§29. The Greeks’ experience of unconcealedness as the basic character of beings as such and their lack of inquiry into ἀλήθεια.
How are we to understand truth in the sense of the unconcealedness of beings so that it might allow us to see why the Greeks did not explicitly interrogate unconcealedness, allow us to know how to judge this lack of inquiry, and allow us to experience thereby the necessities we ourselves are drawn into?
The experience of truth as the unconcealedness of beings implies first of all that truth is—to say it quite indeterminately—a character of beings themselves, and not, as in the ordinary view of later times, a matter of assertions about beings. For the Greeks, but only for them, beings themselves are what can be true or untrue, i.e., unconcealed or dissembled
To obviate misunderstandings in this regard, a short excursus is needed. In the following times, every being, ens, was indeed still conceived as verum, and scholasticism as well as a part of modern philosophy spoke of “ontological” truth in distinction to the “logical” truth of the intellect. Now this doctrine does in fact stem from a particular adherence to the tradition of Greek philosophy, but it is thought and intended wholly and utterly in an un-Greek way. Verum does not mean the unconcealed; on the contrary, omne ens est verum—“Every being is true” —because, as a being, it is in advance necessarily thought of correctly by God or, according to Christian and Old Testament thinking, by the “creator,” 1.e., by the creator as the absolute spirit free from error. We note this parenthetically in order to avert the commingling and identification, attempted again and again, of Thomistic thinking with Aristotelian thought and Greek thinking in general. This identification is often advanced not only by representatives of Thomism but even by classical philologists. For example, the theory Werner Jaeger has disseminated about Aristotle is much more medieval and scholastic than Greek. Both medieval and modern thinking move wholly within a conception of truth as correctness, i.e., as a determination of knowledge—even when they speak of “ontological truth.” This “ontological” truth is nothing else than the correlate of God’s thinking, which is in itself absolutely correct. It is not the unconcealed in the Greek