Ordinarily we speak of letting be whenever, for example, we forgo some enterprise that has been planned.  “We let something be” means we do not touch it again, we have nothing more to do with it.  To let something be has here the negative sense of letting it alone, of renouncing it, of indifference and even neglect.

However, the phrase required now – to let beings be – does not refer to neglect and indifference but rather the opposite.  To let be is to engage oneself with beings.^b On the other hand, to be sure, this is not to be understood only as the mere management, [84] preservation, tending, and planning of the beings in each case encountered or sought out.  To let be – that is, to let beings be as the beings that they are – means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand, bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself.

Western thinking in its beginning conceived this open region as τὰ ’αlηfέα, the unconcealed.  If we translate ’αlήfεiα as “unconcealment” rather than “truth,” this translation is not merely “more literal”; it contains the directive to rethink the ordinary concept of truth in the sense of the correctness of statements and to think it back to that still uncomprehended disclosedness and disclosure of beings.  To engage oneself with the disclosedness of beings is not to lose oneself in them; rather, such engagement withdraws in the face of the beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are, and in order that presentative correspondence might take its standard from them.  As this letting-be it exposes itself to beings as such and transposes all comportment into the open region.  Letting-be, i.e., freedom, is intrinsically exposing, ek-sistent.¹⁰  Considered in regard to the essence of truth, the essence of freedom manifests itself as exposure to the disclosedness of beings.

Freedom is not merely what common sense is content to let pass under this name:  the caprice, turning up occasionally in our choosing, of inclining in this or that direction.  Freedom is not mere absence of constraint with respect to what we can or cannot do.  Nor is it on the other hand mere readiness for what is required and necessary (and so somehow a being).  Prior to all this (“negative” and “positive” freedom), freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such.  Disclosedness itself is conserved in ek-sistent engagement, through which the openness of the open region, i.e., the “there” [“Da“], is what it is.

——–Martin Heidegger———
PATHMARKS: ON THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH