of truth itself, if we relentlessly enough raise questions in order to create a free path for its innermost impetus. We are asking the question of truth, i.e., we are asking about the essence of truth. We are not seeking individual “truths” but the essence of truth. In the unfolding of this question we have now reached the point of having to raise the question of the truth of essence. All this is enigmatic: the question of the essence of truth is at the same time and in itself the question of the truth of the essence. The question of truth–asked as a basic question–turns itself in itself against itself. This turning, which we have now run up against, is an intimation of the fact that we are entering the compass of a genuine philosophical question. We cannot now say what the turning means, where it is founded, since we have hardly entered the portico of the region of philosophical reflection. Only one thing is clear: if all philosophical thought must more unavoidably move in this turning the more it thinks originally, i.e., the more it approaches what in philosophy is primordially and always thought and reflected upon, then the turning must belong essentially to the single focus of philosophical reflection (Being {Seyn} as the appropriating event {Ereignis}).
Since it was necessary to bring a first clarity to the task of the question of truth, the search for what is true, whether it be individual truths or the decisive truth, was delimited against a reflection on the essence of truth. This delimitation seemed unequivocal, and the philosophical task thereby seemed clear. Now, however, we have seen that in the question of the essence of truth not only is truth as such questionable but so is the perspective within which we are raising the question: what we so casually and easily call the essence. We speak of the essence of the State, the essence of life, the essence of technology, conceding perhaps that we do not yet know the essence of the state, of life, and of technology, though silently claiming to know the other side, namely what essence is in general, whether it be a matter of the state, life, technology, etc. But as obvious, and questionable, as is the determination of truth as correctness, that is how questionable, and obvious, is our view of the essentiality of the essence, supposing that in the usual talk about the essence of things we do intend something determinate in the word “essence” and do not simply abandon ourselves to an undetermined word-sound.