Heidegger was somewhat obsessed with language and believed that language tends, over time, to hide and obfuscate meaning, when it should rather shed light on things. Along this vein, Being and Time begins with the claim that we today no longer understand the meaning of Being, and that this forgetting is so thorough that we are not even any longer aware of this absence of understanding, so that even the question "What Is Being?", which should be the most important question for us, is for the most part ignored and overlooked. To even begin understanding Being, then, we must first try to understand the meaning of the question of Being. We must first come to the realization that there is even a problem there in the first place which needs to be resolved. Heidegger's chosen solution to this problem involves the claim that while language conceals meaning, it also, in its origins, is able to reveal it if we are able to come to understand language correctly. He gives an example with the term aletheia, which in Greek means truth. By getting to the origins of language and the experience of language, we can reveal aletheia. Aletheia, etymologically, means not-forgetting (thus the river Lethe is, in Greek mythology, the river of forgetting that the dead must cross before resting in Hades), and so the truth is implicitly an unconcealment that recovers the meanings implicit in language.

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