are the custodians of the beginning of the Occident, experienced immediately in θεωρία an essential relation to the θεάοντες, to the θεῖον, and to the δαιμόντον. Therefore the Greeks do not first need to impute to θεωρία a practical "value" in order to justify its "truth claims" or in order to justify it over and against the suspicion that it is something "merely" theoretical, devalued as something "merely" abstract running about like some horror. With such a removal of the "theoretical," as the "abstract," from θεά, from the look of Being, can we then be surprised at "atheism," which circulates not only among "freethinkers" and within the "atheistic movement"?
That the basic Greek experience of Being is θεωρία does not testify first and foremost to the priority of seeing and looking but testifies above all to the primordial holding sway of the essence of ἀλήθεια, in which there dwells something like the clearing, the lighted, and the open. Insofar as we follow this directive from the essence of unconcealedness and think the open, our meditation on the essence of ἀλήθεια is indeed not at its end but is only now first brought to its beginning.
d) The open at the beginning of the meditation on the word ἀλήθεια. Essential thinking: the leap into Being. Unconcealed beings in the security of the groundlessness of the open (the free) of Being. The concealment of the decision of the bestowal on man of unconcealedness in the securing open. The entitlement, through the bestowal of Being, to see the open: a historical beginning. The alienation of man from the open.
The beginning requires of us, whose history has proceeded from the beginning, a reflection on the essence of the "open." In naming "the open" and using the word "openness," we seem to be representing something known and understandable. But, on the contrary, everything is blurred in the indeterminate-that is, unless we now take the word "open" seriously and think it exclusively within the essential nexus our meditation on the essence of ἀλήθεια has brought closer to us. We shall thus use the locution "the open" only in its indissoluble essential unity with ἀλήθεια and with the essence of ἀλήθεια as primordially experienced.
In this context, the open is the light of the self-luminous. We name it "the free" and its essence "freedom." "Freedom" has a primordial sense here, alien to metaphysical thinking. We might be inclined to elucidate the essence of freedom, thought here as the essence of the open, on the basis of the traditional delimitation of the various concepts of freedom. For we would be tempted to draw closer to the essence of what we are calling "the open" by approaching it gradually through our ordinary representations.