abides, does it bring the clearing into the unconcealed. Because the clearing occurs in the concealed essence of ἀλήθεια, we experience emergence and presence, i.e., Being, "in the light" of the bright and of the "light." Luminous self-disclosure shows itself as the shining (The sun shines.) What shines is what shows itself to a looking. What appears to the looking is the sight that solicits man and addresses him, the look. The looking performed by man in relation to the appearing look is already a response to the original look, which first elevates human looking into its essence. Thus as a consequence of the abiding of ἀλήθεια, and only because of it, looking is the primordial way of emergence into the light and coming into the light, i.e., shining into the unconcealed. To be sure, we must understand looking in the original Greek manner as the way a man encounters us by looking at us and, in looking, gathers himself ill to this self-opening emergence, and therein, without holding back a remainder, presents his essence and lets it "emerge."
This looking, which first makes presence possible, is therefore more original than the presence {Anwesenheit} of things, became the self-disclosing look, according to the full essence of disclosure, at the same time shelters and hides something undisclosed. The thing, on the contrary, lacking the look, appears only in such a way that it stands in the unconcealed but itself has nothing to disclose and consequently also nothing to hide.
Here the animal has a peculiar intermediate position. Animals are said to "watch" us. But animals do not look. The "peering," or "glaring," or "gawking" and "gaping" of an animal is never a self-disclosure of Being, and, in its so-called looking, the animal never produces a self-emergence in a being that is disclosed to it. We are always the ones who first take up into the unconcealed such "looking" and who, on our own, interpret the way animals "watch" us as a looking. On the other hand, where man only experiences Being and the unconcealed sketchily, the animal's "look" can concentrate in itself a special power of encounter. Looking, in the original sense of emergent self-presenting, i.e., determined from ἀλήθεια, is in Greek θεάω. On the other hand, looking in the sense of grasping, which is understood on the basis of the grasped and lets the encountering look come to itself and accepts it—this grasping look is expressed through the medial form θεάω in the word θεάομαι, to let the encountering look come to itself, i.e., to behold. The Greeks were acquainted with the grasping look, just as, conversely, in addition to such looking as an act of subjective representation, we also know the look of encounter. But the question is not whether both these essential forms of looking, the encountering and the grasping, are known or not. The issue is which one, the look of emerging into presence or the look of grasping, has the essential priority in the interpretation of appearances and on what basis this rank is determined. According to the priority of subjectivity in the modern