In pages 135 through 163 of Parmenides, Heidegger takes up his pursuit of the Fourth Directive presented by alethea. He begins by discussing the law of proximity, claiming that normal vision overlooks what is immediately closest and sees first what is the next closest. The brightness shining from alethea is overlooked as what is closest. Instead, one sees what the light illuminates before he recognizes the light. Hence, the beginning is first seen in what is begun. Heidegger points out that the first beginning is not the primordial beginning. The first beginning comes to light at the end. This end is a sign of the closeness of the primordial beginning. Thus, if the history of the West is the history of “the transformation of the essence of truth and Being,” then capturing the essence of Being indicates the end of this history. It is at such a completion that one comes to realize the resonant importance of Parmenides’ statement that “Being is;” that something is is more significant than what it is.
Heidegger argues that a subject-object way of thinking, wherein unconcealedness is thought only as a showing that meets a perception, results in what is closest – the pure shining – being forgotten. The perceiver thinks that he is owning or mastering beings via the look, thus forgetting that he is being visited by Being. A full understanding of unconcealedness must include all of its components: its emergence from itself, its self-showing by such an emergence, and its coming to presence (or its “it is”). Addressing the argument that subjectivity can be overcome by eliminating the selfhood of man, Heidegger claims that this error in thinking ignores the distinction between selfhood, or individualism, and subjectivity. The selfhood of man occurs when man excludes himself from his relation to beings out of selfishness or egoism. When immersed in subjectivity, however, man asserts his will over other beings. The essence of subjectivity can include selfhood, but the two are not one and the same.
Returning more directly to the pursuit of the essence of alethea, Heidegger briefly elaborates on the self-emergence, physis, inherent in alethea. This emergence, as what is overlooked, is essential to alethea. It has been misconstrued as “nature” in modern thought, but understanding physis this way prevents one from seeing it as what is closest to us in alethea. Also weighty in the essence of alethea, and disregarded in its closeness, is the “open.” Further, “time,” or chronos for the Greeks, is what releases beings into the open and also takes them back, as in the example of the female deities giving birth as well as taking life. The modern concept of time, as something to be measured and calculated by man, ignores its role in disclosing and concealing. To understand time as thought by the Greeks is to understand that a being requires its appropriate time in order to emerge. Moreover, time always lets emerge what is destined to come forth but is as yet un-open. As such, what emerges comes into the open “and therefore is the open.” (143) The open is not a result of disclosure, but the beginning of the unconcealed. It is the hidden essence of Being. Heidegger presents the “free” as “the sheltering place…for the Being of beings,” (143) noting that the familiar notion of the free, as related to free will, says nothing about its relation to alethea. It is as the free that the open gives itself in advance and whereby a letting appear can occur.
Because the Greeks experienced the open in the form of the lighted, Heidegger presents the lighted as a third facet of alethea. The light, or brightness, makes the look possible. Heidegger reiterates that the look is not a function of one’s seeing, asserting that the look is not part of alethea simply because the Greeks were a visual people. Rather, the lighted as experienced by the eye is given priority because the shining of the light holds sway in alethea. Both the open and the lighted make what appears conform to the look that looks into the light. The Greeks used the word “thea” for the look of Being. From this root emerges the term “theory,” the “perceptual relation of man to Being.” (147) Modern thinking reduces the theoretical to that which must be proven by fact before being accepted as “practical.” The offensiveness of this transformation to Heidegger is illuminated when he reminds us that “Alethea is thea, goddess….” (162) Thus, encompassing the open, the lighted, and freedom, alethea is crystallized as “the looking of Being into the open that is lighted by itself as itself.” (162) Before these remarks close his meditation on the essence of alathea, however, Heidegger remarks on how man might experience Being. He claims that, because beings irrupt so suddenly into unconcealedness from concealedness, one must be wakeful in his relation to beings. He must meet a being’s emergence with the realization that the being is. Thinking Being also demands that one leap into the groundless, which resides outside oblivion and beyond the cracks of the familiar ground that will never hold or secure beings.
Taking all of this into consideration, some interesting comparisons can be drawn between Heidegger’s thoughts and Voltaire’s satire Candide. Throughout the novel, Candide and his companion Pangloss never leave the familiar ground of their own philosophy. Instead of allowing Being to encounter them, they try tirelessly to conform what they see of the world to their preconceived notions, attempting to master beings with their gaze. Pangloss especially ignores the light that might allow a new thought to emerge, as he is too busy trying to shape existence according to what he believes. Neither character gives priority to the “it is” of anything; they are both preoccupied with the why it is.
