People have said benignly that the merit of the treatise Being and Time was to have brought back into circulation this literal translation of ἀλήθεια. Ἀλήθεια is now translated as “unconcealedness,” and—everything remains as it was. For nothing is gained by a mere change in the way of speaking, not even if, beyond the literal translation of ἀλήθεια, it is shown that the Greeks already knew the unconcealedness of beings to be the essence of truth.
Such an improvement in the historiographical presentation of the Greek conception of truth is far removed from a historical reflection on the question of truth—so far removed that the improvement in the way of speaking actually further impedes this reflection and its necessity. For it is now well known that the Greeks had already appealed to the openness of beings as truth. But modern and contemporary philosophy also know, more than anything else, that, in the progress of philosophical thinking, Plato and Aristotle overcame this early Greek conception of truth. In the course of modern thought, the doctrine that truth is the correctness of the judging reason (intellectus) developed into such a matter of course that even the greatest antagonist of this thinking, Nietzsche, does not tamper with the doctrine in the least but instead makes it the foundation of his own theory of truth. In doing so, Nietzsche is unwittingly in perfect agreement with Thomas Aquinas, who said, on the basis of a particular interpretation of Aristotle: veritas principaliter est in intellectu: truth has its place, above all and originally, in judging reason. Every connection with the early Greek conception of truth—truth as the unconcealedness of beings—is therefore stigmatized as a relapse into a standpoint that has been overcome long ago and was valid only for the rudimentary beginnings of Western thought.
What has now been accomplished? Where have we arrived since we deflected from our simply stated course of questioning onto an apparent side track? We questioned back from the ordinary conception of truth (truth as the correctness of an assertion) into what we called openness—which we introduced as being genuinely worthy of questioning. Openness, however, can constitute the more original essence of truth only if that of which