Daimonion may be called the “uncanny,” or “extraordinary,” in the sense that it everywhere surrounds the present state of things and presents itself in everything ordinary, though without being the ordinary. The “uncanny” can be understood in this way, with regard to what is ordinary or natural as the “most natural” in the sense of how “nature” is thought by the Greeks, i.e., in the sense of physis. The uncanny is that out of which all that is ordinary emerges. To daimonion is the essence and essential ground of the uncanny. It is what presents itself in the ordinary and takes up its abode therein.

Daio (daiontes—daimones): to present oneself in the sense of pointing and showing.

Daimones: “the self-showing ones” are the ones pointing. They are who they are and they way they are only in the essential domain of disclosure and of the self-disclosing of Being itself. Night and day take their essence from what conceals and discloses itself and is self-lighting. That which is lighted, however, is not only what is visible and seeable, but prior to that – as the emerging — it is what surveys everything that comes into light and stays in it and lies in it – it is what gazes into everything ordinary, indeed, in such a way that it precisely appears in the ordinary itself and only in it and out of it.

Theon: “looking” is: to provide sight, namely the sight of the Being of beings, which are the looking ones themselves.

Theo: “the look” as the basic mode of self-showing appearance and essence that present themselves in what is ordinary.

Theomai: “contemplate” or “spectate”

Theatron: the place of the spectacle or “theatre”

Theomai: to provide oneself with “the look,” i.e., thea, in the sense of the sight in which something shows itself and presents itself.

Therefore, Theo in no way means “seeing” in the sense of representational looking upon and looking at, by which man turns towards beings as objects and grasps them. Rather, theo is the looking in which the one who looks, and shows himself, appears, and “is there.” Theo is the fundamental way the one who looks presents (daio) himself in the sight of his essence, i.e., emerges, as unconcealed, into the unconcealed.

Oi theo: the so-called gods, the ones who look into the ordinary and who everywhere look into the ordinary, are the oi daimones – the ones who point and give signs.

Eidos or Idea: the “countenances” things take on, their “outward look”

Being – idea – is what in all beings shows itself and what looks out through them = the precise reason man can grasp beings as beings at all.

Man: that which within the ordinary comes to presence by his own look. Man himself is that being hat has the distinctive characteristic of being addressed by Being itself, in such a way that in the self-showing of man, in his looking and in his sight, the uncanny itself, god, appears. The Greeks experience looking at first and properly as the way man emerges and comes into presence, with other beings, but as man in his essence.

LOGOS-MYTHOS

The name as the first word lets what is designated appear in its primordial presence. The word is in essence the “letting appear” of Being by naming. Man is the Zoon Logon ekon – the being that emerges by naming and saying and that in saying maintains its essence. The word as the naming of Being, the mythos, names Being in its primordial looking-into and shining—names to theon, i.e., the gods. Since to theon and to daimonion (the divine) are the uncanny that look into the unconcealed and present themselves in the ordinary, therefore mythos is the only appropriate mode of the relation to appearing Being -- since the essence of mythos is determined, just as essentially as are theion and daimoion, on the basis of disclosedness. It is therefore that the divine, as the appearing and as what is perceived in the appearing, is that which is to be said, and is what is said in legend. And it is therefore that the divine is the “mythical.” And it is therefore that the legends of the gods is “myth.”(p.112)

A-theism correctly understood as the absence of the gods, has been, since the decline of the Greek world, the oblivion of Being that has overpowered the history of the West as the basic feature of this history itself.

Historia: to bring into view, to place in the light, in the brightness (110); the gods, as theontes, are necessarily historis. History is the event of the essential decision about the essence of truth, which event is always a coming one and never something past.

Atekmarta: “signless” (the essence of the veiling concealment of oblivion is first touched by “not showing itself,” “hiding itself”)

Tekmar: the “sign,” that which shows, and while it shows itself, at the same time, shows the condition of some being which human comportment reaches and has to reach.

What shows itself, the unconcealed, the indicator, can subsequently also mean “goal.” The limit (peras), as thought by the Greeks is not that at which something stops but that in which something originates, precisely by originating therein as being “formed” in this way or that way, i.e., allowed to rest in a form and as such to come into presence. Where demarcation is lacking, nothing can come to presence as that which it is.

Moira (“destiny”) holds sway over gods and men. (p.110)

Lethe (this field of withdrawing concealment) is itself bare of all that grows as well as completely void of everything the earth lets spring forth. (Republic, 621a3f) This field of concealment is opposed to all physis. Lethe does not admit any phyein, any emerging and coming forth. Lethe appears as the counter-essence to physis. If we understand physis as “nature,” and Lethe as “forgetting,” then we will never comprehend how physis and Lethe come to be opposites, why they stand in an emphatic relation to one another. But if we think of them in the Greek manner, then it becomes clear that Lethe as essential withdrawing and concealing never lets anything emerge, and hence it sets itself against all coming forth, i.e., against physis. The field of Lethe prevents every disclosure of beings, of the ordinary. In the essential fields of Lethe everything disappears. … The place is void – there is nothing at all that is ordinary in it. But the void is precisely what remains and what comes into presence there. …. The void of the place is the look that looks into it and “fills” it. The place of Lethe is that “where” in which the uncanny dwells in a peculiar exclusivity. The field of Lethe is, in a pre-eminent sense, “demonic.”