HEGEL AND THE GREEKS
dissembling and hiding? It is not that unconcealment is "dependent" upon saying; rather, every saying already needs the realm of unconcealment. Only where unconcealment already holds sway can something become sayable, visible, showable, capable of being apprehended. When we keep in view the enigmatic sway of Ἀλήθεια, disclosure, we may come to intimate that even the whole essence of language resides in dis-closure, in the holding sway of Ἀλήθεια. However, the talk of holding-sway, too, remains still a makeshift expedient, if indeed the manner of its being in play receives its determination from disclosure itself, i.e., from the clearing of self-concealing.
"Hegel and the Greeks" - in the meantime, we seem to have arrived at a discussion of something strange, remote from our topic. Nonetheless we are closer to our topic than before. In the introduction to our lecture, it was said: The matter of thinking is at stake, in play. The attempt is to be made to bring this matter into view through our topic.
Hegel determines the philosophy of the Greeks as the beginning of "philosophy proper." However, this philosophy remains, as the stage of thesis and abstraction, in a "not yet."4 The completion through antithesis and synthesis is as yet outstanding.5
[272] Our meditation on Hegel's interpretation of the Greek doctrine of being tried to show that "being," with which philosophy begins, unfolds essentially as presence only insofar as Ἀλήθεια already holds sway, and yet Ἀλήθεια itself remains unthought with respect to its essential provenance.
Thus in looking at Ἀλήθεια we come to experience the fact that, in regard to it, our thinking is addressed by something' that, already before the beginning of " philosophy," yet at the same time6 throughout its entire history, has drawn thinking toward it. Ἀλήθεια comes before the history of philosophy, but in such a way that it withholds itself from philosophical determinability as something that demands to be discussed by a thinking that springs from it.7 Ἀλήθεια is that which, unthought, is worthy of thought the matter of thinking. Therefore, Ἀλήθεια remains for us what is first of all to be thought - to be thought freed from the perspective of the metaphysical representation of "truth" in the sense of correctness, freed also from the determination of "being" as actuality.8
Hegel says of the philosophy of the Greeks: "Satisfaction is to be found therein only to a certain degree," namely, the satisfaction of spirit's drive to ward absolute certainty. This judgment of Hegel's as to the unsatisfying
a Separatum from The Presence of the Greeks in Modern Thought (1960): that which presses, the conflict.
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