In-der-Blog-sein

kulturCritic on unhiding truth.

[Heidegger] came to believe that the original condition of human dwelling was obscured by the analytical habits of modern consciousness, and that truth lay somewhere hidden in a collective forgetfulness. In fact, he came to rely increasingly upon a concept of truth as “unconcealment” or “disclosedness,” seeking thereby to articulate the original intertwining of thinking and dwelling – a condition of openness that he termed Gelassenheit. He recovered our concept of truth from its ancient roots in Greek myth, deriving rather circuitously from the word lethe, the river of forgetfulness, one of the five rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology. The term lethe in classical Greek literally meant “oblivion,” “forgetfulness,” or “concealment.” The word for “truth” on the other hand, from whence Heidegger rescues the concept, is aletheia (ἀλήθεια), meaning un-forgetfulness, un-concealment, or disclosedness. The event of truth would be exposing that which had been essentially concealed or hidden and letting it again shine-forth.

Yet any unconcealing of truth is accompanied by a complementary concealing, so truthing is a zero-sum game. Gelassenheit is accepting that Nash equilibrium.   ¶ 7:42 PM