the relation between λήθη and ἀλήθεια would not only be mentioned immediately but would be thought explicitly and assigned to meditation prior to everything else. This expectation. which is precisely ours and in no way a Greek one, is not fulfilled Nevertheless, the reciprocal counter-essence between ἀλήθεια and λήθη holds sway as the basic feature of beings as a whole, in the midst of which Greek humanity endures its history. It is almost as if what was always already nearby and experienced is explicitly put into words only in the age of the completion of Greek humanity, a completion that is not a high peak but instead a high pass of transition to the end. The Greek world comes to completion in the thinking of Plato, and Aristotle's thinking knows and says this completion in the most extreme possible manner.