HEGEL AND THE GREEKS
has its limit, which can be circumscribed as follows: the more thoughtful a thinking is, that is, the more it is claimed by its language, the more authoritative what is unthought becomes for it, and even what is unthinkable for it.
When, from the perspective of absolute subjectivity, Hegel interprets being in a speculative and dialectical manner as the indeterminate immediate, the abstract universal, and explicates the basic words for being in Greek Ἕν, Λόγος, Ἰδέα, Ἐνέργεια - within this horizon of modern philosophy, we are tempted to judge this explication to be historiographically incorrect.
Yet every historiographical statement and its grounds move already within a relation to history. For this reason, we must, before deciding upon the historiographical correctness of our representation, consider whether and how history is experienced, whence it is determined in its fundamental traits.
[269] With regard to Hegel and the Greeks, this means that, prior to all correct or incorrect historiographical assertions, Hegel experienced the essence of history in terms of the essence of being in the sense of absolute subjectivity. To this day there has been no experience of history that, seen philosophically, could respond to this experience of history. But the speculative-dialectical determination of history does entail that it remained denied to Hegel to see Ἀλήθεια and its holding sway expressly as the matter of thinking, and this occurs in precisely that philosophy which determined "the realm of pure truth" to be "the goal" of philosophy. For, when Hegel conceives being as the indeterminate immediate, he experiences it as what is posited by the determining and conceiving subject. Accordingly, he is not able to release εἶναι, being in the Greek sense, from the relation to the subject, and set it free into its own essence. This essence, however, is presencing, that is to say, an enduring coming forth from concealment into unconcealment. In coming to presence, disclosure is at play. It is at play in the Ἕν and in Λόγος, i.e., in unifying, gathering, lying-before - i.e., in letting come to endure. Ἀλήθεια is at play in the Ἰδέα and in the κοινωνία of the Ideas, insofar as these bring one another to shine and thus constitute being beings [das Seiendsein], the ὄντως ὄν. Ἀλήθεια is at play in Ἐνέργεια, which has nothing to do with actus and activity, but rather only with the ἔργον, experienced in a Greek manner, and with its state of being brought forth into presencing, through which the latter reaches completion.2
Yet Ἀλήθεια, disclosure, is at play not only in the basic words of Greek thinking, but in the Greek language as a whole, which speaks differently as soon as we put out of play Roman and medieval and modern ways of representing in our interpretations of it, and seek in the Greek world neither personalities nor consciousness.
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