7. The basic experience of oblivion
The basic experience, i.e., the experience that conferred ground and direction to my thinking, is that since 1916, and more clearly in the lead up to 1920, I was struck by the rush of one fact, that “Being,” esse, εἶναι, remained in its essence unthought, and thus so too did the relationship between Being and beings.
What kind of a “fact” this was, and still is, remained obscure even to itself; because it had to define itself from out of that which Being has forgone, and so it had to remain obscure to itself, and worthy of question; the question about the “meaning” of Being, about what essentially occurs in Being that thinking needs to think, had to remain obscure. [220] Readiness for this rush, which came to me from the opacity of the fact of the oblivion of Being, manifested itself in my first attempts in manifold ways, and in many inappropriate ways . . . this readiness was prepared for a long time through the early efforts to find a simple way to understand the few main doctrines of Aristotle about the ὄν.
These came to me in 1907 through the dissertation of Franz Brentano “On the Manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle” (this book was given to me as a gift by Dr. Konrad Gröber, who was the city pastor in Messkirch at the time).
The text preoccupied me throughout my last years at the Gymnasium—in addition to reading the texts of Aristotle.
The πολλαχῶς λεγόμενον struck me:
1. that it is that way with the ὄν;
2. that Aristotle never asks why;
3. that the πολλαχῶς itself is ambiguous: a) in a four-fold sense, b) within the ὄν of the κατεγορίαι once again;
4. what the unity of the πολλαχῶς is;
5. how the λεγόμενον is to be grasped as δηλούμενον—as ἀλήθές.
Thus, with this manifold question-worthiness of the ὄν and of thinking about the ὄν, it became increasingly unquestionable that there is a puzzling fact here: namely this, that Being remained unthought in its essence, that it was not thought about; that it remained in oblivion.
In my questioning since 1920, as Husserl’s “phenomenological sight” (not his theory!) became clearer and more practiced in my own seeing, the following became more obvious:
1. that the oblivion of Being must somehow belong to Being itself;
2. that this has to do with an early fact that determines all Occidental thinking—thus with something “historical”;
3. that the difference between Being and beings actually remained unthought;
4. that every “is” is said differently; [221]
5. that the oblivion somehow correlates with Λήθη and thus with Ἀλήθεια and that, therefore, the question about the essence of truth, thought on the basis of the basic experience, must be decisive;