discover the truth

From time to time I pick up old texts of mine to read: letters, diaries, notebooks from childhood and adolescence. In these ancient texts, I always find truths that I had already discovered and forgot that I had discovered. As if the truth appeared and disappeared, was covered and uncovered, was veiled and unveiled and then revealed again.

It is possible to think of truth not as opposed to lies (truth as adequacy), right in relation to wrong, but truth as discovery, truth as something that appears and disappears, is here and is hidden. In ancient Greek and in the original Bible – in Greek – this truth was called aletheia.

In this text, I describe truth as aletheia, a very important concept for phenomenological psychology and for phenomenology in general.

To better understand the concept of Aletheia, I will refer to the text “The end of philosophy and the task of thought” by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, which is articulated around two questions:

– To what extent has philosophy, at the present time, entered its final stage?

– And what task still remains reserved for thought at the end of philosophy?

We must take our time with questioning, since its purpose is not to gather organized knowledge as an answer, but rather to make such questionings allow for a transformation of thought. And it is in this sense that we will approach the concept of alethéia, or unveiling.

The end whose philosophy is spoken of is philosophy understood as metaphysics. This thinks the entity in its totality from the point of view of the being, the imbrication of the entity and the being. The being of beings showed itself from the beginning as the foundation, arché, ation, principle. And this is where beings as such are what they are. The foundation manifests itself as its presence.

What philosophy, in its history, has tried in stages, that is, to expose the ontologies of the various regions of beings, the sciences have assumed as their task.

Metaphysics then opened space for the emergence of the sciences, and it is precisely in this unfolding, which consists of its extreme possibility, that philosophy finds its completion.

The end of philosophy reveals itself as the triumph of the controllable equipment of a technical-scientific world and the social order that corresponds to it, with the rational element and the models of thought that only represents and calculates prevailing.

However, is the end of philosophy, understood as its unfolding in the sciences, the full realization of all the possibilities on which the thought of philosophy bet? Is there a thought that can be neither metaphysics nor science? What remains unthinkable?

For Heidegger, the very possibility of metaphysics is born of a thought that is not exhausted in metaphysics, from which it seems to derive as from its hidden foundation, which has been abandoned or forgotten.

Basically, the question that then arises has as its axis the question of truth, a word with which it is intended to translate both the meaning of alethéia and the Platonic conception of truth.

Throughout the history of philosophy, Plato’s thought, albeit in different guises, remains decisive. Metaphysics is Platonism, it speaks the language of Plato.

Plato postulates the identification between being and idea. The idea is the being of the entity, or the essence that demarcates the specificity of every particular entity.

It is understood from there, that the truth will be reached in the correct and adequate apprehension of the idea. Truth thus appears as adequacy, and finds its place in the primacy of reason and subjectivity.

However, in the forgotten foundation of metaphysics, of which Heidegger speaks, truth is thought in a more original sense than adequacy, and from which the latter derives.

In Parmenedis’ philosophical poem, Alethéia is named: “You, however, must learn everything: / both the undisguised heart of unveiling / in its perfect sphericity / and the opinion of mortals who lack / confidence in the unveiled.”

Here, the aletheia is called perfectly spherical because it rotates in the very circularity of the circle, in which each point of beginning and end coincides.

Alethéia, or unveiling, designates clearing. This guarantees, above all, the possibility of the path towards presence and enables it to present itself. Alethéia should be thought of as the clearing that ensures being and thinking and their reciprocal self-presentation.

For example, we can think of an opening, or clearing, in the middle of a forest. This opening allows the presentation of light as well as darkness, light as well as shadow, allowing truth itself to become present.

That is why alethéia cannot be identified only as truth, since truth itself, as well as being and thinking, can only be what it is, in the element of the clearing, therefore any translation of alethéia by truth will be reducing it to a strict and limited sense. , which does not correspond to what that word represented for the Greek thinkers, mainly for the pre-Socratics.

In the later history of philosophy, this sense was forgotten and abandoned with Platonic thought. However, this forgetfulness does not constitute a failure, negligence or accident, since Lethé, veiling, is part of A-lethéia, as its heart is part of its constitution.

Questioning about the end of philosophy, understood as metaphysics, and the task of philosophy, led us to the concept of alethéia, to questioning about the opening, or clearing that allows the being of the entity to manifest itself, to become present, as well as the truth , which cannot be confused with this overture.

Heidegger’s questions open a new space for philosophical thought. By searching the origins of Greek philosophy for the foundation that supports Heidegger’s thought, he re-encounters alethéia, unveils the “veiling” of the very thought process of veiling and re-veiling, and really opens up, in this way, a new and interesting possibility.

New, insofar as it differs from our custom of thinking through an attempt at adequacy, and the first possibility, since even adequacy derives from alethéia, although it can only exist as truth and just like the truth, in this space of opening.

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