unlimited and limitless are zones without stopping places, where every sojourn loses itself in instability. The open provides no shelter or security. The open is rather the place where what is still undetermined and unresolved plays out, and therefore it is an occasion for erring and going astray. Thus with regard to the open two questions immediately arise. In the first place, as originating in primordial freedom, how is the open supposed to be the originary essence of unconcealedness? Secondly, how can the open be essentially sheltering?
It cannot be denied that the primordial essence of truth, ἀλήθεια, refers to the essence of the open and of openness. Although the Greeks did not explicitly think through and name the open as the essence of ἀλήθεια, yet they experienced it constantly in one regard, namely in the essential form of the lighted and the lighting, and this in turn in the shining of the light that provides brightness. We had incidentally mentioned the open as the lighted when we characterized the δαίμονες and the θεάοντες as ones who look and appear in the light, and we already indicated the connection between clearing and light. The light is the determining radiance, the shining and appearing. "The" light in the eminent sense shines as the light of the sun. On the basis of Plato's "cave allegory" we can immediately gather the connection between sun, light, unconcealedness, and unveiling on the one hand, and between darkness, shadow, concealedness, veiling, and cave on the other.
This reference to the essence of ἀλήθεια in the sense of the open of the clearing and of the light will serve to conclude our elucidation of the Greek experience of the essence of truth. Apparently, then, we need only take a few more steps in order to "explain" this essence of truth in a way that might satisfy even ordinary, i.e., modern, thinking and its demands.
c) Light and looking. The "natural" explanation of truth as lighting in terms of the "visual" Greeks, versus the disclosing look. The perceptual look. Ἀλήθεια: the event in the landscape of the evening that conceals the morning. Θεᾶν-ὁρᾶν and theory.
The light, understood as brightness, first bestows the possibility of the look and therewith the possibility of the encountering look as well as the grasping look. Looking is an act of seeing. Seeing is a power of the eye. Herewith we seem to reach a point that could entirely explain ἀλήθεια as the essence of truth for the Greeks, i.e., lighting and the open as the essence of truth. The Greeks were, as we say, "visual." They grasped the world primarily by the eye, and therefore they "naturally" paid attention to looking and the look. So they had to consider light and brightness. From the lighting and brightness and transparency (διαφανές) of the light there is only a small step to the lighted and