Aletheia: Who Are We?
This piece was originally written in the Winter of 2017.
How to go about answering the question “who are we?”... Perhaps the same way one might answer the question “who am I?” To this question, I would first offer the meaning of my name. My name is Liam, which means resolute protector. My parents somewhat arbitrarily chose this name. Although they had reasons to choose it, they hadn’t met me nor yet known me for the twenty-two years I have now been alive, and so I have grown into it with meanings and reasons they never could have known.
Part of the reason I joined Aletheia was its name. Heidegger talks about this Ancient Greek word in his treatise Being and Time. The word means truth. Heidegger defines truth first as uncovering. We, as humans, are the ones that perform this uncovering, and so, next, we can see truth as the uncoveredness of that which we uncover. Heidegger writes,
“Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factitial uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery. Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth, they use a privative expression--a-letheia” (265).
The Lethe river, according to Greek mythology, is the river of forgetfulness and oblivion in the underworld. Souls who drink its water lose all memory of their bodily lives. And so Heidegger perceives that truth has been stolen from this river. But this leaves it in a very precarious position where it is constantly slipping back into oblivion, constantly concealing itself again. But, Heidegger writes, “Entities have not been completely hidden; they are precisely the sort of thing that has been uncovered, but at the same time they have been disguised” (264). With truth as our deepest desire, then, it is essential that we “should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered, defend it against semblance and disguise, and assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again” (265). Truth is not something to set on your shelf, but a seed that sprouts, requiring more care and attention than at first. When the truth is communicated to us we sometimes do the former. We think the truth has been wrested by someone else and that we do not have to do any wrestling for it. Thus, the truth continues to be passed on, but in the form of a sealed letter. We pass it on without ever making it our own.
When we first meet someone, we see their face. It has a nose, and eyes, and cheeks, and a chin and mouth. As we get to know this person, their face seems to change. We see who they are displayed in the physical characteristics of their face. Although we saw their face at first, we did not know how profoundly it embodied them. Their face slowly reveals itself to us; though it was always there, only after time can we really see it. This is just how it is with everything: uncovered but disguised--only through effort do we slowly tug the disguise away, unraveling it so subtly that we don’t always recognize this happening.
Aletheia is a group of faces that, over the past two years, have revealed themselves to each other in some ways, and remained disguised in other ways. We came in with certain ideas about life, and as we have grown in college, our ideas about life have changed in some ways, and remained the same in other ways. This journal is a way for us to express these views and what we have learned. But there is always the chance that what we write is read shallowly: that it is read as truth that can be set up on a shelf and forgotten about, rather than an invitation to wrestle with hard questions. And that is why Aletheia cannot just be the journal, but the experience that we, as a group, have had, wrestling our way through college and existence.
A large part of our wrestling has been our Christian struggle. We believe Jesus is Aletheia, as he says he is. We believe that his resurrection from the dead uncovered life. And we believe that, though our faith is solitary, we are meant to live in fellowship.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Print.
