PATHMARKS
a manner that the experience transposes us in advance into the originarily essential domain of truth. But here it becomes evident also that freedom is the ground of the inner possibility of correctness only because it receives its own essence from the more originary essence of uniquely essential truth. Freedom was initially determined as freedom for what is opened up in an open region. How is {GA 9: 188} this essence of freedom to be thought? That which is opened up, that to which a presentative statement as correct corresponds, are beings opened up in an open comportment. Freedom for what is opened up in an open region lets beings be the beings they are. Freedom now reveals itself as letting beings be.a
Ordinarily we speak of letting be whenever, for example, we forgo some enterprise that has been planned. "We let something be" means we do not touch it again, we have nothing more to do with it. To let something be has here the negative sense of letting it alone, of renouncing it, of indifference and even neglect.
However, the phrase required now - to let beings be - does not refer to neglect and indifference but rather the opposite. To let be is to engage oneself with beings.b On the other hand, to be sure, this is not to be understood only as the mere management, [84] preservation, tending, and planning of the beings in each case encountered or sought out. To let be - that is to let beings be as the beings that they are - means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand, bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself. Western thinking in its beginning conceived this open region as τὰ ἀληθέα, the unconcealed. If we translate ἀλήθεια as "unconcealment" rather than "truth," this translation is not merely "more literal"; it contains the directive to rethink the ordinary concept of truth in the sense of the correctness of statements and to think it back to that still uncomprehended disclosedness and disclosure of beings. To engage oneself with the disclosedness of beings not to lose oneself in them; rather, such engagement withdraws {GA 9: 189} in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are, and in order that presentative correspondence might take its standard from them. As this letting-be it exposes itself to beings as such and transposes all comportment into the open region. Letting-be, i.e., freedom, is intrinsically exposing, ek-sistent.10 Considered in regard to the
a First edition, 1943: Letting be: (1) not in the negative sense, but granting - preservation; (2) not as an ontically oriented effecting. Heeding, taking heed of being as beyng.
b First edition, 1943: Leaving that which is present its presencing, and not importing anything else into it in addition.
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