grounding of the ground, is not yet genuine grounding in the sense of a fathoming of the ground. What then are we to make of this occurrence, namely that the Greeks experienced ἀλήθεια precisely as the essence of truth and took it up as the ground of correctness but did not themselves explicitly fathom this ground? What if the effect was that henceforth truth as correctness acquired domination over that in which it is rooted? What if this occurrence, that the thinking of the Greeks did not master ἀλήθεια, led to the situation that this beginning was submerged in the following times and remains submerged even today? And what if this occurrence were thereby not something bygone but would now still be coming to pass insofar as we move in the ungrounded obviousness of the traditional concept of truth?
And in fact that is what is happening. The knowledge of the essence of ἀλήθεια did not get lost because later on ἀλήθεια was translated by veritas, rectitudo, and “truth,” and was interpreted as the correctness of an assertion, but just the opposite, this translation and this new interpretation could begin and could gain prevalence only because the essence of ἀλήθεια was not unfolded originally enough and its unfolding was not grounded strongly enough. The occurrence of the submergence of the primordial essence of truth, unconcealedness (ἀλήθεια), is nothing past and gone but is immediately present and operative in the basic fact it determines, namely the unshaken domination of the traditional concept of truth.
Within the realm of the history of what is essential, only rarely does something occur. What does occur there happens very slowly and very silently, and its immediate effect leaps over the span of millennia. It does not need the crutches of a continuous chain of cause and effect, each effect becoming the cause of a succeeding one. If historiographers were required to assume the task of presenting what is essential, they would flounder in the greatest embarrassment, not because they have too much at their disposal but too little. What would remain of the whole business of archives and literature, what would remain of the business of reviews and dissertations, if by one stroke what is unessential became ungraspable? But that will not happen, for the unessential, in very different forms, is the long shadow cast by the essential, to end up mostly overshadowed by it. The occurrence of the submergence