The prospective category aletheia designated a play of hiding and showing whose variations make the epochs. Each reversal articulates anew what remains hidden or concealed and what is shown or disclosed, so that a crisis in history appears as a redistribution of shade and light, as a rearrangement of the 'clearing' within which life and thought are possible for a while. The corresponding retrospective category, justice, shows conformation to have been as anthropocentric undertaking since the Greeks. such notions as homoiosis, adaequatio, 'justice' have had the effect of committing lethein and concealment to oblivion and of restricting unconcealment to a human comportment: assimilation to the Good, assertion of correct judgements, and finally done to chaos.

Under the anticipatory incidence of the transitional category which corresponds to aletheia and to justice, the hiding-showing can be neither epochal nor humanist. Indeed, what is the 'favor' that announces itself in the danger of transition and thanks to which the 'world' can appear as a self-regulating play, as the 'fourfold'? "In the essence of the danger a favor dwells and prevails, namely, the favor that the oblivion of being turn about into the truth of being...We have thought the truth of being in the worlding of world as the mirror play of the fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities. When oblivion turns about, when world as the safekeeping of being's essence turns in, then there comes to pass (ereignet) the lightning stroke of world." [P. 44] As if to point out the threshold upon which the Ereignis, event of appropriation, starts coming into play, Heidegger adds: "The lightning stroke is the event in which the constellation of the turning [comes about] in the very essence of being, and that in the epoch of enframing (des Gestells)." [P. 46] The categorical transition from 'unconcealment' to 'event of appropriation' is datable: it occurs with contemporary technology.

Pp. 217-8

¶ 7:48 PM