The Early Saying of Being as Physis (as Aletheia) 61
position on Aristotle’s understanding of the proper locus of truth. [4] “This says: what shows itself in its prevailing stands in the unconcealed.” This line restates the oneness in essence of physis (“what shows itself in its prevailing”) and aletheia (“the unconcealed”). [5] “The unconcealed as such comes to a stand in showing itself.” This is the same point as the previous sentence only with the terms reversed. [6] “Truth, as un-concealment, is not an addition to Being.” As with sentence [3], the full significance of this line can be appreciated only in view of the traditional philosophical understanding of “truth” as an “addition” to Being supplied by thought, or more specifically, by the “judgment.” Hence, he is countering this traditional position by maintaining that truth (aletheia) is not, in the first place, an intellective “addition” to Being; rather, truth is the “same” as Being. That is, aletheia is convertible with Being insofar as both aletheia and Being name unconcealment, manifestness, in all its dimensions. (7) And this is brought home decisively by Heidegger in his concluding italicized sentence:
Truth belongs to the essence [essencing] of Being.
The originality and radicality of Heidegger’s fundamental position that Being “is” physis “is” aletheia is what I have been emphasizing for some time, yet this position is apparently still sufficiently alien to philosophical thinking that even among some contemporary Heidegger scholars, the effort persists to return the principal locus of “truth” to the domain of the human being (Dasein). Yet Heidegger’s own words say otherwise – and decisively so. From the late 1920s onward, he became ever more clear and insistent that the primary locus of “truth” is Being as physis. The aletheic character of Being as physis is Heidegger’s distinctive philosophical claim, and IM is one of his most important statements on the matter. A few years after IM, in his 1939 essay on Aristotle’s Physics B 1, he restated this position that “truth as self-revealing belongs to Being itself: physis is aletheia.”11 In addition, in the 1943 summer semester lecture course on Heraclitus (GA 55), the