a-letheia

Category: Heidegger - Termos originais
Submitter: Murilo Cardoso de Castro

a-letheia

a-letheia, aletheia

As Heidegger goes about meditating the process of ἀ-λήθεια, this strange paradox (hidden from the metaphysician) that Being contracts into the beings it makes manifest and hides by the very fact that it reveals, never loses its fascination for him. He interrogates Being precisely inasmuch as it is hidden always in ὄν (yet different from ὄν), for it is “upon the hidden [dimension] of ὄν that metaphysics remains grounded. ...” We find striking confirmation of this in the inaugural lecture at Freiburg (1929), when, in posing the question that gives the lecture its title, “What is Metaphysics?,” he meditates the sense of Non-being (Nichts). The hiddenness of Being (in beings) is, then, for Heidegger as essential a part of his experience as Being itself.

What we call here the “hiddenness” of Being (in beings) may be understood in terms of a “not” that contracts Being in beings and at the same time differentiates it from them. Since the function of Being is simply to en-light-en beings, then this contracting “not” is intrinsic to its very nature. For want of a better word, let us call the “not”-character of Being “negativity.” Then the manifestive power that shines forth in beings as beings we may call “positivity.” 22 Once we comprehend this fusion of positivity and negativity into the unity of a single process, we begin to grasp what Heidegger understands by Being as the process of truth. Fot truth, understood in the radical sense of ἀ-λήθεια, is literally non-(ἀ-)concealment (λήθη).23 Being as the process of non-concealment is that which permits beings to become non-concealed (positivity), although the process is so permeated by “not” that Being itself remains concealed (negativity). To think Being in its truth, then, is to think it in terms of both positivity and negativity at once. [RHPT:8-9]

Submitted on:  Sat, 31-Jul-2021, 23:53